cheese it, the cops!

in a book review in the nytimes, jim holt asserts flatly that ludwig wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. putting it mildly, i disagree. wittgenstein had a deeper commitment to conveying the fact that he was a genius than to any particular subject-matter or position. this, if you ask me, profoundly mars the work, which is characterized by a slipperiness edging into obscurantism: if the position lapsed into clarity, it would be refutable, and no longer readable as the expression of an intelligence transcending the merely human. the comparison i always make is to j.l. austin, whose positions are markedly similar to wittgenstein's, insofar as wittgenstein had any positions. austin is witty, clear, humble, and overwhelmingly original and smart. wittgenstein is overwhelmingly pretentious.

[on subject-matter: wittgenstein was obsessed by language, and had his role in centralizing language as the pre-eminent philosophical topic of the twentieth century. however, the same could be said of many of his predecessors and contemporaries: frege and w's mentor russell; peirce; heidegger; carnap/ayer; austin; and so on.]

now on the other hand, there are important insights in wittgenstein. one might point to the "private language argument" in the investigations, for example. and if holt had gone for "one of the greatest philosophers &c" i wouldn't have blinked, though i think even that exaggerates the achievement and underestimates the drawbacks.

of course, greatness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the unbelievably huge literature on wittgenstein, the status of texts in many subsequent debates, make him central whether you want him to be or not. but as with some other gnostic or oracular figures, there is a terribly unseemly cult of wittgenstein, acolytes muttering wittgensteinian incantations, followers who replace the world  with wittgenstein's texts as what must be accurately reflected in order to speak the truth.

don't set yourself on fire, or we'll shoot you.

needless to say, i have argued many times in favor of the sort of conscience clauses that obama is rescinding. one measure of the decency of any institution is the extent to which it does not require the people embedded in it to violate their own religious and ethical commitments. it's worth acknowledging that he wants to tighten and not eliminate such regulations, and that's better than ditching them. but one suspects they'll basically be ditched. if the argument really is that this will prevent people from getting blood transfusions or something, or even that it presents serious barriers to care of various kinds, then i want to see the evidence. and i want to weigh actual barriers to care against actual conscience rights of practitioners. it's easy to invent a case where you have a christian science emt and a hemophiliac, a lot harder to find the actual problems actual people are actually having.

if you want to see the gist or force of my argument: imagine that your own job assigns you a task you find deeply morally repugnant. don't let your pro-choice position govern the general question. imagine that your boss tells you to torture, or censor, or lie your ass off: whatever it is you actually object to. opting out is not only important to your self-respect: it is important feedback to the institution.

bizarrely, some have quibbled with my characterization of joe biden as a buffoon and a charlatan. just for the hell of it, i'm hooking you into the transcript of his "questioning" of samuel alito during the latter's confirmation hearings before the senate judiciary committee. (you'll find the biden bit toward the end of the first page; only kennedy was his senior on the minority.) in the course of a half hour he doesn't formulate a coherent question, just yaps with complete mindlessness.

also, notice that insofar as he's saying anything, it's a barrage of completely disingenuous diversions and disclaimers: you know judge i'm not saying you're not not not a man of integrity, but you know, i'm not not saying that either etc.what it amounts to is something like this: because i'm such an amazing and generous person, i'm going to assume you are a man of integrity, you monster. 

and all of it is, let's face it, embodied in the syntax of a moron.

ponder the fact that this is what he did with his one chance to assess alito's qualifications to sit for life on the supreme court. this is what he did rather than ask alito, well anything, but maybe: how do you read the second amendment? or: let's talk about separation of powers.

no one messes with joe. indeed no one with any sense gets anywhere near him. you know, it doesn't follow from the fact the you basically agree with someone's politics that they're smart or that they're not completely incoherent. there are not too many professional politicians who could stand up on a stage with sarah palin and be outclassed intellectually. biden, however, is one such person.

Judge, I'd like to say a few very brief things at the outset. I'm puzzled, and I suspect you may be puzzled, by some of the questions. I don't think anybody thinks you are a man lacking in integrity. I don't think anybody thinks that you are a person who's not independent.

I think that what people are wondering about and puzzled about is not whether you lack independence, but whether you independently conclude that the executive trumps the other two branches.

They wonder, when you -- granted, it's back in '85 or '84 when you wrote, "I do not question the attorney general should have this immunity as absolute immunity but, for tactical reasons," et cetera.

So people are puzzled -- at least some are puzzled. And so I don't want you to read any of this as -- at least from my perspective, as I've read it so far -- that people think that this is a bad guy.

BIDEN: I mean, what people are puzzled about with the recusal issue was, under oath you said, "I will recuse myself on anything relating to...," and then a case comes up. So they're looking for an explanation.

So it's not about whether you are profiting or whether you are, you know, all of this malarkey about whether you broke judicial ethics. It's, you know, a simple kind of thing. You under oath said: I promise if this ever comes up, I'll recuse myself. And then you gave an explanation. It slipped, you forgot, it had been years earlier, et cetera.

So don't read it as this is one of these things where we know where you are. The people I've spoken to on your court -- and it's my circuit -- have a very high regard for you. And I think you're a man of integrity. The question is, sometimes some of the things you have said and done puzzle -- at least, puzzle me.

And one of the things -- this is not part of a line of questioning I wanted to ask -- but I did ask you when you were kind enough to come to my office about the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Were you aware of some of the other things they were saying that had nothing to do with ROTC? Because there was a great deal of controversy.

I mean, I can remember -- I can remember this. My son was -- well, anyway, he ended up going to that other university, University of Pennsylvania.

But I remember at Princeton, I had spoken on campus in the early '70s. This was a big thing up at Princeton at the Woodrow Wilson School. And I remember -- I didn't remember Bill Frist, but I remember that there was this disavowing, that Bill Bradley, this great basketball star, and now United States senator, was disassociating himself with this outfit, that there was a magazine called Prospect. I remember the magazine.

And all I want to ask you is: Were you aware of the other things that this outfit was talking about? Were you aware of this controversy going on in...

ALITO: Senator, I don't believe that I was.

ALITO: And when it was mentioned that Senator Bradley had withdrawn from the magazine, that didn't ring any bells for me. I did not recall anything like that.

BIDEN: Well, it was a pretty outrageous group. I mean, I believe you that you were unaware of it. But here I was, University of Delaware graduate, a sitting United States senator, I was aware of it because I was up there on the campus. I mean, it was a big deal. It was a big deal, at least in our area of the Delaware Valley, if Princeton, Penn, the schools around there had this kind -- because the big thing was going on at Brown at the time as well.

And by the way, for the record, I know you know when you stated in your application that you are a member -- you said in '85, "I am a member" -- they had restored ROTC. ROTC was back on the campus.

But again, this is just by way of why some of us are puzzled. Because if I was aware of it, and I didn't even like Princeton...

(LAUGHTER)

I mean, I really didn't like Princeton. I was an Irish Catholic kid who thought it had not changed like you concluded it had.

I admit, one of my real dilemmas is I have two kids who went to Ivy League schools. I'm not sure my Grandfather Finnegan will ever forgive me for allowing that to happen.

But all kidding aside, I wasn't a big Princeton fan. And so maybe that is why I focused on it and no one else did. But I remember it at the time.

third in the series encompassing arguments for anarchy:
autonomy and responsibility

i wonder what y'all think about the rhetoric of american exceptionalism, at least as prevalent in obama as in bush or mccain: we are, straight up, god's chosen people, and the spirit of america will necessarily overcome every obstacle. we are destined to lead the world. forever, and lead it into good. now this is required of every american politician, of course. and i wonder whether sarkozy has to say the same thing about the french at every moment of every day. and i like a lot about our culture and our political traditions. i also think that we have lost much of what might have made us in some sense exceptional: cussed self-reliance, frontier can-do attitude, the ideals of independence and fierce defense of liberty. and of course our history, as any black man must know, is an extremely mixed legacy. and of course i deny that we have any particular destiny: we might lead the world for awhile yet; we might be in terminal decline. and i guess i basically think people are more or less the same everywhere and we're not massively superior overall to zimbabweans or whomever it may be. also i think this rhetoric has a little fascist tang: you could transpose it to mussolini and italy, and the rhetoric would fit right in. and i think it does actively encourage a kind of imperialism, especially economic.

a few stray observations about bo's speech last night. he said that over the next ten years (um) he can identify $2 trillion in savings, moving toward a balanced budget. dude. you spent $2 trillion last week. and though he indicated some places to trim, he proposed whole new gigantic swathes of spending, in medical care, for example, education, veteran's benefits, growth of the armed forces and increase in their salaries. for example, he said if american kids will commit some time to public or military service, we will pay for their college. sounds nice of course, but costs mega-bucks on both ends. surely, surely this budget depends on massive obfuscation of the sort he explicitly repudiated. and didn't i hear him propose a massive set of loan programs direct from the government to individuals for al sorts of things? now, if he wasn't folding that into bank nationalization (which again he repudiated) he was surely suggesting that the fed open shop as a massive provider of direct banking services. any way you look at it, i believe, he is annexing whole regions of the economy into the federal government, and enthusiastically launching a host of new spending initiatives into perpetuity. ("we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.")

here's a disturbing story, especially for those of us raising teenagers in pennsylvania.

thank god.

Fish pedicures — the use of tiny, live carp to clean feet — have been made available in several Florida cosmetology salons in recent months.
Now, Florida is banning the practice.

not to quibble with the omb or the cbo, but bo's notion that he's going to halve the deficit during his term just seems baldly ridiculous. the trillion might just be the first installment on the stimulus, and creates many programs that will have to be funded for many years. what the bank bailout will finally entail in anyone's guess: $1.5 trillion, one would think. then tax revenues will be severely curtailed by the recession. any sense that deficit spending might be a problem is refreshing at this moment, but this seems, let's just say, ludicrous and dishonest. it's one of those times when you just go, huh?

"martin marched so barack could run":
anarchism and pacifism

ecstasy!: terps 88, #3 tar heels 85, ot!

yet another argument against the legitimacy of the state, this one focusing on the notion of the rule of law:

eric holder's nation of cowards thing was interesting. i think we learned not to talk frankly about race because of all the explosive possibilities, how easy it is to put a foot wrong, the massive informal and formal enforcement of pc speech codes etc. but here, eric, is a sample of what what you're asking for. there is still a hierarchy, conceived within the black community and the white community, of "black" people by skin-tone. still sense in the term high yellow, for instance, as you can tell when you get a gander at black aristocracy, such as, er, eric holder's family.

 

prince of darkness denies own existence. now that is a good headline. it's an amusing story, as stories by dana milbank often are. but it's disturbing in its own way too. i think the idea that there's no such thing as neo-conservatism, and this was an extreme simplification drummed up by opponents of the bush administration, could be an interesting approach. but perle here, one soon sees, is ill. morally diseased. he simply cannot take responsibility for anything, is in this continuous strategy of denying responsibility for...the reports he signed, the memos he wrote, the title of his own book, and so on and on. any position taken by someone like that, any action, is a node of evil. of course, that you have no responsibility for what you do or say could allow you to do or say anything. but also, any actual policies and procedures, much less wars and so on, for which no one is responsible begin to grow toward absolute disaster.

so a us army medic was convicted of shooting four bound and blindfolded iraqis in the back of the head. his defense? um, insomnia. this was supported by medical experts.

In closing arguments earlier, Leahy's civilian lawyer, Frank Spinner, argued that Leahy went along with the killings because he was dazed from a lack of sleep and numb from being in a war zone for months. It was a sentiment bolstered on Thursday in testimony from Col. Charles Hoge, a doctor and director of psychology and neuroscience at the Army's Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

He testified that Leahy was unable to reason properly because of the constant danger of living and operating in a war zone and getting little sleep for months on end.

it's good that they convicted him, because this style of explanation would of course excuse absolutely anything anyone might do to anyone during a war.

i suppose it's right that the defendants in the politkovskaya trial were acquitted, considering that that the guilty party is, um, putin.

um!

GARDEN GROVE, Calif. -- A man shot and killed himself in front of a cross inside televangelist Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral on Wednesday as a nearby volunteer told a group of visitors about the church's suicide-prevention program, police and church officials said.

quite a great piece by george will, who's approximately as good an op-ed columnist as there has ever been. i particularly like this: "Talk about trillions of dollars has become so commonplace that billions seem minuscule -- even though a billion minutes ago Plutarch (46-120 A.D.) was alive."

It is often said that anarchism is entirely impractical. An enumeration of anarchist experiments and moments in history does not entirely refute this claim. But it may be of interest nevertheless. If y'all have suggested additions, I'd love to hear them.

tribal societies: what is and what is not a political state is obviously a hard question, but many tribal societies surely have none. One thing we might point out: people have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the political state for perhaps 4,000. Call this the period of civilization if you like, or of terminal illness. Michael Taussig has argued that the tribal peoples of pre-columbian Americas were perfectly aware of the state alternatives (as, the Inca empire), and took active measures to reject it.

Peasants' War: The radical reformation, with leaders such as Thomas Muntzer, attacked all established Church and political authorities and "liberated" the town of Allstedt. He was, well, beheaded, but many radical reform sects, such as Anabaptists, set up independent communities throughout northern Europe in the decades that followed.

Diggers: The most radical faction of the English revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, they set up small independent agrarian communities on the common in Cobham, Surrey. Gerrard Winstanley.

American Utopias: Because the American frontier was rather unsupervised, many radical protestant sects set up shop to escape the political authorities in Europe, from the 17th through the 19th centuries. These were followed by many secular experiments that essentially declared their independence from the state. many such communities were relatively enduring and successful. One might mention: Rappites, Shakers, Modern Times, Brook Farm, Oneida, Hopedale.

Pirate Utopias

Revolutionary Ukraine: Anarchists were of course one element in Russia during the revolutionary period. Nestor Makhno organized the Ukraine along anarchist lines from 1919-1921, and successfully resisted the Bolsheviks before finally getting crushed.

Spanish Civil War: Anarchism was a major element in the Spanish Civil War and resistance to fascism in the late 1930's, led by figures such as Buenaventura Durruti. They managed to hold parts of the country for substantial periods of times, organizing them in as free a manner as possible, given the military pressures.

i knew it was a bad idea to appoint plaxico burress to the senate.

bo, signing the stimulus: "this is the beginning of the end."

i do think the cult of obama has its disturbing qualities. in particular, as far as i can tell, the nytimes editorial and op-ed pages are, literally, enthralled. bob herbert today, speaking crush to power:

But beyond his specific policies (and whether one supports them or not), Mr. Obama is emerging as the very model of the type of person one would want in high public office. He is intelligent, mature, thoughtful, calm in the face of crises and, if the nation is lucky, maybe even wise.

me on podcrash.

Because a number of people have been asking (including the folks at Bureaucrash) I've developed a basic history of anarchism in the form, more or less, of a reading list.

Anarchist Political Theory: a Reading Guide

In my view, anti-authoritarianism and scepticism about state power are as old as authority and the state. Many of its expressions have certainly been repressed. In ancient Chinese philosophy, Taosim can be considered an anarchist political philosophy. The Tao Te Ching (circa 450 BC) is a surprisingly political text, often pretty direct in its anarchism. The Chuang Tzu, perhaps even a greater book, likewise. You want Burton Watson's complete translation of the text, and not just the "inner chapters."

An obviously anti-authoritarian tradition in ancient Greece is Cynicism, and Diogenes famously told Alexander the Great to get out of his face. One might try Luis Navia's book Diogenes the Cynic.

In my view, modern anarchism begins as a religious tradition associated with radical elements of the Protestant Reformation. The attack on the institutional power of the Church and the defense of individual conscience as an ultimate religious arbiter were quickly extended to an attack on the institution of the state and a defense of the individual conscience as the ultimate moral arbiter. One might consider here the notion of "inner light" in Quakerism, but more clearly in Anabaptist and other pietist sects. Also in the "antinomianism" of figures such as Anne Hutchinson. The Cambridge reader The Radical Reformation is a good place to begin.

Often an anthology of anarchist political theory will begin with William Godwin, a shockingly good and undervalued political philosopher, in the late eighteenth century. Godwin was the husband of ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and hence the father-in-law of Percy Shelley. His classic An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is, incomprehensibly, out of print. The best option is probably Peter Marshall's The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin. Godwin's anarchism is eminently rational, with a utilitarian ethical orientation.

Because government rests on force, pacifism entails anarchism, though not all pacifists have seen this connection. But expressions of this can be found in, for example, the writings of American religious pacifists such as David Low Dodge (see especially the second item on that link: "The Mediator's Kingdom" (1809)) and Adin Ballou, for example in Christian Non-Resistance. Leo Tolstoy also drew these implications in The Kingdom of God is Within You and other writings. Related versions of Christian anarchism and pacifism were developed by the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Nathaniel Rogers.

American utopians, individualists, and transcendentalists of the nineteenth century developed an elaborate philosophical and practical anarchist program. I might mention Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" of 1848 and Emerson's great essay "Politics" of 1844. Some of the wildest and at the same time most practical metaphysical and economic theories of individualist anarchism were developed by Josiah Warren, who also edited what might be the first anarchist periodical, The Peaceful Revolutionist, in the 1830s. Connected developments might be associated with William Batchelder Greene, who developed a system of mutual banking. Lysander Spooner was a brilliant abolitionist, expert on legal history, and systematic theorist of individualist anarchism. The astounding American essayist Voltairine de Cleyre, though emerging later, comes from this tradition. I'd of course recommend the book I co-edited: Exquisite Rebel.

"Egoism" is an extreme version of individualist anarchism invented by the "left Hegelian" and opponent of Marx Max Stirner. His book The Ego and Its Own (1844) is quite something, a kind of pre-Nietzschean masterpiece. Stirner's egoism was later elaborated and connected to the American individualist tradition by Ben Tucker.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was probably the first theorist to call himself an anarchist, and was an early leftist opponent of Marx (on the grounds of Marx's totalitarianism). By far the most accessible work in English is What is Property? (1840), perhaps not his best or most important work. Shawn Wilbur is working on this problem. Proudhon's position is often called "mutualism" (also, "federalism") and is interesting in relation both the individualist and communist anarchism.

Communist anarchism was both influenced by and developed in opposition to Marx. It emerged as a critique of property and industrial capitalism (whereas individualist anarchism emerged from early nineteenth-century reform movements, often religious), and provided the main alternative to Marxist communism in the liberation movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In common with Marxism, it is often fundamentally materialist in its metaphysics, and analyzes human society in terms of class structure. It differs in prescribing non-state or non-coercive solutions.  Mikhail Bakunin was an important organizer, and helped inject atheism into the whole deal, but was not, if you ask me, a particularly impressive thinker; certainly he pales in comparison to his rival Marx. The best and most systematic and influential theorist of communist anarchism was the Russian prince and scientist Peter Kropotkin. His anti social-Darwinist views on evolution, expressed in Mutual Aid (1902), are classic. The Italian Errico Malatesta should also be mentioned. The Russian-American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were essentially followers of Kropotkin, but made independent contributions. Goldman's collection of essays Anarchism was what originally converted me, and Berkman's ABC of Communist Anarchism and Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) (he was jailed after he shot the industrialist Henry Clay Frick) are excellent.

Bringing the thing closer to now, one might mention in an individualist vein figures such as Murray Rothbard and the fascinating Karl Hess, who wrote speeches for Barry Goldwater. In a communist-style vein, there is of course Noam Chomsky.

Postmodernism has displayed various anarchist tendencies. I might mention Michel Foucault's brilliant and fundamental Discipline and Punish (1975), which describes the birth of the modern prison and modern "carceral" society, and the astonishing TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) (1985) by Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson).

Contemporary anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, squatter, and anti-intellectual property folk often refer to themselves as anarchists.

The best overall history is Peter Marshall's excellent Demanding the Impossible. 

anarchist library at blackened flag
anarchy archives

panarchy

the kiddies and me have been messing with pandora, the amazing internet radio deal where you design your own stations. they seem to be stronger on some things than others: my old-time blues-type thingummy tends to produce the same few artists and songs over and over, whereas contemporary commercial pop is an elaborate world, so jane (8) gets to hear aly and aj and also all sorts of sorta similar stuff she didn't know. under the influence of the amazing joan brown, i''ve built a station around the grateful dead. now i was a huge dead person when i was 14. then i sort of went off, in two directions: "real" country music as opposed to the dead doing "mama tried" or whatever.(i would still say: if you'd rather hear the dead than merle haggard doing "mama tried," you are fundamentaly confused.) and then punk. i started to think of the dead as wimps or idiot hippies, and, actually, not particularly great musicians etc. that the drug culture they built was problematic is attested to by garcia's death.

but i have to say, the stuff sounds great. actually the rough edges and discursive structures are pleasant and kind of inspiring: they remind you what actually playing music is for. and there are so many excellent songs from all phases. right now what's on is "the golden road to unlimited devotion." the garcia song "the wheel" is so stuck in my head it's a form of clinical sanity. sometimes, indeed, the endless jam seems merely pointless, endless noodling. at other times it is inspired. well, that's the idea of a "jam band," though i have yet to really glom on to any jam band other than the dead: the seem kinda like sha na na doing doo wop in 1978: um, you know this was done better twenty years ago.

pandora uses what it calls the "music genome project," supposedly comparing songs along 400 dimension, by computer, i guess. if that's what they're really doing, it doesn't come up with anything other than what common sense and an acquaintance with the history of popular music would produce. you don't need computers to connect the dead with the allman brothers or neil young, aly and aj with hillary duff, mississippi john hurt with mississippi fred mcdowell, obviously, which is what these things spit out.

this idea that every issue (e.g. the financial crisis) is a security issue is truly an artifact of our moment. it displays the continuing mutation of the u.s. into a security or police state, in which the model of response to anything, the basic form of understanding, is a domestic application of a military-style command structure. of course it entails that the response must be a state response, since the security of the nation (i.e. "homeland," a term that obama likes as much as bush did) is a state matter. it is also, of course, just an attempt to render the terrain a complete mind-numbing confusion, and to emphasize in every context government responsibility for the safety of citizens, to inject the tinge of physical fear into every matter. for gore, global warming is our greatest security challenge. for tom friedman or whomever, it's education. you might raise the terrorist threat level to red on the basis of a warm autumn, or because citibank is having problems, or because the sheiks in dubai lost their seventieth billion, or because sat's have leveled off, or...well, just because. to my way of thinking the greatest national security threat we face is horseshit. 

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress yesterday that instability in countries around the world caused by the current global economic crisis, rather than terrorism, is the primary near-term security threat to the United States.

how weird is my family? so weird and unique that we listen to u2. so unbelievably idiosyncratic and confident in our amazing bizarreness that our faucet drips. so utterly pathological and beautifully eccentric that we were inspired by the obama inaugural. so unbelievably, insanely normative, so absolutely dead center of yuppie demographics, that we don't actually exist at all, that we are, strictly, redundant.

this is rather unseemly, but if any of y'all liked against the state, you might stick up a review on amazon. it's a rather depressing little pair right now.

$1.5 trillion? hey yo, no problem. pretty soon, we will have spent more than the value of all the real estate comprising the nation, and all the items sitting thereon. but after all, money is merely a convention, eh? a fiction as it were, and there is no actual economy or value to which it corresponds. so i suppose that the recovery will also be...purely fictional, which is ok since we are the stories we tell, not, like, physical creatures in a material world. let's just call it infinity and have done.