cheese it, the cops!

i might put this a different way; i've formulated the same idea, perhaps somewhat wider, as ratigan's and called it "squishy totalitarianism."  but i say that this is a fundamental insight. last week there was a story about how tim geithner talks to the ceos of goldman sachs and morgan-chase every day: one of many ways to see that (with ever-greater perection) the treasury department = our mega-banks. now if you had benanke's records, they'd show the sam thing, i suspect. when we cal upon the govt to regulate the banking system, we are calling on the bankers to regulate themselves: there just is no distinction. this is why, when people (jon stewart, for example) confront libertarian-types (ron paul for instance) with the question of who is going to limit the power of the corporations if the state is, per impossibile, shrunk down, they're caught in a false and completely anachronistic dichotomy. you can't attack one without the other.

typepad seems funky this morning, so i can't link tom friedman's column. but i think he's showing his stripes, his...ass. he actually suggests that the nobel peace prize should go to the american military. now i will admit that the relation between peace and military power is complex, and that one way to keep the world peaceful would be to subdue it entirely by the overwhelming threat of violence, a threat that you'd have to substantiate every so often by killing a few thousand/a few million people. friedman on the other hand must be aware of certain ironies of such a position: the heroes who, you know, vaporized the inhabitants of hiroshima, or destroyed the village in order to keep it free, or set up a system of worldwide black site torture facilities, or helped turn ptsd into a worldwide epidemic, or phosphorized fallujah, or predator-droned the wedding etc: i'm not sure how they really stack up against king and gandhi as embodiments of peace.

the military may be necessary. indeed perhaps the power to entirely destroy life on earth is necessary, or at least useful (oops, maybe not), but as an emblem of peace per se you'd be better off awarding the nobel to a fungus or a clock radio, on the grounds that they never napalmed any children.

what i would call attention to, however, is the culture of obedience, a culture of which friedman represents one form: he tends to call it 'education.' i suggest that you cannot be a hero in virtue of obeying orders, and that that's why the bush/biden/friedman theory that every soldier is an american hero is...as terrifying as it is mindless. king called on you to observe the absolute dictates of conscience. the military calls on you to trade in your conscience for...donald rumsfeld, or whomever happens to have risen to power. now perhaps in obeying these orders you do something good: storm omaha beach etc. or perhaps you do something evil. what you're saying is that making those calls isn't up to you.

get enough people in this mode and you've got...a world at war. cool! but you might want to skip the peace prize.

here's the sort of reason that obama shouldn't be gettin no nobel. and here's a piece of the announcement:

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

one suspects that obama was awarded the prize for the devastating 'hope' poster, which uplifted and yet bored us all; perhaps it should have gone to shepard fairey instead. but wait a second. why should it be a matter of 'sharing values and attitudes with a majority of the world's population'? and what the hell are these attitudes and values anyway? there are a lot of muslim fundamentalists or peasant communists, i believe. if you found that liberty or peace weren't polling very well (and liberty has an advocacy group in the u.s. that's smaller than the margin of error), would you think that our most inspiring leaders must lead on the basis of unfreedom and war? did martin luther king speak for a majority?

other americans who have "captured the world's attention": michael jackson, angelina jolie, charles manson. anyway, the nobel heads might want to re-think their criteria, or perhaps hire someone to try to think through their basic concepts or something so that the text of the next announcement isn't just slop, or is better slop.

indian philosophy strikes me as if (in fact, quite as if) the whole of the western tradition consisted of three millennia of german idealism (when a half century was plenty), and your biggest decision is: schelling or hegel? (wait. fichte!) you get to choose between slightly different visions of the absolute. but where's the moment where someone says, "the absolute? what the fuck?" no sooner do you have a hegel in the west than you get a kierkegaard: subjecting the whole thing to ridicule, taking up a very opposed position. or a nietzsche, a foucault.

my guy j.l austin thought that philosophy could be more collaborative, more cumulative, that we could work together through the meaning of terms etc. that's a nice vision in many ways, and the "individualism" of the west can seem peverse or obnoxious: each figure bolstering his ego by rejecting the one before. on the other hand, this has its dangers. you could get off on the wrong foot and spend the rest of history hopping.

i'm gearing up to teach asian philosophy  next semester. what i'm going to say is the kind of thing one just shouldn't say, and i would like to be instructed otherwise, but i sort of hate the philosophy of india, which for one thing i might compare unfavorably to the philosophy of china. indian thought has some very problematic (from my point of view) general aspects. it is not or is virtually not for a moment, distinct from religion. now it might actually be pretty hard to distinguish these things in any tradition in a principled way, but a lot of indian philosophy seems to me to massively import dogmatic assumptions that it doesn't bother to defend, and i'm realizing that i like that independent edge, you know, in aristotle, or hume: it's why aquinas - important though he is - has to look a little fantastic to someone outside the religious orientation.

 but indian philosophy appears to me almost wholly "scholastic," unbelievably elaborate ramifying of almost arbitrarily generated and venerated ideas. and you get what you'd expect to get in rampant scholasticism: extreme refinement over millennia of a set of basic concepts, to the edge of complete incomprehensibility.

and then i might say most of indian philosophy occurs within a basic set of presuppositions. reincarnation in some form is agreed on by almost everyone. almost everyone in one way or another views time and indeed the world in time as an illusion, a veil we have to see through. now in the west at least since...i don't know, 1450, and also 550 bc to 400 AD, if someone said stuff like that, someone else would say: what? that's completely wrong. but no one in india really seems to. it's like i want to grab some arhat by the lapels (if any) and go: ok. why do you believe in reincarnation? what if you're wrong? 

it's a bit hard for me to believe that no one in ancient india was actually doing that: these are, it seems, rather fantastic or certainly kind of evidently optional approaches to accounting for our experiences. so then i begin to wonder: why does it seem so slavish? or: what forms of censorship or repression kept people from asking, or kept the askers' questions from being represented in the tradition, etc? but at any rate, i can at least say that i myself find no plausibility in the basic doctrines of indian philosophy.

i think there's a good contrast with chinese thought. often chinese thinkers are brutally clear, almost unbelievably straightforward, even when paradoxical etc. the analects of confucius, or the chuang tzu or even their later elaborations are difficult in their way, but not because the thinkers were lost in an infinite glob of verbal gobbledygook. they want you to understand what they're saying. buddhism it seems to me, was extremely well-served by being yanked into an east asian context: sharpened, clarified, brought to its essence. certainly it often lost even the veneer of orthodoxy. no indian is going to say "kill the buddha; that's the essence of buddhism." but indian thought is way too reverent to be tasteful; the boldest move is the introduction of a refinement; this is true even with regard to the jaina or buddhist 'attack' on or mild refinements of  the vedic or 'hindu' tradition; it's not nearly thorough enough to really support the conventional term for them: 'heterodox.' 

y'all: let me show you heterodoxy.

npr this morning: "obama was reported to be humbled by the award." um, no. he was reported to have said he was humbled by the award. in general, if you want to humble somebody, showering them with accolades, cash, etc. is not the best strategy.

dude. you have got to be kidding me. i guess i always find it a bit puzzling when, in charge of "the greatest military the world has ever known," or in general a world-annihilating power, you are saluted as the personification of peace. barack obama has no power that does not rest on violence. truly: let him disarm entirely and then see what he can do with healthcare reform. no i'm serious: it's great he wants everybody to have health insurance: now enforce an individual mandate with no coercive force: no prisons, no weapons, by sheer inspiration.  but as he prosecutes his wars, he's trying to minimize civilian casualties.

give it to you again: the nobel laureate is martin luther king...with predator drones. anyway, obviously i would always choose a dissident, and to be fair the nobel often goes to dissidents. in my view, ron paul would be a more plausible choice than barack obama. not only does he want to radically curtail our military adventures, but he wants to radically curtail the power of government, i.e. violence.

i propose this to you: every principled advocate of peace is an anarchist or is embroiled in massive internal inconsistency: just p and not-p in your face.

this is an interesting piece. but it contains a colossal assumption=mistake. that is, that the basic function of absurdity is to make us better at reason, or that we love nonsense because it helps us make sense, feeds into our logic machine. the piece mentions kierkegaard, and if this approach was represented as kierkegaard's position it would be...nonsense. let's say the world was full of arbtrary or teemingly incomprehensible facts. then the continual project of making sense would be incapable of adequately representing the world: the drive for sense would embroil you in falsehood. in some cases on some occasions, sense, pattern, logic, etc is a trap, an oppression. we need it, and we also need...release from it. which is not to say, however, that you could understand order without chaos. that's only one of the purposes of our chaos and nonsense, which is intrinsically as well as instrumentally needful.

probably this is the kind of thing that has occurred to many people, but i've been mulling it so i'll hit it. we have the notion that a human life is of infinite or transcendent value. i feel that way about my own life, i suppose, and i feel that way about the lives of the people i love. and when people i love have died - rather a common event in my life - the loss is inexpressible, or, again, infinite or something. and politics, really on both sides of the ideological divide, takes this as a sort of obvious truth or even uses it as a cliche. that's why you have to support healthcare reform or oppose abortion, etc.

now i can say in a casual abstraction that everyone's life has that sort of value. but i am incapable of actually acting or experiencing things that way. when x hundreds of people die in an indonesian earthquake, i don't laugh or celebrate, but i also don't experience some sort of transcendent loss. nor could i, because then it would be infinite loss all day every day. people die, in meaningful or meaningless ways, for any reason or none. and i would say that many of our beliefs and policies are obviously incompatible with the notion of the infinite value of an individual life.

obviously, for example, you can't get a war going if this is the way you are thinking about your soldiers. the losses in iraq and afghanistan are set up as "blood and treasure," really as though these were comparable or as though they were intertranslatable. people are resources for other people, tools to realize their goals, and this is most obviously the case when the idea is to take collective action. you want to minimize collateral damage, but you can't eliminate it, and you take a certain number of civilian casualties in stride. indeed, you, um, don't care as much about that as you do about reaching your goals, or as much as you pretend to.

you might not like death panels, but you can't have a healthcare policy where you are willing to spend millions of dollars each to keep everyone alive as long as possible, no matter what you say; if you have any national healthcare policy, you are going to in effect put a cash value on people's continued existence. especially in a context of national policies or globalized economies, the basic fact is always use of people as means.

is that ok? or what do we really think about this? are lives of infinite value, or worth $256,325 (or perhaps 57 cents and a marble, with some lint)? all, really. at a minimum, it would be good to explicitly endorse the values we actually hold, instead of just living in continual hypocrisy. well, that might be hard to face.

before you just say: no i really do hold that each human life is of infinite value, i want you to think about how you would act if you really believed that, and how you actually act.i remember obama in some speech - maybe the "to the muslim world" thing, talking about how the most basic value is "the inviolable dignity of the human individual." right and i too was just nodding along; who could disagree? what i am saying is that all of us say it and none of us actually believe that. so: should we say what we actually do believe, even though that is disturbing and disgusting? or should we just continue mouthing inspiring misrepresentations of ourselves? when obama is trying to decide whether to intervene in darfur or something, does he actually not at all consider the costs or something? well, of course not. that's why we're not in darfur.

if i told you that by selling your car you could save a life (which is probably true), would you sell your car and send the cash to the congo? some folks would, i guess, but there are...a lot of cars. i own one myself. or if i could save a life by working an extra 40 hours next week, and perhaps i could, would i or do i? not really; i'm tired. do you? so what do we truly, actually believe about this?

just to throw down the metaphysics for a moment: in my view time is not an artifact of consciousness, a pure form of perception, a phenomenological whatzit, a veil of maya, etc etc: it is a perfectly real objective fact or element or dimension in which we are embedded. sometimes it seems faster or slower, but of course that doesn't even make sense except on a background of constancy. the tick tick of the clock does not constitute but tracks the external reality of time. in short: we do not fabricate, we are fabricated by, the world as it actually is.

this (arrested for using twitter) raises all sorts of interesting questions. "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime." i say just string the guy up for his anarchism.

one correlate of the idea that time is progressive and that we are it which should give progressives pause is the way the idea has articulated cultures. so, for example, hegel held that africa had no history, was outside of history. in anthropology into the midlate twentieth century, you got the idea of some cultures at history's cutting edge, and others scattered along the way, abandoned at one or another moment of time. so our distant past was the present of "stone age" or "primitive" or "savage" societies. we had detected the direction of history and y'all weren't it. almost self-evidently, you had to be brought up to speed, i.e. annihilated as a culture.

i'm just going to state what we all know. whoever the san people or the aborigines may have been in 1830, they were then the exact contemporaries of hegel. every culture that exists right now exists right now. the amish live precisely in the present. dirt poor rednecks in bama exist as much in 2009 as does al gore.the fight of islamic terrorists against the west is not a battle of the medieval against the modern, though it is often portrayed that way (again today by thomas friedman); they are exactly as in the present as we are, conceptually and in a million perfectly practical mundane respects. of course, if they were fighting on behalf of the year 1200, we could not by definition lose.

the progressive politics of today is still connected to the anthropology of the primitive: you are living back there, but we will bring you into now and into the future: our generosity = the destruction of your society = time. the backward and ignorant must be educated and nurtured until they catch up.truly, it is exactly the same basic structure of thought that had the u.s. government kidnapping indian children and sticking them in missionary schools. the left hates that idea. but they're still kidnapping children and sticking them in their missionary schools. only their god isn't jesus, it's the future. with regard to both, i am an atheist.

this is a very hard tension at the heart of progressivism: the pc equality/democratic stuff vs the we are the agents of the future and you are our raw material stuff. it's why instead of letting people of all kinds go - which would seem to make sense if you are in favor of gay rights, indigenous rights, women's rights, everybody's rights - we are constantly engineering, manipulating, dragging people kicking and screaming into the future. it's at once a mellow democratic egalitarianism and an unbelievably presumptuous (and of course entirely incoherent) nonstop paternalism.

first of all, i would say that the idea that time is progressive traces to a millenial, christian tradition. you see it going mad in the nineteenth century: everyone anticipating one or another version of the ecstasy at the end of history, and there is a transition from pietism to the perfectionism of the shakers, for example, to a hegel/marx conception of the end of history. you get a milder but just as definite conception in pragmatist meliorism, which prescribes eternal progress wih no end-state. let's just say there are other ways of conceiving time: cyclically, for example, or as one damn thing after another (which is my astonishing account).

to give a progressive account of history, and then to be a "progressive," is to identify your own position with the unfolding of time, an idea which, if nothing else, is magnificently or satanically arrogant, and would of course make all resistance useless. then you get the political spectrum (as divided by progressives) taxonomized into progressives and reactionaries: people pushing forward and those pushing against the unfolding of history. the first thing i want to point out is that this structure of thought is optional: it's not the only idea about history. which is good, because it's also silly. really it's as though the ticking of clocks should slow when a republican gets elected, or as though time curves around glenn beck as around a black hole.

here is one massive paradox: time has a certain directionality, but we are called upon to make this actual: we are the agents of time: time (god) requires our assistance in its inevitable progressive unfolding. this is the craziness at the heart of marx: the proletarian revolution and subsequent millennial communism is strictly speaking inevitable. but we must hasten the day. what this means in practice is that the people who are holding up time - the bachmans throwing their bodies in front of time's bulldozer - must be liquidated. and the ignorant must be constrained to actually enter time.

in other words, with one sentence we identify ourselves with history. with the next we are deploying totalitarian power to make time actual. the first, we might say, is the rhetorical flourish and the egomania. the latter is the only actual agent of time as conceived progressively. time can only be pushed forward by coercion or if necessary genocide etc. meanwhile, the time of this world - as opposed to the time of progressive fantasy - just tick tick ticks at the same rate wherever it is found. right now it's 7:34 est at michelle bachman's place too. you can't slow it down, and you can't speed it up. you can't be an agent of the future or an agent of the past: all you're doing you're doing now.

conservatives fear change. on the other hand by the same reasoning it is evident that liberals quake in bug-eyed, screeching, unreasoning horror at reality as it now stands, which they negate and despise. fear of the entirety of actuality is going to make it difficult even to hide in your room under the covers, which are, indeed, part of what liberals so cravenly quake in the presence of. i will note that it is almost impossible to fear anything other than the future, though liberals may be gearing up to fear the past, which is always chasing us in extremely close carnivorous proximity. fortunately, liberals are completely immune to fear of...global warming, the palin administration, etc. and they, unlike everyone else, are extremely impressed by their own courage, which is scary.

that conservatives fear the future appears to entail that human history is a triumphant march of progress, which is inspiring though obviously false, and that this triumphant march of progress consists of the public healthcare option, or, well, anything we advocate. let's just say that the claim to be able to understand the direction of history and drive it forward - a lovely conceit shared by hegel, marx, nietzsche, hitler, and madam zelda - is a pathetic delusion, as a brief survey of the astonishing predictions of these figures will reveal. but that i am a spokesman for the future, sent here as it were from it to drag you there (under fullbore coercion), sure makes me feel excellent, which as i keep pointing out, is what the entire structure of thought is for.

the use of "the future" by blow etc is rather odd. it does not refer at all to what may happen after now.  it refers, rather, to their present policy positions. the 2013-2021 glenn beck presidency, though it will happen in a period subsequent to the present period, is not the future. it's the past, which is interesting. historians should now be studying the michelle bachman administration of the 2030s, which, since "the future" refers to policies she rejects, is already long over. charles blow may fear the abject failure of the obama administration: the destruction of the healthcare bill, the sex scandal, the afghan quagmire, etc. however, such a failure is a priori impossible, because 'obama's policies' and 'the future' are synonymous terms. thus, if such failures are ever actualized, and since they would be extended in time, they can only have happened in the past. i.e. the obama administration has already failed. but that's a priori impossible, etc.

let's just say that this picture where my ideas are the future while your ideas are the past is incompatible with...time. a thousand paradoxes spin out from this slop immediately. sometimes when you examine the merest commonplaces of political discourse you find a complete mess, a hyper-intense unanimous idiocy.

i don't really understand the criticism of obama for trying to sell chicago to the ioc in copenhagen. hey the outcome was genuinely uncertain, and he gave it a shot. why not? what was he actually gonna do for healthcare in that 24 hours or whatever?