cheese it, the cops!

the only actual mainstream politician who has defended wikileaks is ron paul. but then he goes farther and starts to talk about why the cables are important, or what they actually show about how we conduct our foreign policy. i realize that ron paul is too coherent to make sense to people. but at a minimum you've got to understand that if you throw down a list of tea partiers, wingnuts, and so on, and you've got sarah palin and ron paul on that list, you have to deal with the fact that they have entirely different politics, even as they overlap a bit. at any rate, i want you to bring me someone from the actual practicing political left - a congressperson, a governor, in short, a successful politician - who would take a position like that publicly.

back to hawking: "the unobserved past is indefinite." "Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past." ask yourself, for example, what experimental results could show that 'the unobserved past is indefinite.' i would think, for example, that the idea that the past is in continual flux would make it impossible to do any sort of experiment: the conditions under which it was performed won't stay still for a moment. what did you just do in the lab or just observe? there are many correct answers to this, as many as there are future reinterpretations. i wonder whether it could turn out, for example, that george washington wasn't the first president. or whether it might keep changing back and forth, etc. i don't mean that we could revise our beliefs. i mean can it actually cease and resume being true that he was? somewhere back there, gw is flickering in and out of existence.

well i suppose this assertion applies only to the 'unobserved' past. this might have two senses: something past that was not observed in the past is indefinite (which i'm reading as a third truth value between true and false?). for example, it is indefinite - it neither true nor false - that there was a universe a billion years ago. or perhaps the idea is that something asserted about the past now is indefinite unless that past is observable now. however, nothing past is observable now. follow either of these ideas for awhile and you'll realize you just got lost.

and you'll realize that you've lost entirely the pastness of the past. to repeat, what we have here is hegelian absolute idealism or something, and the continual revision of the past is also a doctrine of pomo narrative theory (which really derives from hegel). or maybe it's like the pragmatist approach to history (c.i. lewis's, for example): to say that p is true is to say it will guide us fruitfully in the future. so the claim that gw existed, for example, is a claim about the future. ok, well, knock yourself out while i try to knock yourself down. only don't try to tell me this is "science."

it's a little hard for me to see where the math comes in, but i do want to point out that it is indeterminate whether hawking has actually ever done any mathematics and whether it turned out right when he did.

in some ways this is a commonplace. for example, it became the case, say, in 1870, that manet's work of the 1850s anticipated impressionism. that wasn't true of manet's paintings in the 1850s, but it was true of manet's paintings of the 1850s in the 1870s. ok, is this the sort of thing y'all have in mind? 

anyway, philosophy is not dead as long as physicists are engaging in the most rank and post-empirical philosophical speculation. when rorty and folks said philosophy was dead, they at least tried to stop doing it. hawking, though, doesn't really have the training to know whether philosophy is dead, or to kill it. certainly you can't kill it by putting forth a theory of truth, "solving" the problem of skepticism, or describing the cosmic order of the universe.

 

i'll tell you this: andy clark is on the right track. the nytimes's philosophy "blog" has been, overall, disappointing, possibly cause they haven't called me yet. but this is really good, of course expressing a position that clark and others have been putting forward for many years now.

i can't do physics, because i can't do the math. but let me say in defense of my turf that i don't think we should let physicists loose in the realms of metaphysics and epistemology. hawking, as the tls review puts it, thinks the reverse: philosophy is 'dead' because it's not keeping up with physics. anyway, it's the quantum stuff where i feel these people go nuttier than exquisitely-educated fruitcakes. from the particle-slit experiments, or whatever it may be, they seem to draw conclusions like this: there are eleven dimensions. time splits at each event. the principle of non-contradiction is false. truth, reality, the world are/is observer-dependent. there's no fact of the matter about whether a cat is alive or dead, etc. now it's easy to let this stuff wash over you; it's been washing for decades now. and it's very, very easy to defer to the authority of people like hawking. obviously he's smarter than you and me. i, personally, couldn't write books by twitching my eyebrow, and i intend not to try. nevertheless, my left eyebrow is raised as though to write "huh?".

i would like to point out with all due respect that this shit is insane. it makes the highest flights of christian mysticism look rational. that experiments could show that reality is observer-dependent is an assertion that roget, consulting his excellent thesaurus, might call twaddle, flapdoodle, tommyrot, balderdash, bilge, poppycock, and piffle. the events observed in experiments are all observed, while events that are not observed are not observed; it's going to be rather hard to demonstrate the existence of non-observed events by observation, etc. that is exactly as profound as saying you've never seen something you haven't seen. but if you concluded that nothing is visible except what has actually been seen, i'd say in the words of the immortal metro truly (a dude i went to junior high school with) that you're off your feeble tree.

i think one thing these physicists have definitely overcome is ockham's razor: they appear to have a fondness for the maximally lush or bizarre explanation. once you get rid of non-contradiction, by the way, you have gotten rid of the possibility of explaining anything, much less everything: even if your explanation were true, it wouldn't follow that it wasn't false. if watching the paths of microparticles or whatever it is suggests to you that there are eleven or infinitely-many universes, i want to make sure you haven't tried all the this-universely explanations you might generate, etc. 

some quotes in the review from hawking and mlodinow's book: "the unobserved past is indefinite." "Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past." "abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe." i suggest that these are philosophical or religious speculations having nothing to do with empirical results. the universe they describe is, for one thing, hegelian (for example in the notion that the present retroactively creates the past and in the extraordinary idea that the laws of logic generate a universe). this is speculative metaphysics at its most bloated, and i would really find some killer analytic philosopher to help these folks clarify their basic terms. where are rudolf carnap and gilbert ryle when you need them? i not only don't think that these claims are true; i don't know what it would mean for them to be true. i think they are incoherent.

some links delineating my argument that citigroup, e.g., is not distinct from the federal government:

selling citi short is out of fashion

treasury sells $10.5 billion in citigroup stock

peter orszag, vice president of global banking at citigroup

by way of the nytimes op-ed page

as i've traveled this nearly-great land, i've been asked by many people just like you - it's like an army of little fucking clones - "senator sartwell, why do you support tax cuts for the rich?" well i can tell you this: i don't do it to stimulate the economy, which should be starved like a dangerous beast. i do it because all my life i have been committed to one simple moral imperative: give people what they need. the poor need leisure in order to develop their higher sensibilities; i offer them unemployment without checks. and the rich? the rich need money, or they would likely not be rich.

let's not pretend that we're all the same or that human needs aren't socially articulated. the need for money is not a primal or instinctual need, but it is nevertheless very real to those who feel it. at one time people 'needed' the approval of the gods: the need was real even if the gods were not. why does a cannibal devour human flesh? we're not really sure, but we know that the government must provide human flesh to the cannibal. (i am sponsoring legislation to that effect again this year in the senate. i expect it to pass, because before being democrats or republicans, all senators are americans and cannibals.)

decent folk like you and me do not understand the rich man's need for $$, just as we don't understand the need to have sex with people of our own gender or listen to sting or live in a city. but simple justice demands that we satisfy it. rich people are still people, and we should help them preserve whatever dignity they can still simulate. when you ask who, in our society, should have the money, the answer is almost tautologous: the rich should have the money; whoever actually does have the money is rich. a person of fabulous wealth without money is in a difficult predicament! on the other hand, we expect the poor to be without money (the connection is virtually conceptual), and you rarely see a destitute person who's extremely wealthy. taking money from rich people, or giving money to poor people, enacts the most wretched logical contradiction.

just as black people speak in ebonics, though we understand them not, just as women are adrift on a stormy sea of incomprehensible feelings, the rich have money: it is part of their very identity. i will defend with all the passion and hope i can muster in a world like this your right to whatever you are under the delusion that you require.

Assange's London attorney, Mark Stephens, told AOL News today that Swedish prosecutors told him that Assange is wanted not for allegations of rape, as previously reported, but for something called "sex by surprise," which he said involves a fine of 5,000 kronor or about $715.

"We don't even know what 'sex by surprise' even means, and they haven't told us," Stephens said.

sometimes you're running through the possible jokes and you realize that it's just not necessary. happy birthday, baby!

peter orszag is a good emblem of extreme squishy totalitarianism. one day he's setting up to funnel billions of dollars to citibank. the next he's joining their board of directors. on the third, he's telling you what to think about it all in the new york times. he has transcended corruption into a new realm of blessedness. i'm going to give america's democrats the benefit of the doubt and assume that they didn't quite understand who they were electing.

i'd say the anti-smoking police have ramped up the hysteria to maximum: Even One Cigarette Can Prove Lethal, U.S. Surgeon General Says. or even one moment anywhere near someone who's smoking: instant death. where the surgeon general can go after that is not clear, so i guess that's her last appearance on television; thank god we've heard the end of that. still you can't argue with Science. it's almost hard to imagine the litigation atmosphere this creates.

mastercard etc have portrayed the attacks as trivial, and the msm keeps saying that actual transaction processing was never affected at all. you know, i'm not sure about this. i actually did have some trouble doing web transactions yesterday.

perhaps you're wondering what i think about obama on tax policy: 'compromise' or 'capitulation'? i haven't even declared my position on the actual issue: whether to call this thing giving a tax break to the wealthy, or rather backing off from a massive tax hike in hard times. i know that huge matters are at stake, for instance, whether this bill falls within the extension of the predicate 'stimulus package.' but as amazing as this yapyapyap is to me, i'm just going to admit it: i don't fucking care! hahahaha!

no seriously what i like is how politicians now have come through pomo communications programs: the underlying philosophy is rortyan: words make reality! (a simple communications-program version of this is frame theory.) what i dig is the endless performative refutation of that view by the actual practice: all you hear is blahblahblahyacketysmackety.

i hope the performance of anonymous is not too disappointing. i want to believe there's a twisted little genius among them, a malignant gates, casually preparing to vaporize global capital so that it will seem never to have existed at all. awwww you shudna fucked with us, beeches!

on the phenomenon of domestic islamic terrorists (though what 'domestic' means in a multi-ethnic society is complex). i think that it's a very predictable result of precisely the means by which it is policed. so there is always a shadow, or multiple shadows: a place to go in a mood of total rejection: if you like, adolescent rejection. so at different places and times: a nihilist, an anarchist, a nazi, a communist, etc. in 1999 dylan klebold and eric harris still resorted to hitler, the little fuckheads. now they'd have posters of osama perhaps.

the bush administration mobilized massively not only actual police mechanisms, but a symbol system, crystallized as the war on terror. the figure of the terrorist in this imaginary is preternatural, a shadow figure or negation, of civilization, progress, rationality. by means of this a tiny group of people held a whole world in thrall, mobilized...everybody. installing this whole thing throughout the society makes "islamic terrorist" a role of terrible symbolic power (even with relative futility of actual action!) indeed, even the guidance by the fbi of the teenager into the plot is part of the "construction" of the figure of the terrorist through the means of its enforcement.

on the other hand, that doesn't mean that it's a good thing that people are scurrying about who want to blow up a truck bomb in your mom's neighborhood, or that that's an understandable or excusable response.

it's funny but there's always still a place for a kind of classical art criticism, pre-danto (much less craig owens and rosalind krauss), pre-harold rosenberg, even pre-clement greenberg. it's still right back in bernard-berenson-era exquisite connoisseurship, the cult of the masterpiece, etc. people, or at any rate their biographers and canon-formers, even basically treat picasso and (god help us) warhol this way. i suppose it's important because that's still an almost commonsensical approach to art. this piece by andrew butterfield in the new york review, however, shows what can go so horribly wrong.

The ravishing application of paint, the luscious brushwork, and the startling compositions of the two pictures impress all who behold them. But just as fundamental to the pictures’ power is Titian’s poignant exploration of the tragic themes of the myths he represents. Rarely before had any artist looked with such unblinking concentration, and such deep empathy, at the vulnerability and the injustice that are an inescapable part of mortal existence.

it is remarkable that butterfield says almost nothing about the paintings themselves except at that level of generality. but even their mere lusciousness - titian's notorious or obvious sensuality - is incompatible with what he says later in the piece, to wit:

Titian...seems to stress the unfathomable and unmerited cruelty of the gods. Looking at these pictures, it is easy to think of Gloucester's anguished cry in King Lear, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport."

really, honestly, this array of unveiled delectable virgin flesh? if the painting is an influence on rubens, that is precisely how, and through him renoir etc. butterfield's reading makes the work so profound that he misses what's right on the surface: it might be a playful allegory of the battle of the sexes; the eroticism of seeing and of being seen, central to heterosexuality; titian is the most het of painters. the painting is...coquettish. my god her little diva-esque lap dog is yipping at him. 

at any rate there's no need to blow the thing up like a balloon into an incomparable trans-human achievement ("the painter Lucian Freud, for example, recently called them “the most beautiful pictures in the world”) to appreciate a good painting: skillfully made, witty and so on.

 

well i hope this is not the end for assange: one scenario now has him gulaged: extradited here and there, never quite emerging from the international legal twilight. on the other hand if he's actually a rapist...the charges are still beyond vague and puzzling. but what assange has actually done with wikileaks does not require charismatic leadership, and if there could be fifty mannings, there could be fifty assanges. this is a critical moment. states will band together to institute a global system of information control. within a few years, and even a few months, we'll have a better sense of whether they can assert authority over global information flow. if so, then the state/international system bids fair to dominate the century. if not...maybe not.

if elected, i will fight to change the national motto from 'e pluribus unum' to 'report suspicious activity.' (i will just point out, once again, that a wal-mart superstore, or a big public high school, cannot be secured. if terrorism were common here, these places would cease operations. think about all the vehicles that pull up, the deliveries, the trash. think about how many people walk in and out, etc. you cannot have institutions like that in a terrorist world.)

honestly, i don't think you can really secure an airport either. but while a city might have one or two airports, there's a wal-mart and a public high school in every suburb and small town. they have to operate relatively cheaply or they can't operate at all. you're just not going to have DOE screeners reaching into the underwear of every american child, every whitetrash christmasshopper, etc.

the reason that wikileaks is still worrisome is that (if this is true) all the material derives from a single source, viz. bradley manning. we need fifty of him, all over the world. imagine a comparable release from russia, from china, from iran; israel, venezuela. ok.: what we don't know about these states is monufuckinmental. (i'd especially like to see russia.) where are the people in all these bureaucracies - the everyday infohandlers - who feel a higher calling than that of their government? think about the gigantism of all these bureaucracies: all you need is a few dedicated dissidents in a population of tens or hundreds of thousands. actually i bet there are people, many people, in all these bureaucracies, who are better at concealing their filching than was manning. well of course that goes for corporations as well...

sorry for slow blogging. it's not because stuff ain't happening. this idea that assange is holding the world's governments at bay with a nuclear weapon is, as i'm sure some have remarked by now, unbelievably dr. evil. but dude. dr. evil is an anarchist! and he's so far stunningly, strikingly effective. this whole wikileaks thing was an entirely unpredictable development but looking back it is already fundamental in world politics and power relations. that is astonishing whatever happens from here. what if they remove assange and the site just keeps proliferating in endless mirrors? his strategies so far have been successful in evading removal. but of course that could be just the beginning in this mode: the micro-exposure, the exposure in every detail, of the actual operations of power. that could actually make the world hard to govern. you might think that's a bad thing. or you might...not. at any rate, the response by governments continues in its hysteria, demonstrating assange's effectiveness. holder: "The American people themselves have been put at risk."

 

one thing i will say: they need someone really good at such things to put them together visually. they need a flag, a logo, a color scheme etc that's better than they have now. wallpaper above is worse than lame, e.g.

it's interesting that it's the diplomatic stuff and not the military that swung the world into action against wikileaks. but surely if nothing else the many fascinating stories emerging vindicate the newsworthiness of the leaks: nytimes has half a dozen really good things just today. i realize that the question of whether wikileaks is journalism is important in american constitutional law, for example. but i don't exactly think of it as journalism; it's the raw material of journalism. 

if i were the teacher's union, i'd respond to this type of stuff - continuous surveillance, a procedure that makes performance evaluation more important and time-consuming than the job itself - with a strike. and by 'a strike' i mean a cruise missile attack on the department of education or the gates foundation. i guess what i don't understand is why teachers don't organize themselves into a hyper-violent revolutionary front: surely the only rational response to current "theories" of "education."

got to say this: ron paul has tremendous guts.

Paul followed up with a post to his Twitter account Friday morning: "Re: WikiLeaks — In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."

i note that i can't open wikileaks this morning. oops actually it comes up at wikileaks.ch.

headline: Woman Says She Stabbed Husband Accidentally While Cutting Cheese

(stabbed him through the heart, actually.)

i wonder who is really ahead, people like assange or the hacker underground from which he comes, or these state information technology operations: 

The main WikiLeaks site, originally hosted by Bahnhof, was hit by a denial-of-service attack on Sunday that knocked it offline, hours before publishing more than 250,000 United States embassy cables.

stuxnet was a state information operation. i think maybe they're at the point of harassing wikileaks, but i guess they don't have quite the boldness or hypocrisy (or the ability?) just to bomb it out of existence. 

i have a feeling that what is now going to happen to assange and wikileaks is going to make it evident - as though the actual contents of the leaks themselves didn't make this obvious - that the united states operates as a worldwide police state. this summary of the response from a guardian opinion piece gives the flavor.

WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 United States embassy cables – shared with the Guardian and other international newspapers – was an act of terrorism, congressman Peter King declared. Sarah Palin called for its founder Julian Assange to be hunted down as an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands", while former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has demanded that whoever leaked the files should be executed for treason.

 

 

one odd thing about the charges against assange is that the detaiuls of the acts he is supposed to have committed remain murky. whom is he supposed to have raped and molested under what circumstances etc? you know it certainly reeks of cia counter-intelligence; that's just what they'd do. anyway, who's checking? the cure is to do some reporting. if anyone knows or can find out a good source on this matter, the details of the swedish indictment?, i'd appreciate it.

i must say that i'm much happier with the climate-change people since their chastening. that the scientist who predicts the most thorough and imminent apocalypse is morally superior to his fellows is incompatible with anyone producing credible scientific evidence; the motivations are way too detached from the procedures: you need it to turn out a certain way. at any rate, these folks seem a lot more cautious now in stating their own evidence, as well they should be. so at this point i'm willing to say with some caution that i do think the world's getting warmer due to release by human beings of greenhouse gasses etc and that it is likely to cause problems. and i'm willing to talk about, you know, reasonable responses.

now on the other hand if these folks were right that we'll all die a week from saturday (and presuming that they were not right when they said we'd all die a week ago saturday), then they failed to save the world and we should never have questioned for a moment anything they ever said. and this period of complacency where we're not galvanizing all world governments into zeroing out their carbon immediately is actually responsible for the end of the world: a lot to put on the shoulders of the people that leaked their memos. but i think we're likely to get more realistic assessments now than then, and be able to put this issue in balance with other problems etc in a more rational way. of course any way you look at it, our response is going to be inadequate. we are, after all, human beings, the most morally and intellectually incompetent species that evolution has so far permitted to continue.

ok here is an op-ed-style piece summarizing my misgivings about environmentalism. the ideas will be familiar to anyone who reads eyeofthestorm.

 

Environmentalists Against Nature

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

 The practice of environmentalism has, or at least sometimes has, been wholesome. But the basic concepts underpinning it are, I think, profoundly incoherent.

    On any reasonably naturalistic conception of human beings - any conception even vaguely compatible with science, for example - we are natural creatures, one variety of mammal. And on any even slightly empirical account of natural history, ecosystems are volatile. Most environmentalists, surely, would accept these assertions. And yet almost every sentence out of their mouths contradicts them.

    The environmental movement, first of all, rests on a picture of human actions as encroachments on the order of nature: according to this picture we are distorting, manipulating, and destroying the earth. We have lost our connection with it. But if you believe that we are part and parcel of nature, that we emerged as an animal species by natural selection, then the picture of us as attacking it is an impossible picture. We are it. Everything we do - from hiking the Appalachian Trail to spewing toxins - is completely natural.

    Environmentalists often seem to want to return ecosystems to a pristine condition, a natural balance or harmony that we have disturbed. But ecosystems are not static, not even strictly cyclical, and they are in continuous interaction with one another: no ecosystem, not even the entire earth, is a biosphere sealed off from elsewhere. Species have been appearing and disappearing and traveling the globe since life emerged, colonizing this environment, abandoning that one.

    Some ecosystems display some elements of balance or harmony for significant periods of time. But such harmonies are always provisional and always in the process of being compromised, whether we're the ones doing the compromising or not.

    I live in rural Pennsylvania, more or less in the woods, though there is a strip mall about three miles away, with a Wal-Mart and a Wendy's (the video store, of course, is defunct, thus destroying the balance of strip mall). People have lived around here for centuries, and their traces are everywhere: in the fields cleared for farming, the old stone walls and ancient structures slowly crumbling into the earth. There are little middens here and there, where folks in the good old country tradition have dumped their broken bottles and kitchen scraps.

     I haven't actually done a census, but it's hard not to see that there are "invasive" or human-introduced species everywhere. The English ivy grows luxuriantly along the ground and is ascending the trees. Gangs of starlings waft hither and yon.  Chinese chestnuts feed the grey squirrels. Invasive European-Americans appear in abundance, though they are fewer here than in some spots. This year we were invaded by stink bugs.

    But the place is deliriously alive. I think of the poison ivy out here as a single entity taking over whole regions with its lustrous green leaves and its nasty toxin, perhaps enhanced by climate change that has made the place just a bit more lush and tropical. There are layers of birds, from the hummers and finches and chickadees, through the doves and pigeons, to the several species of woodpeckers overseen by the big pileateds, to the kestrels, sharp-shinned and red-shouldered hawks, to the turkey buzzards floating at altitude. There are voles, chipmunks, colonies of feral cats, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, deer (along with tree stands for those who enjoy shooting them).

    The other day a raccoon toddled into my house when I let in my cat; I'm not sure which of the three of us freaked out more.

    That, I must say, is a good enough eco-system for me, and I think that perhaps we should think of any such system in terms of its vitality and volatility rather than its stability. We should note and we can value its imbalances and inharmonies as well its balances and harmonies.

    And I participate, not only by a feeling of oneness or something, but with my chainsaw, the old mops I toss into the old dumps, my herbicide. I grow roses and butterfly bushes and hybridized tomatoes. My house is as much a part of this ecosystem as the boulders, and I as much as the raccoons.

    Plants and animals, as I say, have been moving around and expunging one another since they existed at all. We are one way they do that, and we are animals who do that ourselves. The globe has been cooling and warming since there was a globe, and we are one way it does that too.

     The picture of us as disturbing or destroying nature is exactly as supernatural as the religious orientations according to which it was all put here by God for us to do with whatever we please. The environmental movement is still locked into a picture of us as immaterial souls - or at any rate things well beyond nature - who are invaders or visitors on this earthly plane.

     And it is just as devoted to controlling or altering this order as the rankest industrialist. We are still trying to transform the world according to our little conceptions, only now our conceptions are slightly different: we'll control it to return it to a pristine balance that emerges only out of our imaginations and has the status of a deity that prescribes moral standards.   

   What I'd suggest is that environmentalists need to examine their assumptions, and at a minimum reconcile them with each other. And they also need to re-think their practice in a way that is compatible with a fully naturalistic, reality-based conception of the world and of themselves.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.