like i say, i think this is the fork in the road, where your way swung off, where you chose between freedom and slavery. it's revealing opinion-wise who takes what road. thomas friedman hesitantly throws his weight behind the view that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance is legitimately a secret. gene robinson hesitantly goes the other way: so hesitantly that it's hard to tell. one very big sign that some mealy-mouthed colluder in totalitarianism has no idea what to say is that he's glad that the discussion has been opened. it's an important discussion. one way i'd like to take this significant, open discussion is to open up the question of arming the population as a militia. i do think that we could responsibly market high explosives to patriotic groups of all kinds through gun shows. we're definitely going to need anti-aircraft materiel, e.g. i think, simultaneously, that we're going to have to think about disarming all agents of state power. safety first.
no, honestly, anyone who ever considered themselves a journalist is out of their minds to be ambivalent about this. what happened to the media? oh y'all didn't go to fucking grad school in communications or something? christ. whom do you identify with? what is the place of your own freedom to speak in a democracy or free society? time to admit that you're just pr or whatever.
the quality of the arguments shows something about the intelligence of our leaders in various walks of life. but i do particularly like the portrayal of snowden as 'solitary' by brooks and others. this has a variety of rhetorical functions, even though it has no logical force. it's a typical bit of 'mere' rhetoric: the idea is a kind of ersatz peer pressure. even if it were real peer pressure, of course, it wouldn't be a reason. so, first off, if snowden were standing as a solitary sentinel against injustice - all alone at tremendous cost - that would be even more admirable, because even more courageous. but he's not alone. even these polls that people are trumpeting show 40% support or something. there are plenty of people who accept every word of the argument he made and who would have made it themselves. for all you know, he had a little group of libertarian friends.
he's 'solitary' only insofar as the state is the social in its entirety: the same old saw about the state being all of us all together. anyone who doesn't agree with that is a howling savage, beyond the pale, an isolate. no, actually, such a person might have plenty of real community. there are many ways to make connections, and many ways that dissent or revelation contributes to the social fabric. the unity you're recommending is false because coerced, but you're identifying it with the possibility of human community per se. the actual means that you're using to form all of us up into one community is a secret program to watch everyone all the time. really, time to face up to it: you are a person who could make an argument like that for a conclusion like that. but even the mainstream community depends on its defectors and subversives and truth-tellers for whatever decency and truth it possesses.
i do think that being in an elite and in particular exercising authority has an epistemically distorting effect. it's really like these people have lost their reason. what you do instead of giving easons when you have authority is just keep repeating yourself more loudly, or start to rant and screech at individual victims in your proximity.
it is amazing what's happening to edward snowden. the outpouring of revulsion is remarkable: it shows you every flavor of the authoritarian personality. also it is bullshit. jeffrey toobin on cnn practically jumps out of his skin with hostility and - like many others - constantly makes reference to snowden's age. i suppose 29 is too young to do the obviously right thing. say rosa parks had been 29; she'd have been a laughingstock. and he goes with 'you just can't do that' as an argument; just a sheer repetition of the authoritarian imperative. here are david brooks's complaints today:
He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.
keeping your promises is one dimension of honesty and integrity, but it can be over-ridden by other moral imperatives, including the moral imperative to help other people. understand, that is exactly what snowden took himself to be doing.
He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.
this is assistant principal bullshit. everyone will be punished for your transgression.
He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.
to repeat, honor codes are important. they can be over-ridden by other considerations, and for that matter other honor codes. here the argument is that it's obligatory to violate your own basic values if you're being paid lavishly. that i guess is what david brooks would call a social contract.
He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.
this is unbelievably tendentious, fallacious claptrap. on brooks's view, it serves the cause of open government for it to be a secret that everyone is under surveillance at all times. revealing that just causes more secrecy. truly, the logic is depraved.
He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.
this 'backlash' style of argument has got to go. your resistance to oppression is wrong because we'll double the oppression. the correct answer is then we'll double the resistance. seriously, here's why keeping all your crap secret is a bad idea: it forces us to reveal your ass to the world. don't make us do it. you'll have only yourselves to blame. you're just serving the purposes of julian assange again.
He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.
this is mindless. i don't know what the founders thought about 'solitary 29-year-olds,' but brooks does. i want to say this: edward snowden is not alone. he is not a solitary figure. what he did, he did at tremendous cost to himself and out of an evident commitment to actual public service. he has a worldwide community.
the community brooks appeals to is an imaginary community simulated by secrecy and coercion. every one of these arguments is an argument that everyone should be secretly under surveillance at all times. but the arguments are just this anthology of desperate manipulations, meaningless spasms of the authoritarian mind, real stupidity.
no evil committed by an institution, whether a state or (for god's sake) a defense contractor cannot be justified by arguments like this. you could transpose these arguments directly to any fascist or communist dictatorship in the world; they could be and have been the ideology of every genocide. they are arguments that your conscience does not count, and hence you should do what we say. you don't even deserve to know the basis on which we're making our decisions.
you know, arguing for evil is annoying, but it's really the logic i find discrediting. so, your argument against revealing a massive secret police program to its victims is that the person who did it was a high school dropout. what's sweet about this as an example is that it both implicitly accuses snowden of stupidity on an inadequate basis (have you heard him talk?) and itself enacts stupidity (it's derangedly irrelevant, like a kind of incompetent surrealist poetry).
more notes: of course, anarchists are not the biggest fans of 'the rule of law' and the question of who's a criminal is not what interests me. but just for the hell of it, the constitution including the 4th amendment is the supreme law of the land, and hence snowden has exposed a vast criminal conspiracy.
so one of the people the administration is standing up there to threaten snowden and present a completely incoherent defense of this massive volation of our sacred way of life is james clapper, the director of national intelligence.
Over the last decade, much of the company’s growth has come from selling expertise, technology and manpower to the National Security Agency and other federal intelligence agencies. Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.
The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.
Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.
As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.
from wikipedia, summarizing clapper's resume omitting booz hamilton.
the state/corporate interface is the very center of this total info regime: google, apple, verizon, booz hamilton and entire defense-contracting infrastructure, intelligence agencies with facilties all over the country and all over the world, integrated with drone targeting and a thousand other aspects. they are developing databases for all global locations and all individuals at all times.
The gargantuan $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City features 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet.
The Utah Data Center is a data farm that will begin harvesting emails, phone records, text messages and other electronic data in September.
talking to a leftish friend last week, he was doing a common theme: i don't pay enough taxes. i want us to help each other... we're paying for the power that subordinates us. some of us are happy about it!
also thank god for glenn greenwald. this is a test of basic decency or where you decided whether or not to support slavery. anyone who spends any time considering whether it might be alright to keep these programs secret, for example by focusing outrage on ed snowden, is a mere lover of tyranny. don't let anyone obscure even the trivial question of legality; read the 4th amendment.
i myself went at first with 'oh we figured that.' but it's one thing to vaguely understand that you might be under surveillance, and another to show in detail that and how this is possible. one thing is that a world in which some of the things they are describing are happening, they might get to the point of info control at which edward snowdens become impossible. but right now, they are still possible. practical measures of all sorts, legal and illegal, to keep them possible, are essential.
so all these mofos are on television saying 'string him up'. he's a felon. his felony was revealing the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance all the time. he didn't reveal the content of anthony kennedy's email; he revealed a fundamental fact about everyone's lives, a ground-level reality. that really is a felony.
if you are opposed to everyone knowing that everyone is under surveillance all the time, i think you really had better think about who you are and what you represent. it's surprisingly easy to become a monster, and you might want to go on a journey of memory, trying to figure out exactly when you turned that corner. reflecting on that moment might show us all something important about how evil gets into the world.
the kinds of arguments they're already giving are obscene: snowden is 'making his own rules,' for example. 'you just can't do that.' no: but it is admirable according to the rules to do evil as the rules demand. i want you telling god that shit later on.
from wikipedia on booz hamilton, the company snowden went back and forth to and from to nsa/cia. squishy totalitarianism; merger of state and corporate sector. correct? snowden is perfectly articulate; he speaks better for himself (and all of us) than anyone else.
Another controversy, related to some of the senior staff of Booz Allen (past and present) and related to its performance on some specific U.S. intelligence agency contracts, was brought to light on January 12, 2007 in an interview conducted by Democracy Now! with Tim Shorrock,[71] an independent investigative journalist, and separately in an article he wrote for the Salon online magazine. Through investigation of Booz Allen employees, Shorrock asserts that there is a sort of revolving-door conflict of interest between Booz Allen and the U.S. government, and between multiple other contractors and the U.S. government in general. Regarding Booz Allen, Shorrock referred to such people as John M. McConnell, R. James Woolsey, Jr., and James R. Clapper, all of whom have gone back and forth between government and industry (Booz Allen in particular), and who may present the appearance that certain government contractors receive undue or unlawful business from the government, and that certain government contractors may exert undue or unlawful influence on government. Shorrock further relates that Booz Allen was a sub-contractor with two programs at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), called Trailblazer and Pioneer Groundbreaker.
he's not less safe by going public, i believe. but he's definitely not safe.
alright here is a list of soul by women singers. a lot of these are people i saw or even met, and millie jackson or donna summer could kill you on a good night. also it is heavy on my particular favorites, especially betty wright and ann peebles. there are incomparably ferocious performances here, such as tina on 'i idolize you' or betty wright on 'let me be your lovemaker'. i've tried to avoid the songs you've just heard too much, such as 'respect' or 'you make me feel like a natural woman'. obviously one can't omit aretha, so i listened through again. i toned down the motown because that didn't emphasize the single female voice , but i do have little doses of especially martha reeves and gladys knight, who i think were the soulfulest of that stable. i emphasize churchy shouters, for sure; that is the essence of soul music. but i try to register different modes like a more elegant etta james or overlaps into disco and or white-girl sex gospel. i put minnie riperton in there cause that was my song with my first gf jamie. it's not necessarily that listenable, even with the twittering birds. actually i've deleted it from own playlist. i do think janis was basically a soul singer; fucking incredible, too. if i'da been in charge, i woulda sent her to memphis/stax.
Soul Woman
Betty Wright, "I Love the Way You Love"
Ann Peebles, "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"
Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love
You)"
Gladys Knight and the Pips, "I've Got to Use My Imagination"
[Ike and] Tina Turner, 'I Idolize You"
Susan Tedeschi, "You Need to Be With Me"
Betty Wright "If You Don't Love Me Like You Say You
Love Me"
Aretha, "Chain of Fools"
Martha Reeves, "Power of Love"
The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go?"
Janis Joplin, "Cry Baby"
Ann Peebles, "I Can't Stand the Rain"
Betty Wright, "All Your Kissin' Sho Don't Make Good
Lovin"
Eurythmics, "Let's Go"
Ann Peebles, "I Pity the Fool"
Shirley Caesar, "Don't be Afraid"
Big Brother and the Holding Company, feat Janis Joplin,
"Piece of My Heart"
Etta James, "At Last"
Millie Jackson, "Breakaway"
Donna Summer "Love to Love You Baby"
Big Brother feat Janis, "I Need a Man to Love"
Betty Wright, "Let Me Be Your Lovemaker"
Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles, "[1-2-3-4-5-6-7]
Count the Days I'm Gone"
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"
Minnie Riperton, "Lovin' You"
Bettye Swann, "Chained and Bound"
Maria Muldaur, "Jon the Generator"
Gladys Knight and the Pips, "Heard it Through the
Grapevine"
Betty Wright, "Clean Up Woman"
Anita Ward, "Ring My Bell"
Adele, "Rolling in the Deep"
Janis, "Move Over"
Tracy Nelson, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh;, It Takes a Lot to Cry"
Ann Peebles, "(I Feel Like) Breakin' Up Somebody's
Home"
Bonnie Raitt, "You Got to Be Ready"
Aretha, "Think"
Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You"
The Fugees, feat Lauryn Hill, "Killing Me Softly"
The Staple Singers, "I'll Take You There"
the material is as gender-problematic and interesting as the music being made by female country singers at the time. one flavor you get, as in both tina, below, and betty, above - and for that matter in shirley caesar in relation to god - is ferocious submission. this should tell you right there that this dominance/submission heterosexuality was always extremely complicated: a very rich erotic terrain or transaction. but then you know ike and tina's history and that song is hard to listen to. but then it is a performance of fearsome power.
well, you sort of figured they were scooping everything. really, obviously, most of us only depend for the non-detection of our crimes on the fact that there's too much information to actually read, though i'm sure the algorithims get better here as in china. but however: understand that anyone is arrestable at any time, in virtue of their tax posture, drug consumption, possessions of one sort or another, associations. that is really the squishy totalitarian sine qua non or some shit. yo y'all want this. you need to be safe! neo-cons and safetynetters agree. you have already been searched.
remember last week, when you were arguing that the government is all of us, working together, our agent of collective identity, our collective justice? funny what it takes to make that shit happen.
one thing you see immediately: the government regulates these communications companies, and these communications companies maintain an oligopoly, and they and it are all one big sprawling machine when it comes to processing your information. also health-care, benefits, taxes are all worked in; you are never not embroiled. but you just just try to chill and there's no real reason you should particularly come to anyone's attention. can't intern everybody! but we could intern anybody.
where is russ feingold? paging russ feingold!
squishy
totalitarianism: the
political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common,
for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Iran, and the United
States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of
state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as
compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state
or 'safety-net' programs that enhance consumption and give large parts of the population
a sense of dependency and security; a relative tolerance for some forms of
diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption,
combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance; overwhelming police and military force and
sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth
and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks
in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national
sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the
circulation of wealth.
Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Sung and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald
Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Alain Badiou and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did, or have been represented as saying they did, even if they acted entriely incompatibly with it:
the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To
reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the
other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend
constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From
an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, or anarchist point of view, this spectrum
stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the
other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that
incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy,
structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth.
And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Massively, quite obviously
false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies
have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local
moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political
progam; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and
incoherent.
as anselm argued, that is a vocal performance than which no greater can be conceived in soul music, proof of the existence of god. it's dynamic, baby.
that's - yes! - little beaver and willie clarke doing everything from b.b. to shaft.
one way to construe the left-right spectrum is as state vs capital. but this distinction is a single ideology shared by ayn rand and vald lenin. look and see: they are not distinct and you will not be pulling them apart.
Both left and right accepted an ideological framework in
which state and capital were opposed; indeed to a large extent the left-right
spectrum just is this idea. And yet as soon as this opposition is questioned
empirically with regard to any particular fundamental development in practical
political economy, it disintegrates. Panitch and Gindin adduce also the world financial
crisis of 2007-2008, which was created in part by the American government's
support for home ownership and the development of financial instruments based
on them. Of course the American government and those of other nations, as well
as international coalitions of bankers and officials massively infused the
specific private financial concerns with cash in repsonse to the crisis. The
United States government purchased and then re-sold domestic car manufacturers.
The interlocked
histories of the corporation and state war machines, for example Krup to
Germany or Halliburton to the USA must on any account be regarded as
fundamental to the nature and growth of both the modern state and the modern
corporation.
State repression of
striking workers, for example the severe outbreak in the US in the 1890s, or
the less violent outbreaks in Thatcher's Great Britain or Reagan's United
States, is a tried and true tradition. State regulation of business concerns
increases barriers to entry into the market and hence helps consolidate markets
in established hands. This effect increases exponentially when the regulators
are themselves essentially representatives of those very firms, who after all
are the only ones who understand their segment of the market, and the health of
which depends on their activity.
The way the FCC has
actually imposed corporate oligarchy on communications is entirely typical; in
the public interest and so on they auctioned off and licensed first radio and
then televion frequencies, and now cellular bandwidth made the networks possible,
and for some time most Americans had perhaps four sources of information, all
basically purveying the same interpretation of the world. The state enforced
copyright laws in such a way as to limit publishing or the dissemination of
music to a few large corporations. But it did the same with the railroads and
mineral rights in the 19th century, for example, leading directly to the great
American personal fortunes of that period. By the 1890s the American economy
was being bailed out by J.P. Morgan, a gesture which it has repaid to the financial
sector many times, and in response to which the idea of a central or national
bank was expanded to include unidorm regulation of currency under the Federal
Reserve. These mechanisms for mutual stabilization of state and capital were
refined and internationalized throughout the twentieth century and still have
their little drawbacks at times. One effect of a state that conceives itself
and which is conceived by the population primarily as a distributor of benefits
is that it stabilizes the supply and demand or manufacturing, sales, and
consumption, by, for example, giving many people a certain amount to spend evry
week or month. Consumption can be increased by increasing such benefts, for
example in a slump with regard to unemployment benefits; this assures
retailers, for example, of a certain minimal level of sales. To look at state
and corporate interests as opposed in these dimensions is distorting.
one 10k item in the irs's party budget was a speech on 'leadership through art,' by a painter who, on the spot, created paintings of great leaders such as . . . bono. this tells you all you need to know about the current state of tax policy, visual arts, and music appreciation in this, the greatest nation in the history of my ass. joe scarborough, in rare form this morning, hopes that the work depicts bono playing poker with dogs.
The main historical
point I want to make is this: the rise of capitalism is not explicable without
state power, which has increased throughout the capitalist period. The modern
state and capitalism have the same origins, or arose together, or really -
simplifying slightly - are one thing. In many economic histories, the rise of
capitalism is atributed fundamentally to colonialism, and state/corporate
hybrids such as East India companies have appeared continuously in myriad
variations. They are appearing still. The idea that free markets are
historically distinguished from - or even are the very opposite of - large, powerful government is a
completely ahistorical ideology, shared by the capitalist right and the
communist left. In this regard and in a number of others, we might think of
the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than as a taxonomy of
opposites. Thus, the left-right or Democrat/Republican splits, which
define American politics as a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan
bromides about free markets and positive government programs with egalitarian
results, depend on a historical mistake. It is one so obvious that it is
actually hard to see how anyone, much less everyone, made it. Indeed, the entire history of capitalism is
utterly bound up with the configuration of the state, and I do not believe that
capital accumulations on the vast scales it has achieved are possible in the
absence, for example, of pervasive domestic policing and the ability to project
military power. The idea that you get to something like the British colonial
economy - one capitalist apogee - without a state, is obviously absurd. The
American robber-baron period is often held to have been to have led to
hyper-concentration of wealth in a few private hands and to have been constrained
ultimately by the state. I think that if you looked at the actual procedures
employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you would see that they
depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men
were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth. That this underwent
various adjustments for various reasons in the so-called Progressive era does
not indicate that at that point state and capital went their separate ways,
putting it mildly. And if this oscillation toward state over corporate power
(sort of perhaps her and there) increased equality, I would like to see the
evidence.
Many leftists hold
that we live in an era of 'late' or 'global' capitalism. As they gear up to
equip the state with ever more power to regulate economies (their proposed
solution), redistribute wealth, and so on, they are simultaneously aware that
all of these developments depend fundamentally on state power, sometimes in
multi-state configurations: on central banks and currencies, for example; on
the projection of military force to secure resources. This is central to the
left critique of our situation, but to conclude from it that we need to funnel
more resources and powers to the state and create programs that make many more
people much more dependent on it is bizarre. If one thought a bit more
carefully, for example, about the way that government energy policies and
private energy concerns are interlocked, one would get less and less sense of
any distinction. American democracy, or American politicians, depend on
corporate cash, and any president who really tried to move decisively in other
direction would be vitiating the economy and dooming his presidency. Just to
say the obvious: regulators and corporate lobbyists and Congressional staffers
are all the same people. You could go Soviet, but the most you do is sort of
get rid of some of the lobbyists: you just hand your banking system and energy
sector to state bureaucrats, who three minutes after that are the wealthiest
people in the country, with the power to break you by raising their eyebrow.
Little Crispy's Big Law (LCBL): hierarchies tend to coincide.
Corollary: resources flow toward political power, and
political power flows toward resources.
Economic power coincides with political power. This is not
because economic power constitutes political power, any more than the other way
round. So say you were looking for a political solution to your economic
inequalities. Well, constituting the state as controller of the economy, or
beefing up its mechanisms to redistribute wealth on a fairer basis is -
apparent appearances to the contrary - liable in the long run to have the opposite
efect. The more state control of the economy you have, other things being
equal, the more entrenched and extreme the economic hierarchy. Putting it
mildly, the left is confused about this. And also it is not subject to
information: it does not matter what actually happens anywhere: the left will
still demand intensified political hierarchy in order to pursue economic
equality.
In fact, whatever
hierarchies there are will tend in the long run to coincide. As a practical
matter, if you recommend any hierarchy, whether of experts, races, capitalists,
the Party, etc etc, you are in reality recommending hierarchy in every
dimension. So, if a hierarchy of education or expertise is important in your
society, then resources and political power will flow toward experts. Same with
a hierarchy of beauty or athletic prowess or race or gender, or whatever it may
be. But the fundamental dimensions are economic and political. I'd say it's
obvious that LCBL is roughly true, and everyone knows it to be true. A
white-suprematist polity in which black people were wealthier than white
people, for example, would be extremely surprising. It would be no less surprising if there were
no regulatory capture, for example. You could keep trying to institute reforms
to pull economic and political power apart: I wonder what it would take
empirically to show you that this was counter-productive. It's
counter-productive because when you beef up the state to control capital, you
only succesed in making capital more monolithic, more concentrated, and more
able to exercise a wide variety of powers.
i've been working on the political theory chapter of entanglements: a system of philosophy. probably won't surprise you that i am again undertaking the destruction of the left-right way of conceiving the political spectrum, which i do assert is one of the most grotesque conceptual messes ever inflicted on human populations. so i'll pull out some paragraphs, some of which started as blog entries anyway.
it's reached the point that i don't see how people ever used this way of thinking about politics, which is crazily and obviously incoherent and also practically disastrous. its ubiquity is proportional to its ridiculousness and i think if you start to actually look at it rather than from it, you'll agree with me.
The
left-right spectrum, since it is linear and not infinite, can be characterized
in terms two extreme poles. One way to see that the thing is incoherent is that
these poles can be defined in a number of mutually incompatible ways. So, for
example, in the 1930s it was was totalitarian communism as against fascism. It is odd
that the left could define the right pole as fascist one minute, laissez-faire
the next. I don't doubt that you can make them identical by some conniption-fit
of dialectical materialism or something, but of course then you're just writing
fiction, as usual. The left pole could be an stateless society of barter and
localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race,
gender, and sexuality; or a giant Pentagon-style welfare state; or a Khmer-Rouge
re-education regime. And I think that, bewildered by the endless jive that is
the left-right spectrum, people sort of endorse all these serially or
simultaneously. But it also strikes me that the incoherence is a bit hard to
miss.
It's possible to
tell a coherent history of how the left/right spectrum arose, but I don't think
there is any way to make it make sense conceptually. One possibility, which of
course arises from the left, which I think is who invented the left/right
spectrum, is that the left and the right want time to run at different rates or
even in different directions. This would just make them both insane, I think,
and I've already messed with these ideas in discussing 'reactionary
progressivism.' Also, if progressives are people who want the pace of time to
increase, they are also claiming the ability to foretell the future. It's going
to be the future they want. Of course even if our fate was a world welfare
state or something, that wouldn't show that the result was desirable. Claiming
to read the direction of history is a characteristic derangement of many
people, but even if people could do this, that something is in the future
doesn't show it's good without some sort of extremely anti-naturalistic
conception of human beings. Perhaps God is guiding us to redemption. Otherwise,
it's a mess down here. Even if it's a Darwinian mess, that doesn't entail any
sort of progress by any standard: natural selection will love our extinction as
much as our triumph.
I'd replace left and right with up and down. There are two political
philosophies: hierarchical and anti-hierarchical, statist and anarchist, totalitarian/squishy
totalitarian and resistant. But whereas the squishy-totalitarian side funnels
into a single situation - a frozen economic and political and knowledge
hierarchy - the anarchist side is thousands upon thousands of possibilities, as
many as there are possible voluntary arrangements: a million mutant
communities. Don't think of it as single thing, think of it as all
possibilities but one.
The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand go-go capitalists, neo-conservative militarists, redneck beer swillers, and evangelical christians are all on the same side in your conceptuality. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. For heaven's sake, drop it and start again.
Now on the up/down spectrum, the Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the Communist Party, and American liberals are on the same side, some more extremely or mildly than others. I am a lot more comfortable with that, and I think it's more plausible. I hope that offends you. It ought to make yuou reflect. But of course any linear account is awfully simplistic.
it's going to take a lot for me to think that any particular neuroscientist or interpreter of brain scans isn't just a fool or a charlatan, in particular with the way particular regions are supposed to be correlated with particular activities. but also in the way the brain is being thought of: seemingly as a swarm of little agents. i think astrology and alchemy are far more sophisticated intellectual structures with better empirical confirmation. really, the shit is amazingly ridiculous, but it has that pseudo-scientific jive quotient that silences people or makes them lose all sense and start nodding along. i am going to start collecting casual examples from the media or wherever. ok this is from this week's new yorker, the place where brains go to die, region by region.
Sleep deprivation is a key component of post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., according to Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatiatrist. . . . He told me that sleep is 'fuel for the friontal lobes of the brain,' which handle "ethical and emotional self-restraint" and "the ability to say 'This is now and that was then.'" In the sleep-deprived brain, there is only the eternal present."
i propose that 'frontal lobes' etc are, as usual, doing absolutely no work, and that if you tried to pay off in some specific way on this it would amount to a pile of crap. with better and better scanning technology, i suppose, we might detect the eternal present in your pre-frontal cortex: yo there it is! what 'frontal lobe' or whatever always does is just try to befuddle you with empty scientific-sounding hooha. the strategy is just to accept uncritically whatever arbitrary, superficial, or momentarily-culturally-approved ethics or normative therapeutic techniques or self-help you've got, freeze it into everyone's biology, and pretend that's an explanation. seriously, in a hundred years people will look back and just shake their heads at how large and neurologically active our stupidity centers were and how meaningless the stuff that came out of our language-mangling module.
i'm not saying this because i'm a dualist or because i think minds can't be accounted for physically. really, i'm not. i'm saying this because you're claiming ersatz authority by spouting drivel.
Recent Comments