cheese it, the cops!

There was a crooked man...

Third part of series on The Banality of Contemporary Evil. It is kind of amazing how odd this administration is. There's a continual drumbeat of existential threat interrupted by Trump doing the equivalent of stiffing a waiter. 

On his first Thanksgiving in office, Barrack Obama explain as his daughters looked on with the expressions that only daughters can use when dad is being weird to muse about being president, finishing with, "Some days you change the world; other days, you pardon a turkey." And so it goes. 

In Trump's case, it would be "ruin the world versus steal a turkey."

 

 

 

original sin and rebellion

nytimes: what's good about original sin

splice: why i'm an anti-authoritarian

Stop buying some ideology off the shelf and start thinking independently.

Why I'm Not on the Left

Why I'm Not on the Right

(No, I'm not in the middle.)

 

Philosophy v Science

Got an assertion for you: philosophy since the 17th century, even as it screams 'science science science' is completely incompatible with science and is fighting a rearguard action for spirit. I mean rationalists, empiricists, idealists, phenomenologists, positivists, etc. Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment science are not complements, but opponents. This is obvious above all in the 'idea idea,' that we're experiencing our own mental contents, not a world. It's a disastrous move, and a move directly away from the world studied by science. 

The most hilarious version is positivism: here's our contribution to science: you have to reduce every experience and all knowledge to 'auto-psychological objects' (Carnap). That has to do with absolutely anything but science. First step in the double-blind study: reduce it to the immediate contents of your own consciousness. Maybe you think the dream argument helped science. Or Hegel screaming obsessively insisting on the scientific status of Absolute Idealism. Or Hume's ideas and external-world scepticism. Maybe Kant's characterization of space and time as forms of perception helped someone's geology or something? (No but it led physics into screeching nonsense. Check 'Science' tab at right for much more). Or Spinoza's monism. Or Malebrache's occasionalism. Or Wittgenstein's language games. Philosophy has been at war with science the whole time.

Science presupposes a world outside of human consciousness which we can know. In fact, we all presuppose that. "Enlightenment" philosophy is mostly just an attempt to undermine this claim, or phutz with it for generations, trying to answer questions of its own manufacture.

I do a whole bunch of this in Entanglements: a System of Philosophy.

 

But I'm Not On The Right

I'm still trying to destroy the left-right spectrum, and I'm going to do a three-part series: Why I Am Not a Leftist, Why I'm Not on the Right, and Why I'm an Anarchist, and what that means in this case. I really do think that a wretched mistake lurks at the heart of the left, starting with Marx, an unconscionable and utterly implausible detachment of means and ends.

Anna Deavere Smith on Black Panther

I am always flummoxed by the way people think about representations and reality; they appear to think that representations create reality, or that a novel or a movie can transform you and the whole world. Nowhere is the absurdity more apparent than on Black Panther, and I've never seen it more clearly expressed or displayed more clearly as implausible than by Anna Deavere Smith in the May 24 New York Review of Books. She portrays BP as being to this era what Malcolm, Martin and the Black Panther party were to the 60s.

'There is a conversation to be had,' she writes, in a core sample of her prose style. 'Filmmaking is collaborative,' she observes. 'The producers are essential.' Perhaps she's trying to lull us toward her vast conclusions/rhetorical questions by saying as little as possible for awhile. 'Killmonger [the super-villain] is competitive,' she claims. Like Donald Trump, 'he behaves with no decorum.' Yeah? Say that to his face, why don't you. Consider by contrast the Dread Dormamu, for instance, who always made etiquette his calling card. 'Women have commented on how thrilling it is to see a powerful black woman,' especially one who is 'fresh-faced in every way.' Cosmetics are going to be key, I feel, to Smith's new transformative Black-Panther oriented social movement. 

The character Shuri "represents a new type of young black woman - a science genius who spends her days in the lab making inventions and powering what she invents with vibranium." That *is* a new type. She suggests - I don't think she's trying to be funny - that 'Wakanda Forever!' is to this moment what 'Power to the People' was to the '60s and 'No Justice, No Peace' to the '90s. I want you to picture people chanting that at the demo after the next police shooting. 

'A sense of self comes from the mirror in which you see yourself - and it also comes from gathering information on how others see you. . . . What is it about the human condition that causes us to need to see ourselves in art forms? Is it that art forms are meant to be mirrors?' Or in other words, movies make the self. The 'mirror' of Black Panther is undistorted at last. That required a lot of CGI. If you can hold onto your sense of yourself as an invulnerable costumed superhero, I'd be a bit worried what happens after that, but go for it I guess.

She doesn't know whether Black Panther will change the way judges sentence black men; it's quite possible. She doesn't know whether it will transform schools and the children within them, but it just might. She thinks Shuri will lead to black female CEOs in Silicon Valley. If people didn't say things like that regularly, you'd just go 'have you lost your frigging mind?' She appears to believe that a billion-dollar blockbuster can have results comparable to the entire Civil Rights movement. Plus it can sell more cars than Malcolm and Martin put together.

 

Well, it was the same with Wonder Woman, the Lucretia Mott of our time, the final triumphant realization of feminism, who so transformed us all and demonstrably led to higher SAT scores for girls. And plus WW is super-hot in every way. I know a bunch of sexual harassers who just couldn't continue after they saw that movie. "There is a conversation to be had," one of them told me as we gazed at the screening with almost superhuman intensity.