Moby Dick Backwards

Let's All Make Fun of Princess Pocahonanoke

2010-01-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

So I finally saw Avatar. Eh.

I was prepared for the fact that I discovered myself--it was really, really predictable. I was also not very surprised that I left the theater thinking about the movie's politics. Granted, I was thinking about what was wrong and right about its politics as well as how the movie could've been, like, a million times better if it had approached things plot-wise any one of a billion different ways than the one it did.

It kind of irked me, though, that I was manipulate-able enough to get sucked into thinking seriously about environmentalism for the first time in a long time. But I did--the next day I got two books from the library on the environment. One had a bunch of tips from National Geographic or something about how "you" can live more environmentally conscious. I didn't look at it any longer than it took to let me know I am not in a position, at this time, to do any of their suggestions.

The second book--which I read about half of and skimmed the other half of--was by a guy from L.A. with a beard who was talking about the history of our society's rediscovery of the "enchantment" of the environment (his word). How hypnotized by the liberal media I must have been to pick up a book by an L.A. bearded guy on the environment in the first place. But actually, it was pretty interesting.

L.A. Beard traced the history of the environmental movement, with Thoreau and John Muir and Rachel Carson and the Sea Shepards and The Monkey Wrench Gang and Snail-Darter-Gate and George W. with a pitchfork and all that. My understanding of it goes a little something like-a this:

By the end of the 19th century, the Great Honkey Empire of the U.S. had sarparilla-saloon outposts from sea to shining sea, made possible because all the Indians had been corralled into concentration ca--I mean reservations. Meanwhile, the whole Industrial Revolution had the whole steampunk, dark-Satanic-mills thing going on with tuberculosis and handless orphans and Karl Marx and whatnot. Since there was no more frontier and no danger of getting scalped by Indians, people started to think that the small amount of untouched wilderness we had left was pretty cool, and they even started thinking of Indians as being a bunch of gentle forest denizens who knew the ways of Mother Earth (like those big blue cat-things from Pandora). This all got a big boost with the hippie movement, which pretty much turned to environmentalism in the '70s because the Vietnam War was winding down and, let's face it, they needed something else to complain about (Which I find oddly understandable, by the way).

Which brings us back to Avatar, and the noble savages therein.

Of course, I had some problems with the movie's message, and I knew going in I wasn't alone in having problems with it.

I didn't really care that it made distinct parallels with the Iraq/Afghan War yada yada (who hasn't done that?). I was kind of bothered, however, when it took this passion play in two directions:

1) It made it clear that the Earthicans were totally bad and the Smurwoks were totally good, which would insinuate that the terrorists fighting my friends' friends out east right now are right to kill Americans.

2) It switches those roles when it stages a 9/11 allegory with the destruction of the Keebler Elf tree, where the Earthicans act out the Muslim side.

Why don't I like this? Let me count the ways I can confuse you with more lists:

a) The whole point of anti-war movies is to say that the war you're protesting shouldn't happen because the issue is not black-and-white and/or because there are good folks on each side.

b) There is a good case to be made by people who aren't College Republican chickenhawk virgins that our current military actions in the Middle East are at least in a substantial part due to considerations other than oil. Like not getting blown up. Whether this is a smart way to deal with terrorism is maybe a related issue, but not related directly to this movie and its "unobtanium".

c) If Earthicans = Yankee Blackwater pig-dogs and Smurwoks = colonized Third World organic farmers who include the Muslim world, then the attack on Hometree should've been reversed, in the name of allegoryThat is, the Nav'i should've blown up a bunch of Earth civilians. What? It was meant to twist things up and make people think? Well, how come every other thing in the goddamn movie corresponded to its symbolic counterpart?

As I said, I know my criticisms aren't any more original that the movie itself. This is evidenced by "Dances with Smurfs", the recent South Park episode that lampooned Avatar. If I talked about pop culture on this blog more often, you'd know that South Park has way more influence on me than the Bible and Shakespeare and my parents combined. And here's where we get into other issues.

'Til next time ...

Lower Taxes on Lower Incomes

2009-12-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

It seems the Senate has passed a healthcare bill that takes back one of the president's promises. Back in February, Obama promised that families earning under $250,000 a year would not have their taxes increased. Unfortunately, the Senate healthcare bill just passed under the oversight of Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to involve certain loopholes that could lead to some taxpayers in this bracket paying higher taxes.

According to an editorial by Deroy Murdock published in today's Wooster Daily Record (from a Scripps Howard News Service distribution), this loopholes seems to apply to small-business owners who may file personal returns with earnings under $250,000, who could be paying higher taxes if they don't give health insurance coverage to every one of their employees. This may be unfair, although it is arguably not connected to the spirit of Obama's promise or pertinent to the majority of working Americans who earn less than $250K.

However, this is still a violation of Obama's promise, and it does not bode well. Apparently, this is what happened, according to Murdock's editorial:

Sen. Mike Crapo (R, Idaho) tried to enforce Obama's pledge by deleting from ObamaCare all taxes on families earning less than $250,000 and individuals making under $200,000. Every Republican supported Crapo's amendment. All but five Democrats ganged up and killed it.

There are other tax increases in the Senate bill that may cause trouble for ordinary Americans--at least according to Murdock--like taxes on medical devices or on health insurance companies themselves, which however well intentioned, probably will mean higher costs passed on to consumers as the companies being taxed jack up their prices to make up the difference. This is shitty, but it's how things work in our shitty economy. This is not my primary focus, though, since I don't actually know enough about economics to go through the arguments for and against such things in detail. I'm primarily worried about higher taxes on lower-income people directly, since this is what Obama promised would not happen.

I could go into detail about how Senate Democrats' actions apparently lend evidence to the assertion in my last post, that there is a danger that contemporary left-"liberalism" may put the government before the people in the name of using the government as a stand-in for the people. However, I don't feel like being that smug, though it is oddly interesting in a coldly detatched way. However--in part because I myself as well as most of my friends are currently in this tax bracket--I have a slightly harder time than normal looking at this issue through a detatched lens.

Murdock makes no secret of being extremely biased--justifiably or not--toward the Republicans and against the Democrats. Nationally distributed ditorials selected for my small-town paper tend to be conservatively biased. I don't know how many small-business owners file personal returns with under $250K in earnings, and I don't know how many working people will be affected by a loophole that appears to affect small-business owners.

All I know is that here is one liberal hippie-dippy Obama voter who's pissed off that Democrats can turn their back on their most...democratic values, and work to undermine a promise by a president of their party who many of them, if not most of them, claim to support.

Obama must do everything he can to make sure his promise is fulfilled, and work to quash any language in a finalized healthcare bill that would go against his promise to the taxpayers least able to pay extra (like me, for example).

Citation:

Murdock, Deroy. 30 Dec. 2009. "Santa Harry's gift of new health taxes." Wooster Daily Record, A4.

Are You Sick of Me Talking about Obama Yet?

2008-11-07T08:46:00.002-08:00

Wow. I think part of me didn't really expect him to win. Or at least not to survive assassination.

When I published the first draft of my last post, I'd just voted and nobody knew the results yet. Now we do, and I'm gonna have to put up with four years of my friends and family bellyaching about how awful my presidential pick is.

Yesterday I got my first real misgiving about voting for Hussein Osama. A Navy vet friend of mine was telling me how he heard Obama was going to reduce funding for troops in Iraq, essentially leaving them unsupported in doing their job. My friend said in effect (and this is NOT a direct quote), "They should either take the troops out of Iraq or else give them what they need to do the job."

I agree. I felt terrible that I voted for a man who would half-assedly leave American servicepeople to fight a war they didn't have the funds or wherewithal to fight properly. I didn't even have the guts to tell my friend I voted for Obama. Then I went back to the U.S. News and World Report "Ultimate Voter's Guide" to remind myself of what I'd read Obama's stance had actually been on Iraq. I have to admit to using the info in btoh U.S. News and Newsweek to make my decision last Tuesday--damn liberal media.

Anyway, here are some quotes from U.S. News and World Report about Obama's stand on Iraq, to clear up any possible misconceptions:

Afghanistan, Obama says, should be America's top priority. He says Iraq "never was" the central front in the war on terrorism and has called for withdrawing U.S. combat forces within 16 months of taking office, leaving behind up to 60,000 troops for support missions. The shift would free up more troops for Afghanistan and cut down on Iraq war expenditures--now some $10 billion a month.
Bottom line. Iraq is less violent but remains deeply unsettled. Obama will have trouble pulling out combat forces as quickly as he wants, while McCain will quickly run into the limitations of a strained U.S. military. Because U.S. troops cannot be two places at once, Americans may have to decide where the greatest threat now lies: in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

--Mulrine, Anna. "Iraq" subheading in "Where McCain and Obama Stand." U.S. News and World Report, Oct. 27, 2008. Page 50.

From the same issue:

THE FLIP: In January 2007, Obama introduced a bill that would have removed all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of March 2008. During the campaign, he has pledged to remove combat forces within 16 months of taking office. THE FLOP: Over time, he has said he might "refine" that pledge based on advice from commanders and the situation on the ground. THE BOTTOM LINE: His original proposal allowed for some flexibility on the timetable, and his aides say that Obama would keep up to 60,000 support troops in Iraq past the deadline. Either way, new qualifiers keep emerging.

--Reske, Henry J. "Measuring the Candidates' Flip-Flops." U.S. News and World Report, Oct. 27, 2008. Page 53.

There is the possibility that tjose 60,000 support troops could be the type of under-supported Vietnam-type troops that military-boosting opponents of Obama fear. I can't prove that it isn't

It should be noted, however, that even McCain, in saying he could keep troops in Iraq a hundred years, qualified his remarks by saying that would only be "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed" --U.S. News said he was "comparing it to Japan or Korea."

[see U.S. News, Oct. 27, 2008, page 54, author unknown--I have to admit this is from an article on both candidates' spins, including Obama's.]

So all in all, I think Obama isn't going to pull a Vietnam on us, at least so far as he's able. Maybe it's the wrong decision tactically or strategically or whatever, and I really, really, really hope that such a tactical miscalculation won't result in more American body bags, but based on the info I have now, I think it's as good a decision as we have the option of.

Ideally, I don't want any of our boys and girls (especially not my one other friend still in the Army National Guard) to die in Afghanistan either. However, considering that the war on terror is probably not being staged in a Hollywood studio the way the moon landing was, we might have to stay there, and if we're going to stay in Afghanistan, that's all the more reason for us to ease out of Iraq if we can. And remember: Obama said he'll listen to his generals as far as Iraq goes, and if he does, they won't let him repeat Vietnam.

And if I'm wrong, I apologize for the blood on my hands.

By the way, I just saw this: http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/13056.htm I don't know if it's real, and if it is, I don't know if it was some kind of mistake, and if it's not--well, I dunno.

Fried Fetuses and Watermelon

2008-11-04T05:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I did it. I voted for Obama. God help us all.

If he gets elected, it's obvious that anything bad that will happen during his presidency would not have happened during a McCain presidency, because that's how it works.

It's too late now to try to talk about why people should vote a certain way (if I even wanted to talk about that). Instead, we can talk about how people did vote and why. Well, we don't know the results yet, but you know what I mean.

It's strange. In '04, liberals didn't vote for Kerry so much as they voted against Bush: they hated Bush (as they still do) but couldn't get excited about Kerry. This time around, however, liberals seem to be voting for Obama instead of simply against McCain--there doesn't seem to be much in the way of outright hatred toward McCain from the liberals that I have seen, and Obama has, needless to say, excited liberals quite a bit.

For my part, McCain seemed a bit like my dad: a good guy you can respect, but with some ideas about how to run things that ultimately aren't good for the country.

Now there are good reasons and bad reasons to vote a certain way. I'm sure there are plenty of people who voted for McCain--or declined to vote at all--either because they support McCain or because they have serious misgivings about Obama. Of course, many people have misgivings about Obama, but not all of these are what I'd call serious drawbacks as much as Republican scare tactics.

Here are some of the reasons I voted for Obama, which I consider to be good reasons:

* supporting his desire to draw out combat troops in Iraq, and fight terrorism smarter
* prefering his healthcare plan to McCain's (as far as I can tell)
* thinking he seems to have good temperment and intelligence
* supporting his desire to cut taxes on the lower end of the economic spectrum (where I am!) and on basically concentrating on "bottom up" economic strategies

I have to admit--in the back of my mind I thought there was a chance that maybe electing half-Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama might increase our standing somewhat among people in other countries, specifically people who might be pursuaded by other people to support killing us. Giving Obama brownie points for his father's background essentially means giving him points for his race, which I do not think would be a good idea by itself (see below). However, I consider this possibility of raised foreign esteem to be a side benefit. If I hadn't thought his policies and leadership were good for the country, I would not consider the chance for some slight uptick in foreign people liking us to be worth it.

I voted for Obama, but I almost didn't. Here are what I consider some good reasons to vote against Obama:

* lack of experience
* disagreement with him on some issue(s), such as (in my case) abortion
* similarly, wariness about the ballooning deficit and whether his proposals may increase it

I can understand, as someone who almost didn't vote for Obama, why someone would oppose Obama being president on those grounds. Now here are what I'm sure you'll agree are some bad reasons for voting against Obama:

* because he's black (though of course no one's doing that)
* because you think he's a Muslim
* because you think he's some kind of super-socialist caricature intent on getting our kindergarteners to fornicate while formenting "class warfare" and also somehow managing to be an ultraconservative Muslim at the same time (I consider this different than merely having a disagreement, ideological or otherwise, about his platform)

Frankly, I think class warfare is a good idea, inasmuch as it's already going on. I think a lot of Reverend Wright's words were taken out of context and I personally can't get too excited even if they weren't, I don't quite know why. I think it's a good thing that Obama has ties to students of Saul Alinsky--Saul was the man.

A lot of this discussion rests on whether Obama actually is a "closet radical" like his enemies fear and many of his supporters hope. This only time will tell. While I personally have mixed feelings about socialism in general, I kind of doubt he is a closet radical, what with all those capitalist economic advisors. And whether you have good reasons or stupid rich-person reasons for opposing socialism, I think we can all agree there probably isn't going to be the dawning of the People's Republic of Barackistan if he gets elected.

But even if you don't agree with me on the coolness of class warfare, you still should repeat these magic words:

"Barack Obama is not a Muslim."

Whether it would matter if he were Muslim is moot. He's not. That's it.

Which leads us to talk about people voting against Obama because he's black. Or anyway it would if people had done that, because we all know that nobody would ever think of such a thing, certainly not anyone we know, and we are insulted that anyone would stoop to such accusations.

But if people were to oppose Obama because of his race (how silly of me to even consider!), the race factor would be closely tied to thinking he's Muslim and thinking he's Fidel Castro. Race in America, any pundit can tell you, is waaay too fuckin' complicated. Those kind of associations (non-white/Muslim terrorist, non-white/socialist) tend to crop up in us crackers' minds. Heck, I voted for Obama's black ass like a good college-y liberal, and I can't even say I don't have some racist thoughts and tendencies somewhere back in the cobwebby attic of my brain.

Just letting you know I'm not being self-righteous about my vote.

Seriously, though, I actually think (as of this morning, the fourth) that I've made the right decision. It's not normal for me to think I've made the right decision about anything, so that's saying something. Of course he could be the antichrist and bring the world to destruction in December 2012, but I guess that's meant to be.

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God Help Me, I'm Thinking of Voting for Obama

2008-10-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that title right. On Nov. 8, there's a big chance that I -- who voted for W. in 2000 entirely on the basis of abortion, and who chose not to decide between my old mistake and his Skull-and-Bones brother in 2004; I who like to babble about anarchism when I'm drunk and call it being an anarchist -- yes, I might just possibly maybe perhaps kinda sorta go into that voting booth and make my mark -- a little tiny eensy weensy mark -- for Barack Obama.

Back in my church-going paranoid-guilt days, I always knew I would end up supporting the antichrist.

But before I go any further into why I might commit this heinous crime, let me waste some Internet bandwidth talking about why I think I might be stupid for thinking of doing this. Here are some happy fun quotes:

'The credit crisis in the last two weeks of September raised an issue that has, so far at least, helped Obama. McCain railed against Wall Street and called for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. Obama argued that the crisis showed the failure of Reaganite deregulation. The roots of the crisis lie in both parties' encouragement of greater homeownership. But at critical points, notably in 2005, some Republicans, including McCain, called for tighter regulation of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This was resisted by Democrats, with no demur from Obama.'

[emphasis mine]

- Barone, Michael. "The Year of Campaign Chaos." The National Interest column, U.S. News and World Report, Oct. 13-20, 2008. Page 46.

Also this:

'McCain tried to gain traction by accusing Obama of being too passive in the first days of the financial crisis, while McCain returned to Washington to help round of votes for the "rescue" package ... Both Obama and McCain ended up voting for a modified version of Bush's plan in the Senate, which approved it 74 to 25 on October 1.'

- Walsh, Kenneth T. "Swing-State Showdown." U.S. News and World Report, Oct. 13-20, 2008. Page 34.

So are the Democrats (and Obama) more to blame for the current crisis--which started with the whole mortgage thing--than the Republicans?

Even worse, is Obama, chillingly, in the pocket of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Okay, so at least as far as those bleeding-heart lefties at the Washington Post know, Obama has not received any advisory input from Fannie or Freddie. But what about that even more important form of electoral iput--the monetary kind? I'm sure by now you've read letters to the editor at your daily paper saying that Obama received, like, the second-highest donation out of whoever from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Normally the things said in letters to the editor in the Wooster Daily Record don't strike me as necessarily having anything to do with reality, but apparently this time around, Opensecrets.org agrees.

To quote a comment posted by a reader at the bottom of the Opensecrets page:

October 7, 2008 6:40 PM | EngrCharlie said:
This is the nature of the supposedly clean, certainly dubious "individual contributions" to Obama. McCain has released the names of his contributors under $200, why won't Obama do the same? Couldn't be the same Obama who used the rules to exploit the caucus system to ridiculous advantage could it?

Hmm. This could be a problem for my new savior.

To play devil's avocado to this argument, here's another comment posted by another reader at the bottom of the Opensecrets page:

September 20, 2008 2:18 PM | CeeCee said:
Right wing sites are linking to this to suggest that Obama was in the pocket of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because he is the second highest recipient of donations on the list of Senators and Congressman.

This is an absurd assertion on so many levels. Seeing as how his presidential campaign has raised more money from everywhere than any other in history makes a comparison of his figures to lawmakers raising money for a House or Senate race on its face ludicrous.

And notice how 95% of his contributions came from INDIVIDUALS that work at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are not the policy makers of the company. These are just employees that reflect America.

Everybody works somewhere. I happen to work for an oil company. My contributions to Obama will show up under the name of an oil company, as will my co-workers'. We support Obama's positions because they're good for America, regardless of whether they may or may not be good for the executives of our company.

So the contributions from individuals in a company do not mean that that company has influence over the candidate.

Well, for what it's worth. I'm kind of leaning toward that as an excuse.

Of course, there's also the allegations leveled at Obama in this book. Not that I trust the Townhall people farther than I can throw them--the question is, can I really trust the idea that I can't trust them--or that I can trust Obama? What I mean is, maybe the Townhall people are right after all.

Then there's Fareed Zakaria. I learned not to trust Zak when I read a book of his-- I forget the title--where he basically subordinated all freedom to the economic "freedom" of corporations to do whatever they want--and said that democracy (surprise!) could often be antithetical to this freedom. However, I've since read a lot of his writings for Newsweek and stuff, and I found myself liking a lot of what he has to say. So I was only a little bit paranoid he might be involved in an international conspiracy of rich people when I read that Zakaria had endorsed Obama. It's silly of me, but for a while at least, I felt a whole lot more confident about voting for BO after I read Zakaria's article. Then I remembered Zak's a capitalist tool and now I'm back to not knowing what to think, which some may say is my natural state.

So even though I'd earlier decided I couldn't trust Zakaria, I've ended up wanting very much to trust his judgment on a guy I wouldn't have voted for for anything eight years ago. Life is funny.

Leo Strauss

2008-09-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/

A Libertarian Labor Party?

2008-08-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

If it's possible for political parties to actually accomplish anything, I'm starting to think there should be a Libertarian Labor Party. The "libertarianism" that the current Libertarian Party talks about makes assumptions that make them biased toward the nonproductive, wealthier classes instead of the working class, who are the real producers.

What would a libertarian party--or even just a libertarian movement--look like if it focused on the needs of blue-collar workers? I don't know--but here are some vague ideas:

Taxes: I hate to look at my paycheck and see how much goes out in taxes. Much like unicorns who grant wishes, everyone would love a flat tax if such a thing could be proven to exist. However, failing a class-neutral flat tax (and putting aside for the moment the image of a world without taxes), which would you rather have: a regressive tax that falls more heavily on those with less money, or a progressive tax that falls more heavily on those with more money. If you said you'd prefer a regressive tax, you can go shove The Wall Street Journal up your ass. If you said progressive tax, well, I do too, if you hadn't guessed.

But it's not just about the amount of money you have--otherwise every tiny raise a hardworking person earned would get frittered away in taxes, which often happens now. More importantly, it's how you get the money. In my humble opinion, we should reduce or at least keep steady the taxes on income earned through work--payroll taxes and income tax on people who work for a living and earn no "investment" income. So far as we need revenue for our libertarian "night watchman state", we should concentrate on taking as large a percentage of what we need to to take in taxes on stuff not connected to working--our old friend the estate tax, for example, and taxes on income from stock-market speculation.

What about the importance of investing in creating new jobs, and how taxing investment stifles job growth? Well, I'm in no position to argue against that old corporatist saw. However, let's say we compromise with the bourgeois enemy by doing the libertarian-ly unspeakable: making the tax code more complicated by giving tax breaks. I mean tax breaks for corporations and other investment actors who actually invest specifically in creating new jobs. If your investment creates new jobs, you get a tax break. If your investment does nothing but get you richer, I'm sure you won't mind sharing some of your casino winnings with the people who don't have jobs--because after all you didn't create any jobs for them.

Employee Ownership: Even today's lefties mainly admit that capitalism is an engine of prosperity and blah blah blah. But who says capitalism has to be controlled by capitalists? Employee ownership of the companies they work for--although currently a way for those who are really in charge of a company to get good PR--but it has definite possibilities. And even some business types like it for business-y reasons, which may not be cool in the same way a Che Guevara beret is cool, but could make for a smoother transition to La Revolucion.

The Welfare State: Whether working people benefit from the welfare state depends on both what you call working people and what you call the welfare state (God, I sound like a Democrat). Suffice to say I think that a lot of working people would have a slightly easier job of making it without the welfare state if they didn't pay so much in taxes (Ha ha! Now I sound like a Republican!). I only took one course in economics at my namby-pamby liberal-arts college, so I can't prove this--I just know I've calculated with my bad math skills, that I could make ends meet on my current nonskilled wage rate without eating into my savings (or doing my laundry at Mom's) if I actually took home what I'm earning, at least most weeks.

Anyway, in my utopia, whatever welfare state we would need would, as I discussed above, be financed as much as possible through taxes on non-working sources. According to the Republican conventional wisdom, less taxes on the workers + more jobs because of tax breaks for corporate job investment = less need for welfare programs, according to the Republican conventional wisdom. And according to the more-or-less current Democratic conventional wisdom, more taxes on the rich = less need for taxes on the workers, which feeds back into the Republican schema. How dare I blindly follow the conventional wisdom? Hey, I only said these were vague ideas--everything suggested here could use tweaking.

Affirmative Action: For my all-too-fallible opinion on affirmative action--which is relavant to the whole blue-collar thing--please direct yourself to my post here

Guns: No need to change the traditional libertarian position here, as far as I can see. More on this below.

Abortion: Too complex to get into here. I want to write a separate post dealing with this, but I'm not making any promises. Suffice to say I don't like it personally, whatever importance that has for either libertarianism or the working class.

Other Social Issues: Since the working class is essentially an economic grouping, it'd be hard to make a case for a blue-collar libertarianism that would differ from corporatist libertarianism on most non-economic issues. Although I don't have poll results in from of me, it doesn't take a pollster to realize that a notable number of blue-collar workers--especially in rural areas--are conservative (read: non-libertarian) on social issues like gay marriage, flag-burning, and whatever new wedge issue rich Republicans come up with next month to convince working people they're one of them.

Of course, even a pro-lifer like me can see abortion is one of these wedge issues--just because it's a wedge issue doesn't necessarily mean it's not important, or even that the Republican platform isn't right about it (for the usual wrong reasons). This is what makes social issues in general so hard--even if there were a Libertarian Labor Party whose economic program working people could get behind 100 percent, there'd still be a lot of them who'd see their projected prosperity under that program as "blood money", to quote a friend of mine, because of abortion in particular. However, I already said I was leaving the abortion issue for the moment.

Frankly, though, all other wedge issues really pale in comparison to two: abortion and gun control. I don't mean to stereotype the rural working class, but I'm sure many political scientists would agree that huge hunks of red-state America would vote Democrat rapidly as long as the Democrats let people keep their guns and made people keep their unborn kids. I know we're not talking about Democrats, which only makes my point about the hypothetical Labor Libertarians even stronger: you don't have to imagine how much more rabidly red-state Americans would vote a ban on abortion, a broad Second Amendment and lower taxes for themselves, because they already think they are by voting Republican. Only instead of focusing most tax cuts on the rich while basically ignoring abortion, the heroic new party of my imagination would focus tax cuts on the working class and poor and would--well, again, I said I'd leave off on abortion for now, but you get the picture.

I should stress that neither my stance on the labor-libertarian idea nor my stance opposing abortion is meant only for the sake of votes. I don't plan to run for office and I'd definitely lose if for some reason I did. Getting votes is an important part of populism, so I can't say votes mean nothing, but I support what I do because I think it's right (I think).

So here you have it. None of this is guaranteed to work, largely because party politics is not guaranteed to work. Heck, the state isn't guaranteed to work, which is the whole point of both libertarian "minarchism" (as small as state as possible) and anarchism.

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Who Am I Talking About?

2008-06-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there were these philosophers. You might call them economists, because these particular philosophers philosophized a lot about economics. One particular philosopher guy came up with a lot of the ideas that a lot of the others who came after him copied, even though there were a lot of others both before and during his time who were also influential.

Anyway, these philosophers, with their one philosopher guy in particular, didn't like how the economy was being run by the elites of the time. Back in those days, you see, the elites who were in charge of things politically were also in charge of the economy. These philosophers and their main guy didn't think the elites did a very good job running the economy, and they thought of other ways of running the economy that they believed would be better.

Their main strategy in making the economy better was to not have the elites run it anymore. Instead of the elites, the philosophers came up with ideas about how the economy would run better with everyday people in charge. They believed their economic ideas would give regular people more freedom and prosperity, because in those days the elites who ran the economy bossed everyone else around and kept most people poor. Now, most of these philosophers were not part of the regular "masses" of people themselves; most of them, though not all, came from wealthy backgrounds. Some even came from backgrounds of those same elites who controlled the economy they criticized. Just for the record.

Some of the things the philosophers wanted done had already started being done in the economy; in those cases, the philosophers' words were used as an argument about why it was good to do these things economically. More and more of these ideas started to be picked up by people who, one way or another, took charge of things in those countries -- who became the new elites in those countries. And here's where it gets ugly.

In pursuit of economic ideas that were supposed to liberate people from the tyranny and poverty of the past, the people who were in charge of those economies took steps that made everyday average people's lives more miserable in terms of both tyranny and poverty. This seems to be because many of the assumptions made by those old philosophers became outdated due to chaning economic realities, or was maybe in some cases just plain incorrect.

A lot of this new tyranny and poverty was caused in part by the elites' insistance that the economies of their countries modernize and industrialize to produce more manufactured goods, though there were other factors too. Farmers often found themselves unable to grow food, many times pushed off their lands to make room for new industrial projects; many people starved. When people tried to protest or resist, the government (controlled by the new elites who supported the new economic philosophy) would put down the resistance with violence.

Now what am I talking about?

Some may say Communism, from its beginnings with the Russian Revolution, based on the ideas of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, on to the age of Soviet imperial expansion.

Some may say Capitalism, from its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution, with backing from the ideas of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others, on to the age of corporate globalization.

Some may say ...

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Back to contents:

http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/07/contents.html

I'm Still Alive, If Anyone Cares

2008-05-18T12:50:00.002-07:00

Man, I've been busy. No computer at home, no time to post, not a lot of deep thoughts lately either. I've been starting to think about actual STUFF again, and if I get any of that STUFF in a coherent idea while simultaneously having the time and Internet access, I might post something else. I want to.

Just in case anyone cares, here's what's been going on and why I haven't posted in so long. Basically, I have a 40-hour/week (and sometimes more) job at a local factory, in addition to some freelance writing for a weekly newspaper. I'm auditioning soon for a spot as the drummer in a metal band, and since I only started playing drums last July, I've had a metric buttload of practicing to do. Add to this my need to go to either the library or my mom's house for Internet, as well as other things I like to try to get done such as exercising, occasionally interacting socially with other human beings and even sometimes sleeping, and ... that's my excuse.

In my life of the mind, I've been guilt-tripping a little on the I-use-too-many-resources-and-should-live-in-a-dumpster environmentalist/primitivist thing; trying to resist being seduced to the Dark Side of pure libertarianism, (in terms of giving three cheers to corporate capitalism); planning actively NOT to vote for anyone in the presidential election; and forgetting almost totally about anything that could be considered religious or spiritual. Maybe I'll elaborate on one or more of these when I get around to writing something for real.

Music and Class

2007-08-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

As long as I want to post again, I should post this link I've been putting off writing putting as a reference in a post of my own:

http://weblog.timoregan.com/2007/06/music-goes-round-money-goes-down.html

This Computer Supports Genocide: Cell Phones and Coltan in the Congo

2007-08-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought it was safe to stop feeling guilty -- it turns out cell phones are murder, too -- just like everything else!

From Alternet, 2006:

“The DRC controls an estimated 64 to 80 percent of world coltan reserves”

http://alternet.org/story/41477/

http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/kinshasa/

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Articles/TheStandardColtan.asp

UPDATE!!

Please sign my petition to stop this. The link is here:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/genocide-free-coltan-for-technological-devices

Are Unions Obselete?

2007-07-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

A few days ago as of the start of this post, I had a conversation with some friends about labor unions. I have been in favor of labor unions for many years, but now, as a result of this conversation, I'm starting to wonder if unions are obselete.

Let me set the scene. Five of my friends were present, but this was one of those conversations that really only involved three of them plus me; the other two did the sit-there-and-look-uncomfortable thing (to say nothing of my one friend's girlfriend, who was also present and had never met any of us). I will identify the three friends in this conversation with letters instead of their names, just in case any of them care about something like that. I'll call them B, F and M. It should be noted that all three of them have had plenty of experience working for a living in factory-type settings.

So here we are. I start, for one reason or another, giving my spiel about labor unions and the need for people to take control of their workplaces and whatever else -- my buddies have heard it all before, and we've discussed unions before to some extent.

The thing is, F is mildly critical of unions, and M criticizes unions perhaps a bit more strongly than F, but B says something that really sticks with me: he says that unions are obselete in today's America.

B says that the large number of plant closings in our area can mainly be traced back to the unions in those plants being too stubborn and asking for too much money for wages, leaving the companies in question unable to make a profit unless they close the union plants. I need to research the cases of the facilities that have closed in our area to try to find out to what extent this is true.

B says that if he were to support unions, he would want them to be more of a mediator between the needs of both the employees and the stockholders/management. F says, "I wouldn't go that far," as to say unions are totally obselete; both F and B both say that everyone, unions and management, are being too greedy.

I made the mistake of even trying to bring up the idea that management and the business class are parasites and that the workers should take control of their workplaces. I've brought this up before, too, with similar lack of enthusiasm. I don't remember there being much comment on this aspect of my critique. There was a brief discussion of the relative necessity of management-type work; B argued for it, and I gave him this: it may end up being necessary for some workers to take the job of overseeing their coworkers' labors, but this does not mean that "management" in the CEOs and pencil pushers really have a legitimate stake in making the widgets in question.

When I blamed the injustice of the economic system in general, I told my friends that I anticipated the conservative argument about corrupt human nature as a dismissal of the idea of changing the system, and that that wasn't my point; I accept that human nature is unable to be ethically perfect, but I fail to see how that should keep us from trying to improve matters. F acknowledged my ... acknowledgement, but he admitted he had to return to the argument about human nature as a reason for doubting the possibility of radical social change for the better.

Fast forward to a couple days after the discussion. I've gotten a book from the library that I'd checked out before, which I think might have something to say. Framed!: Labor and the Corporate Media by Christopher R. Martin says, in a nutshack, that the labor unions are negatively stereotyped and unfairly blamed for bad economic happenings by the way the news media presents news about labor unions and their conflicts with management. [ http://notbyjlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/07/excerts-from-framed-by-christopher-r.html ]

I also found a newspaper article which seems to show a picture of a labor union quite different from what B sees. The article, cited below, tells how a United Auto Workers local union at a Ford plant in Lima, Ohio has made concessions and used less strident tactics in order to actively help make the company more competitive. The article says, page D3:

Lima workers have accepted some outsourcing of jobs and shifted management responsibilities to union employees, allowing the plant to cut non-union staff. The moves save the plant $27 million a year.

However, this same article backs up B on one point -- that spending on employees is costing the company in question [page D3]:

Ford continues to lose money on each car it builds, according to an industry analysis called the 2007 Harbour Report. While Honda and Toyota each earn more than $1,200 on each vehicle, Ford loses $5,200, the report said. The two main reasons for the losses are Ford's increased costs for employee health insurance and benefits and higher costs of low-interest rates needed at Ford to move vehicles from the lots.

More later on this, maybe.

Martin, Christopher R. 2004. Framed!: Labor and the Corporate Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Rutz, Heather. 1 July 2007. "Lima union evolves." Beacon Journal [Akron, Ohio]. Pages D1, D3.

Here are some links about company and plant closing and firings, some of them in my local area, and the union's role, if any:

http://www.newsnet5.com/money/2692399/detail.html

http://www.policymattersohio.org/media/ABJ_Unions_Struggling_2004_0905.pdf

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/17018813.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010710/ai_n13922892

http://www.uawhonda.com/Responses%20to%20Marysville%20Journal-Tribune%20Editorial%20.htm

http://www.mcall.com/news/specials/bethsteel/all-bethsteel-printingchapter-8,0,1521582.htmlstory?coll=all-bethsteel-nav

http://www.topix.net/forum/com/amr/T30OTKCGPR8HMBKAN

ANARCHY!! (That Got Your Attention)

2007-03-27T18:18:00.001-07:00

The jury's still out inside my head as to whether I should officially declare myself an anarchist. Part of me thinks that's silly, as if reciting the phrase "I am an anarchist" will somehow stamp me as a member of the blessed community, like saying an Arabic tongue-twister to become a Muslim or falling to your knees in prayer at youth group to become a Christian. Another part of me says that of course I'm not really an anarchist; I don't think we can do without government.

And it's true. I don't know how we human beings would get along without something in some way approaching government. However, this is using a very broad definition of the word "government". I'm quite aware that indigenous tribes living the Ishmael wet dream in the wilderness can get along fine without a tax-supported group of politicians or kings. I'm even aware that small groups can often manage to swing the consensus thing rather than settling for majority rule. It's just that many forms of social organization need something a bit more formalized than village meetings where everyone compromises till they agree. I'm thinking specifically of societies that involve large numbers of people living close to each other, especially when they do not go grocery-shopping in the woods with a stick. Arguing this might make me fall into the primitivist trap, but that's another issue, one I've at least partially discussed elsewhere: http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/09/long-awaited-communique-on.html

Of course, it could be, as usual, that I'm asking the wrong question. Asking "should I label myself as an anarchist?" is mainly a matter of what I want other people to see me as -- "will calling myself that impress people or scare them away?", "what kind of bumper stickers should I buy?", and all that other crap. I should be asking what kind of values I do have. If I don't think society without government would work, what do I think would? When I say I value freedom, what do I mean by "freedom" -- and all my other political terms -- anyway?

Even if I decided to call myself a non-doctrinaire anarchist ("an anarchist, but not a fundamentalist anarchist", as I've like to tell myself), there are still issues to be resolved -- and most of those issues remain the same as the ones above. Perhaps one of the major rifts amongst the gaggle of people who call themselves anarchists is the divide between the ones who like capitalism and the ones that hate capitalism. According to my growing-but-still-limited understanding of anarchist theories, there are three basic positions in anarchism when it comes to capitalism:

1. That capitalism is bad and should be replaced with something similar to what we'd call socialism or communism, only done voluntarily and without any government as such.

2. That capitalism is bad, but is not to be confused with the free market, which is good. Capitalism is defined here as being when somebody takes away the end product or profit of what someone else works to make because the law says that the taker-person is the owner. The free market is what these anarchists call just trading this for that freely -- meaning, I make this thing and trade it for that thing, or else (in some cases) for recognized, non-governmentally-sponsored currency that can be used to buy that thing.

3. That capitalism -- including one person's right to own what other people make, according to pre-established agreements -- is good.

I pretty much reject the third position (insofar as we can do without such economic inequalities any more than we can do without government). However, I see no reason why the first two positions can't at least tolerate each other's existence. Indeed, I even figure that people should have the right to follow the third position if they want to.

Let's say that we get rid of the government and roll up our sleeves to set up an anarchist world. Some of the people freely decide to have voluntary socialism, while some of the other people decide they want to set up a system of trading this-for-that. Why can't they do that? It's anarchy, people! You're supposed to get to do what you want to at least some extent! And heck, if anyone's dumb enough to voluntarily submit to someone else being their boss as in the pro-capitalist position, then let 'em! We may each have different ideas about what will make a truly liberated life, but shouldn't we be liberated to follow those options with mutually consenting people?

Upon further research, I've found I'm not the first to think like this--I hadn't been aware of the existence of "anarchists without adjectives" . Having others basically agree with me makes me feel like I'm not crazy or stupid.

One of the things that attracts me to anarchism is precisely this sense of, well, freedom. Because of the possibility that people can do more or less what they want, there is relatively less for the armchair theorist to have to take a stand for or against when drawing up the blueprints for utopia. If you let other people make their own decisions, there's less work for you. I don't want to spend all my time trying to get other people to do things any more than I have to.

Of course, the liberation can only go so far, even in anarchy. This all is assuming that our anarchist mini-societies would have some anarchistic way of dealing with the possibility that people may try to murder each other and whatnot. Which is another issue with anarchism, but one that I do not necessarily see as an impossible obstacle. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn't.

Interesting aside: I found this FAQ , which attempts to answer the criticism that anarchists "must" somehow assume inborn human goodness. The relevant quote is as follows:

Don't anarchists assume that all people are innately virtuous?
This is a perfectly reasonable question, for it is indeed the case that some anarchists expect a remarkable change in human nature to follow (or precede?) the establishment of an anarchist society. This assumption partially explains the frequent lack of explanation of how an anarchist society would handle crime, dissenting individualists, and so on.

The belief in innate human virtue is normally found only among left-anarchist thinkers, but of course it does not follow, nor is it true, that all left-anarchist thinkers believe in humanity's innate human virtue.

Anarcho-capitalists have a very different picture of human nature. While they normally believe that people have a strong capacity for virtuous action (and it is to people's moral sense that they frequently appeal when they favor the abolition of the state), they believe that it is wise and necessary to cement moral virtue with material incentives. Capitalism's system of unequal wages, profits and losses, rent and interest, is not only morally justified but vitally necessary for the preservation and expansion of the economy. In short, anarcho-capitalists believe in and indeed must depend on some reasonable level of human morality, but prefer to rely on material incentives when feasible. (Similarly, they morally condemn crime and believe that most people have no desire to commit crimes, but strongly favor some sort of criminal justice system to deter the truly amoral.)

---
Anyway back to me. The assumption that we can find some way to do handle such complications without ruling authorities may be anarchism's main blind spot; if anything's keeping me from officially checking the "Anarchist" box on the Self-Identity sheet, it's probably this.

Of course, the idea of anarchism seems to be opposed to the idea of any Self-Identity sheet that we all must fill out in order to be put in little boxes. Therefore, to avoid calling myself an anarchist could be -- if I may say so -- a very anarchistic thing to do.

In the end, I guess I like to think of anarchism as more of a general approach rather than an iron-clad set of prescriptions; the whole "a journey, not a destination" thing, to quote a crappy Aerosmith song. Hence the idea that I'm an anarchist, but not a fundamentalist anarchist.

I kind of think this way: anarchy is best. If anarchy is impossible, then the next best thing is direct democracy, with majority rule and the basic Greek-town-hall vibe. If direct democracy is impossible, then the next best thing is a democratic republic, with the people voting with majority rule for a government with a separation of powers and constitutional constraints. Which is supposedly what we kind of have in Yankee Pig America (gasp!). Whether or not we actually have this, or will have it in the future, depends on all us little semi-anarchists getting out there and raging against the machine with every astro-turf e-mail we send to our Congresspeople (which, by the way, I haven't done in awhile).

So until next time, Anarchy (or at least Responsive Officials) in the U.K.!

I Shall Return

2007-02-26T10:05:00.001-08:00

It may be awhile before I add anything new to this blog. I recently moved into an apartment where I don't have an Internet connection, so the chances I get to log onto the Internet at all are rare. Never fear, though; I shall return.

UPDATE: As of March 27, I am working on a new draft of a post. I'm not finished yet so I haven't published it, but I know I'm enough of an Internet junkie to sneak back to Mom's house or the library to get it done before too long.

2007-01-16T08:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20061016223725241
http://struggle.ws/ws/2002/ws69/lowpay.html

http://www.creators.com/opinion/steve-chapman.html?columnsName=sch

http://www.punkerslut.com

http://anti-state.com/forum/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=18415

http://www.mutualism.org

http://www.zetetics.com/mac/blog/00000930.html

http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/cops.htm

http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1890

http://infoshop.org/afterleftism.html

"Just a Better Human"

2007-01-14T00:36:00.000-08:00

from the following (yes, Tim's site again):

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/01/09/incoming-friend-request-approve/#comments

Lilith Says: January 10th, 2007 at 8:07 am

Enlightenment isn’t about becoming an angel or a messiah, just a better human.
Hear, hear.

The Nine Conservative Statements

2007-01-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

1. Because commerce is essential to America's prosperity, taxes should be lowered so the American people can be free to enjoy their property.

2. The importance of belief in the true God of the Christian tradition should be recognized, rather than false idols. Likewise, conservatives take a realistic view of the world as it is, rather than utopian pipe dreams.

3. In the same vein, conservatism is about a wise and intelligent approach to politics, without the hypocrisy and self-deceit inherent in liberalism.

4. Giving charity should be a hand up, not a hand-out, helping those who earn, rather than wasting resources on the lazy who don't appreciate it.

5. Conservatives support striking back at those who attack America, instead of turning tail and rolling over like the radical appeasers.

6. As with charity, responsibility should be shown to those who are themselves responsible, to discourage the parasites that weaken our society.

7. Conservatives share the idea of man as a fallen and imperfect creature. The Bible tells us that Man became sinful when he reached for the intellectual development promised by the forbidden tree.

8. Liberals spend their lives feeling guilty about all the things that America has earned. Conservatives know better than to fret about driving SUVs, eating meat, shopping at Wal-Mart, and all the other things about which liberals cry crocidile tears.

9. The liberal elite takes affront to the values of true conservative patriotism, and continually uses scare tactics about supposed "right-wingers" to justify ever more power to an amoral central government.

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Can you guess where the ideas for these statements where taken? The funny thing is, I don't disagree totally with all of the above, and I don't disagree totally with the source material. But like the source material, I believe conservatism needs to be taken with a grain of proverbial salt.

Note: I had the idea for this post before I took the quiz that led to the post about me being a liberal.

PS: Months after I wrote this post, I found this:

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http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/07/contents.html

Random Ideas

2007-01-10T09:41:00.000-08:00

9/1/06 - Most of us have heard the phrase, "And Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever" as is sometimes added to the Lord's Prayer (even though these words were not in the version of the Lord's Prayer presented in the Bible, supposedly by Jesus). This blurb here discusses those words.

Kingdom -- noun
Power -- verb
Glory -- adjective

Nouns are matter. Verbs are manifestations of energy. Adjectives (and adverbs) describe how the matter and energy are organized.

All these are aspects of each other. The Kingdom (that is, everything that exists) is the manifestation of God's Power and Glory, while the Power extends over all the Kingdom and is a sign of God's Glory. The Glory, according to something I read in a Biblical dictionary of Hebrew words, would refer to chabod, which roughly translates as "weight" or otherwise "importance". God has Power over all of the Kingdom, so God is pretty important. Each of these aspects are theoretically infinite; the Kingdom is infinite if you count the spiritual realm of Heaven as well as the material realm, referred to as "Earth" elsewhere in the Lord's Prayer, but not restricted to just this blue ball.

Nearer the beginning in the part that is in the Bible, the Lord's Prayer says, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven." Let's say that Heaven is like the "ideal" realm, kind of like in Plato. This is were everything that should happen, happens. In our realm, "Earth" or the material world (real world?), this does not seem to be the case. Morality/ethics asks us to try to do what should be done (I'm a genius, huh?). In my notes, I speculate that the fulfillment of what should be here in the "Earth" realm would making the Kingdom infinite, which I tie to the Buddhist idea of nirvana as samsara.

Whether the monotheistic idea is literally true matters less to me in this analysis than what it says about our moral/ethical role and general approach to the universe and spirituality.

Maybe a week or two after posting this in January, it occurred to me that monotheism is an important model (although of course, a partial and limited one) because it allows us to see the gulf between the ethical ideals we should strive to manifest on one hand, and the way the world actually is on the other. It occurred to me that this is why traditional Abrahmic monotheism pictures God as "holy" -- in Hebrew qodesh or separate from the unclean. There are valid critiques of this view of divinity, which is why I don't make it my only model. However, the idea of God's separate, pure holiness -- coupled with the ancient Jewish idea of sin as "missing the mark" brings home the idea that we have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place, but also that we can't expect our labors to make things perfect.

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12/24/06 - The same way that the market only works if certain conditions are met, and can't be applied to areas where those conditions aren't met, democracy (in the sense of majority rule) can only be applied in certain situations as well. These situations' conditions would include times when the behavior of an individual or a numerical minority would impact the majority of individuals around them. In situations where this is not the case, majority rule -- while the best form of "governmance" -- cannot be applied. (Thanks to Corporation Nation by Charles Derber for inspiration here)

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Well, Gee! I Guess I'm Liberal after All!

2007-01-03T11:38:00.000-08:00

[from a quiz I took at www.lp.org, the Libertarian Party website]

ACCORDING TO YOUR ANSWERS,
The political description that fits you best is...

LIBERAL
LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal
matters, but tend to support significant government control of the
economy. They generally support a government-funded "safety net"to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations,
defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

Your PERSONAL issues Score is 80%. Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 40%.

Personal Issues
(Choose A if you agree, M for Maybe, D if you disagree.)

Government should not censor speech, press, media or Internet A [no brainer]
Military service should be voluntary. There should be no draft M [I got exempted for medical reasons, so ... well, my instincts say there should not be any draft, but who knows?]
There should be no laws regarding sex for consenting adults A [I still don't like abortion -- but see comments]
Repeal laws prohibiting adult possession and use of drugs A [might be a maybe; depends on public safety]
There should be no National ID card M [on one hand, it sounds like 1984; on the other, it might not be, and getting blown up by terrorists doesn't sound fun]

Economic Issues
(Choose A if you agree, M for Maybe, D if you disagree.)

End "corporate welfare." No government handouts to business A [again, a no brainer]
End government barriers to international free trade D [Trading this for that is one thing. The "race to the bottom" is quite another]
Let people control their own retirement; privatize Social Security M [I don't know enough to know how the private alternatives would work; maybe no one does -- though it does seem that Social Security is, as they say, "broken"]
Replace government welfare with private charity D [Yeah, like that would work -- see below]
Cut taxes and government spending by 50% or more M [Government and the corporate order of the "market" both suck. But government seems to be the only option we have right now to override the limitations of the market when the requirements for a free market aren't filled in a particular arena of public interest]

[By the way, this is funny and topical -- a Comparison of Libertarians and Anarchists: http://laughnet.net/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=510 ]

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Morality and Direct Experience: Which Comes First?

2006-12-26T10:48:00.000-08:00

Remember the post I did on "Rational Reptilian Rapacity"? Well, this post here is about related issues. Oddly enough, it was also sort of inspired by something being discussed over at Tim Boucher's site, the same way my Reptilian post was: www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/12/20/as-the-spirit-moves-you/

(I'm not stalking Tim or anything; it's just that I do hang out on his blog relatively frequently, as do several other people, and Tim's posts are often food for my thought in this way).

Anyway, there seems to be something of a disagreement (again!) between me and the some of the other folks commenting on Tim's post, including Tim. I say this:

I wouldn’t personally want to ignore the moral/ethical aspect of anything
spiritual I’d see any point to being a part of. Not that I’m saying anyone’s
ignoring that, it’s just that I’ve been equating religion/spirituality with
morality and ethics for as long as I can remember (not that I practice what
I preach of course). I guess I’ve figured breathing exercises and other
spiritual practices are mainly useful for helping one develop a more
compassionate consciousness that will in turn help one behave more
ethically/morally.

In response, Tim said:

Ethics and morality are simply tools to prepare you, to enable you to live well
with others, and to give your life structure as you go along the way and
experience various things falling away. You needn’t ignore them.

Also, another commenter, under the name Piers, said this in agreement with Tim:

I’d say that it’s a major mistake to equate religion/spirituality with morality
and ethics. Morality may be important, but to equate spirituality with it is to
ignore the reality of spirituality. Ultimately spirituality must be about an
experience of the divine. It’s perhaps our dessicated traditional western
Christianity, which appears to offer nothing but a bit of aesthetic experience
plus some rules for how to be nicer people, that makes people view
religion/spirituality as essentially being about morality.
I heard the beginning of an intellectual discussion about hell on the radio this morning, and amid all the talk of the Greeks and Egpytians and the Bible (interesting stuff), the one starkly missing aspect (that no one noticed was missing) was any
consideration of whether hell really exists. Seeing as it was a mainstream
intellectual discussion, that would be taboo and rather ridiculous. And that’s
perhaps slightly similar to thinking religion is essentially about morality.
If the divine does exist, if we are more than accidental bodies, then
spirituality must be about much more than morality (about reality in fact), but
if not, then it wouldn’t be much more than that.

So basically Tim and Piers say that morality is a tool to help you get along while you go toward the real spiritual goal, which is the experience of true reality and divinity. I argue that the attempt to experience true reality is a tool to help you act more morally.

For a while I was pretty much convinced I was totally right. Not so much in the "I have to kill you" sense that airplane-hijacking fucktards think they're right, but in the nice normal way that meant I really just thought it was an open and shut case. Okay, I felt just a hint of my old OCD paranoia, of course -- I thought at worst that for weak-minded me to apply Tim and Piers' viewpoint could lead me to devalue moral behavior more than it should be, but that wasn't really a major concern.

Now? I still think I'm largely right. And I was all set to sit down and type up a rootin'-tootin' refutation of Tim and Piers' arguments, too. But then I started typing -- and I realized that, goddammit, they have a point. I have a bigger point, yes, but now's not the time for me to be unzipping my pants.

See, I started thinking a bit about the reasons for moral behavior. I'd done this earlier; I'd even commented on it on another of Tim's posts [http://www.timboucher.com/journal/12/21/2006/if-thine-eye-be-single/], before I started this post of my own:

I guess I’m primarily concerned about morality because I want to avoid cosmic
punishment for doing the wrong things. If it doesn’t help me avoid cosmic
punishment for my sins, I don’t see the practical need for spirituality or the
near-insanity of trying to pay attention to every motherfucking moment. Any
input, or am I just being dumb again?*

At any rate, I think that experiences may be one of the central purposes of life, and furthermore, I agree that morality is mainly a practical matter for how to get along during life. If we take life as "for its own sake" -- which, let's admit, we do anyway -- then Tim and Piers have a genuine point.

However, none of this minimizes the importance of morality. This is especially true because many if not most religions have claimed that a more moral lifestyle -- one that is less selfish and more loving -- is also happier. For example, I like to think of the gist of Buddha's message being, "You'd be a lot happier if you weren't such a selfish asshole."

So we've possibly bridged the gap between morality and happiness. But Tim and Piers weren't talking about happiness as the key to spirituality. They were talking about direct experience of the divine. Right?

This begs the question of whether one can experience the divine without at least the attempt of moral behavior playing some part. I guess I feel that moral behavior is sort of part-and-parcel of any real experience of divine mystic oneness. Then again, this begs the question of whether we can ever be moral enough; if we're not careful this can throw us into the jaws of the dreaded Bible thumpers and their talk about Jesus' debt-paying blood being necessary for one to be reconciled with God (Don't think I'm beating that dead horse again, at least not here).**

I don't know about you, but I take the common-sense approach that we can never be morally "perfect"; even if we had it in us (which we don't), the world sometimes doesn't give us clean-hand choices. Fine. but, meanwhile, related questions come begging as to "What do we mean by 'divine'?" or "What do we mean by 'experiencing' it?" While those questions circle our flank, from behind comes an ambush of the question "Does 'experiencing the divine' equal 'happiness?"

This last question, any religious/spiritual person would tell you, would probably be answered with a simple "yes". At the same time: Does "happiness" equal "experiencing the divine"? And if you're not experiencing the divine, are you truly happy? And if you are truly happy, are you experiencing the divine? How can you say what's truly happy anyway? Is true happiness only found while one is engaged in moral behavior? Is this the key? Am I being too lazy by resorting to filling this post with interrogative sentences that I don't answer? Or am I a frickin' guru?

*To make things clear, the order of events was: 1. the discussion on Tim's "As the Spirit Moves You" post, with the three comments by me, Tim and Piers higher above; 2. my comment on Tim's "If Thine Eye Be Single" post, part of the comment being directly above; and 3. my starting to write this post on my blog, where I begin to realize Tim and Piers had a point. Yeah, I know you're still confused, but come on, you're probably so bored by this anyway you stopped reading after the first paragraph.

** Postscript: Why didn't this occur to me right away? There's the whole idea that mysticism and what-have-you is about experience, not of any particular thing that is "divine" but rather experience of, well, regular stuff, directly and as it truly is. Gosh, I have read Hardcore Zen, after all -- you'd think I'd remember to put that in.

This idea would, of course, get us out of a lot of philosophical traps -- not least of which would be the whole "do you think you're good enough to be in the presence of God without faith in Christ" shit that bombards you throughout the area I live. Of course, the questions would still be begged as to what the true, direct experience of regular stuff entails and whether that is even possible.

The experiencing-everything-as-sacred thing might help tie the whole mess to morality, in that being aware of how things really are will help us to (a) see the reasons for being moral, insofar as the truth we experience is that we're all connected; and (b) maybe help us a little bit to be moral, as far as seeing our "selves" as the empty, interdependent things they truly are might, like, humble us. I could not pretend any of these ideas were orginated by me -- this is all pretty much what I've come to understand to be basic tenets of Buddhism, if "tenets" is the right word. It should be noted that Buddhism's Eightfold Noble Path to nirvana calls for both moral behavior (and thoughts) as well as training to increase mystic awareness of breathing and really eating that potato chip and stuff.

Okay, so at the root, morality and mystic experience are interrelated, the same way everything else is, I guess. At the same time, I still think there are reasons for considering morality to be the most important aspect of religion. Since starting this post, I began reading Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen. Most of its contents are not totally new to me, but and it reminded me of how commonsensical was the Enlightenment-era toleration and emphasis on Jesus' moral teachings instead of dogma and all that.

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Multicultural and Monocultural Hypocrisy

2006-12-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

Pop quiz: What do these two things have in common?:

1. The furor a few months ago about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad

2. The current semi-furor over newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison swearing into office on a Quran instead of a Bible

I bet you think you know. They're both about how much or how little tolerance we should show to Islam and the ideal of pluralism, right? Some of you think we should ban depictions of Muhammad and let Ellison swear on the Quran, while others of you think that we should allow parodies of Muhammad and make Ellison swear on the Bible.

What's wrong with this picture? Why would each side ban one type of ideological expression and allow another?

See, I have a confession to make: I don't much like Islam. You could even say that -- during the long dark nights of my whitebread soul -- I sometimes dislike "Muslims" in the abstract on some visceral level, even though the few Muslims I met in college seemed decent. I'm not proud of being prejudiced against Muslims and I hope to resist it -- I don't want to be a prejudiced person toward any of my fellow humans because of some random classification, and when I'm thinking rationally I can sort of banish it from my mind. At the same time my most un-prejudiced opinion of Islam the religion is that it's at best no worse than most of the world's religions, including Christianity, and at less than best it's, well, worse.

At the same time, this is not about my opinion of Islam or anyone's opinion of Islam. I know that nobody likes to take libertarianism whole hog -- including me -- and I don't want to reduce all issues to ones of personal expression, since we all know selfhood is an illusion and it takes a village and little platoons and stuff. But I think these two issues really are about personal expression.

Tell me if this sounds sane: Let people draw pictures poking fun of Muhammad if they want to, and also let Congressman Ellison swear his oath of office on the Quran.

When the Danish cartoon thing was all over the news, I was so angry that people around the Muslim world were getting violent over the assertion that Islam is violent. I wasn't violently angry; that would be too ironic. But come on! Then there was the demand by Muslim groups to have those cartoons removed from the public eye everywhere. Then there was a bunch of my fellow infidels who were actually agreeing with them!

To those of my respected fellow human beings out there who wanted Muhammad pictures banned: Okay, Muslims can't make pictures of the prophet Muhammad. But the cartoonists weren't Muslim! Why the fuck, my friends, do you think it necessary for someone to be forced to follow the strictures of another person's religion? Okay, but the pictures were offensive what with bombs in turbans and whatnot. So you'd never let anyone make a painting making fun of the Virgin Mary again? What kind of liberals would you be then?

Use the argument you use -- rightly -- with all the killjoys; if you don't like it, you don't have to look at it. And if you want to ban it just so the Muslims won't blow us up, well, that's just the way to encourage them. I don't think the Muslims are out to convert us all or in any case that they would even have a chance. I think there's more of a threat of them taking our lives than taking our lifestyles. All the same, what kind of a world would it be if anyone who was personally offended by a public expression went and killed a bunch of people? Predictable allusions to Chamberlain aside, that's just not cool.

All right, all right ... let's move to the other issue and make conservatives look bad.

To those of my respected fellow human beings out there who want Ellison to swear on the Bible instead of the Quran: Duh!!! Why the fuck, my friends, do you think it necessary for someone to be forced to follow the strictures of another person's religion? Oh, oh, I know! Because you have a real God, right? Because in this particular century, fewer people are being murdered explicitly in the proverbial name of Christianity than in the proverbial name of Islam. Well, good for you! But you know what? It doesn't matter! Ellison, for better or worse, is a Muslim. We can assume he's probably one of them good 'uns because he hasn't blown up anyone to our knowledge -- though he is a Democrat, which you probably think is worse. All your creepy ideas about the U.S. being "a Christian nation" aside, there's this: as long as we think Ellison's Muslimimity won't keep him from being fit to be a Congressperson -- and even prejudiced old me doesn't see how that could be -- then there's really no reason to make him swear on a book that he doesn't believe in instead of the one he does.

Of course, supporters of Bible-swearing-only position will state that the issue is indeed about the U.S. being a Christian nation. I don't have the energy and ambition at the moment to try to sift through that pile of bullshit to anyone's satisfaction. I just repeat -- this Christian nation now has a Muslim congressperson. If you don't plan on holding a test of salvation-hood for public officeholders, then I suggest you let this Muslim congressperson take his congressional oath on his Muslim book. 'Cause otherwise, if all the Mexicans convert to Quetzalcoatl-ism and in 30 years, the Mexican majority tries to make you swear on the Popul Vuh, you'll wish you had done unto others as you'd want them to do unto you.

If a curmugeon who hates sand monkeys as much as I do can see not the slightest offense in Ellison swearing on the Quran, then ... well, then you must really hate sand monkeys (and if you can't see I'm being sarcastic here, you haven't learned a goddamn thing).

To all my friends: It's not about Islam. It's not about our religious hang-ups. It's not even about "tolerance", whatever that is, or a Christian nation, whatever that is. Not all issues are only or merely about personal expression and individual freedom, but these two are. Real tolerance is all about this. In a world where we all can tolerate both anti-Muhammad cartoons and pro-Muhammad ceremonial gestures, we can be free to kill each other explicitly over oil like civilized people. What a wonderful world that would be.

P.S. - I got the idea for this post after reading Kathleen Parker's illogical turd of an op-ed piece. You can find a link to it here. See how many instances of hypocrisy you can spot:

www.townhall.com/content/4f632130-0999-478c-9d6c-57d640862a52

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P.P.S. - Here's a link that should be informative for anyone who thinks opposing bin Laden and those fuckwads means you have to be some sort of ultra-neoconservative, or (even more oddly) that offering criticism of America or capitalism means you're somehow bin Laden:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4764730.stm

Could Be Worse

2006-11-09T16:34:00.000-08:00

So the Democrats won Congress and some governorships, and Rumsfield resigned. Cue the dancing Ewoks.

It's probably just as much a cliche as the above to say that we ain't out of the proverbial woods yet, folks. The most important thing I can see is not to mistake the Democrat's victories as a mandate, the way W. thought his elections were mandates. The Dems don't have a mandate any more than W. did; the people didn't vote for the Democrats, they voted against the corruption and perceived incompetence of the Republicans.

As much as liberals (and even quasi-liberals like me) cringe to think of it, it still seems -- as far as can be determined -- that the American people as a whole are pretty conservative. They're not conservative in the creepy neocon way, thankfully, but they do appear in general to be conservative. I don't have stats for this assertion now, but it's just been a vague overall observation. I hope to get stats on American ideological breakdown sometime. I've looked online and haven't found anything yet.

Some of this popular conservatism is the vaguely creepy Bible-thumper kind, but as much as I like to pick on my friends the Bible-thumpers, I think the danger of the "Religious Right" is pretty overexaggerated (well, most of the time). What liberals and quasi-liberals and leftists need to do is to realize that the people who are conservative will keep on being conservative and that not only can't anything be done to stop this, but also that it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Case in point: the conservative-leaning electorate broke the one-party spell. I remember after Sept. 11, the paranoid part of me couldn't help but think, "This is it. The Republican Party is gonna kick the Democratic Party out of politics altogether and we're gonna have a one-party state for the rest of this country's existence." The never-believe-anything-interesting part of me never believed this, but I still thought Republicans had such a pincer hold on mainstream thought -- who can be against both God and low taxes? -- I wondered how divided government could survive (for a good overview of the overall leftist distrust of the ruling right, see http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004/11/holiday-break.html). No, the Democratic Party is not our savior, but it gives me a breath of hope to see that my college-freshman paranoia didn't come true (yet, anyway).

That being said, I will repeat: The Democratic Party is not our savior. We ain't out of the woods yet. The thing about the Democrats and me is this: I lean liberal on some issues and lean conservative on others. The Democrats, therefore, are at the same time too conservative on many of the issues I lean left on and too liberal on most of the handful of issues I lean right on. Even if you're not like me, chances are you think the Dems are either too liberal or too conservative, and one way or another you probably don't think the Dems are our saviors, unless you're naive.

I have one main request for the Democratic politicans: Please, please, please for the love of whatever god or gods the First Amendment gives you the right to worship or not worship, please do not go on a vendetta against the Republicans and/or the Bush administration (not even if that vendetta means wearing stylish masks).

Even before the election was over, we all know there has been plenty of vindictive feeling against the GOP and the Bush gang. Most of this vindictiveness is probably justified, at least in a squooshy liberal "you're allowed to have feelings" way. However, it's just not -- what's the word, Buddha? -- skillful. Even if the electorate is all that liberal, the doctrinal hold of liberalism on their minds is not enough for them to put up with the Clinton impeachment in reverse. And as for the voices calling for war-crimes trials -- I'm not even going to debate whether any of the Bushies deserve that or not. That sort of thing ... well, we left-ish-ists all know it wouldn't bring back the dead, and we'd just look like Robespierre in front of the soccer moms and NASCAR dads. So forget about it. The more Dalai-Lama-y the Dems act toward the GOP, the better off the Dems end up looking.

P.S. Some of the ideas I've put forward here I think I got from two or three editorials I read in the Akron Beacon Journal today (Thurs., Nov. 9, 2006). I can't find this morning's paper so I'm boned as far as citing my sources on this. At any rate, it's usually hard for me to remember whether I had the germ of an idea and then read something I agreed with already or if I read something that convinced me.

See also:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/

www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2006/11/diana-butler-bass-how-to-defeat.html

http://www.snant.com/fp/archives/thank-god-this-fucking-election-is-over/

A note -- in the comments of the Fantastic Planet post, I say "ay-fucking-men" to the post, which has much of the vindictiveness I was talking about. What I actually meant to say amen to was the fact that the poster, one JP, agreed with me in not voting. After posting the comment, I realized I was giving my support to the vindictiveness I wanted to stand against. Sorry for the confusion and momentary hypocrisy.

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Rational Reptilian Rapacity Ravages Reverything

2006-10-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

I was reading a post over at Pop Occulture by Tim Boucher[http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/10/22/is-the-reptilian-brain-in-control] where Boucher discusses the idea that the people who hold the power in the world -- the "powers that be", in his phrase -- are controlled by their "reptilian brains". The reptilian brain, or brainstem, is the part of the brain responsible for primitive self-sustenance drives like getting food and sex and the fight-or-flight instinct. Boucher discusses whether this may not be case as well; he posits that the mischief-making of the folks in power comes from how they follow rationality to its most unsavory ends.

My reptilian brain likes me most, so here's what I think: The "powers that be" may be technocrats who use rationality, but it should be remembered what they're using that rationality for. They use rational means -- often Machiavellian means -- to achieve the ends of power and wealth. Why do they want power and wealth? Their reptilian brains.

Their reptilian brains tell them they need to conquer others for power -- like animals secure dominance over rivals to mate. Their reptilian brains (primed for scarcity) tell them they must get food wherever and whenever they can, which translates -- through cultural conditioning -- into the neverending "hunt" for greater wealth, even if other people as "prey" fall by the wayside. I believe that a lot of what we think of as selfishness -- ego, atman -- comes from the reptilian brainstem and its drives for fight or flight, food and... sex. Rationality may be how the brainstem's drives are served, but rationality by itself cannot dictate a goal.

I've been reading Howard Zinn's essay "Machiavellian Realism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Means and Ends" which I think may have given me a few ideas for this post, what with the whole leaders-using-cold-rationality-for-selfish-reasons thing.

Postscript: After thinking about this issue off and on, I thought of something. The way I see it, the problem is not that we're being either too rational or too intuitional/instinctual. Rather it's that we're not being moral enough. We use reason to achieve instinctual goals but we don't do enought to factor morality (that is, the needs of others) into account when we do this.

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How Bad of a Name Is Too Bad, Bitch?

2006-09-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

So Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called U.S. President Bush "the devil." Some people seem to think this is a deserved epithet. I have no special love for Dubya, so don't think I'm one of those College Republican chickenhawk bloggers when I say that "the devil" might be a bit harsh.

Why? Well, if Bush has been wrong for using terms like "axis of evil" -- not to mention his other "with-us-or-against-us" rhetoric -- then Chavez must also be wrong for using the term "the devil", even to describe Bush.

A little detail. I'm sure you know that Bush himself received a lot of criticism when he used the phrase "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, North Korea, and Iran (Iran being a current ally of Chavez). I am not smart enough to decide whether "axis of evil" was a, shall we say, skillful epithet for Bush to use. However, my vague impression of Bush's rhetorical device is this:

On one hand, you want to be careful using a word like "evil", for reasons that should be obvious to those of us in the blogosphere who are leftist hippie weinies instead of rightist chickenhawk weinies. On the other hand, if you do end up deciding that you have no choice but to kill a person because that person is too stupid to realize he doesn't have to kill you -- such as, perhaps, bin Laden (not in the Axis) -- then you might as well call that person evil. The point is you generally avoid using such language when you're not yet sure whether you'll be forced to kill the person being described. [for those of you understandably upset that I might ever consider it necessary for Person A to kill Person B, please feel free to read my post on violence: http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/09/gandhis-gonna-kick-my-ass-for-this.html ]

The same point, I believe, applies to putting the letter "D" in front of the word "evil".

The truth is, as a politician I don't think much of Bush either way. I guess I've gotten so sick of both the people who idolize him (or who did) as some kind of messenger of God as well as the people who, well, think he's the devil. So sick, in fact, that the only way I can think to avoid sounding like a brainwashed regurgitator of either major party's talking points is to steadfastly refuse to have much of an opinion on the beady-eyed chimp at all (physical observations not counted). Oh, and I know I've badmouthed Chavez before in this blog (http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2005/12/why-hugo-chavez-sucks.html). But that's not the point I want to make here.

I'm taking the risk of assuming I'm probably just objective enough to say this would be the case even if I didn't have it in for Chavez. Well, at any rate, calling Bush a naughty name isn't the worst I believe Hugo has done or is capable of, and it certainly isn't why I distrust him.

Lastly, I realize (retroactively) that I've been using all sorts of non-flattering names, such as "chickenhawk", "hippie", "peacenik", "weinie", "brainwashed regurgitator." Before you think I'm a hypocrite (of course I am, but not for that), please let me explain that I never said all bad names were bad -- hell, I really don't think any of them are without use. I just figure that (a) politics often means dealing more diplomatically with people than does blogging, and (b) some names are just not smart to use in an international-incident-type setting. At the risk of sounding self-contradictory (of course I am, but not for that -- hee hee), I'd say the case could be made that using "evil" and "devil" to label political enemies isn't even necessarily wrong, just boneheaded. Or maybe it is wrong, but not as bad as, like, genocide or whatever. Got that, motherfucker?

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College-Loan Debt and Why Everyone Should Be Lucky

2006-09-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

A recent editorial by Cokie and Steven Roberts brings
up an economic issue that is does not hit as close to home for me as it does for many other recent college grads, but still pisses me off. This issue is the growing problem of college-loan debt. To quote the Robertses directly:
A serious class conflict divides the
nation's campuses. On one side are
privileged grads entering the work
force
debt-free because Mom and Dad foot the
bill; on the other are
students
shouldering huge loan burdens . . . Wealthier
students can
afford to take
unpaid internships that provide invaluable career
advancement. Kids who wait
tables to pay their bills can't do that.
More seriously, students graduating
with large loans face severely diminished career choices. They simply can't afford to take jobs that provide psychic rewards instead of financial ones.
I am one of the "privileged grads." I have no college-loan
debt because with my college education, part was paid for with an academic scholarship and my parents paid the rest.
Yes, the amount my parents paid actually included an amount
left for me (just like my sister and all my mother's-side cousins) by a late
great-aunt. And my academic scholarship was pretty good. But there still remains the fact that unlike many of my peers, I did not have to take
out loans or even work (though I did have a
few summer jobs and an after-school job anyway) to pay for what my
scholarship didn't.

So we've established that you're free to hate me. The point I
want to make is: I got lucky. Lots of other college kids didn't. That's not
fair. I don't think it was necessarily my fault or my parents' fault for
being lucky that made those other kids be unlucky, but either way, those
kids should've been as lucky as me.

My guilt reflex is somewhat ... well, impaired, after my
overloading with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, college liberalism,
Protestant fundamentalism, and reading "The Redneck Manifesto" by Jim Goad [see: http://notbyjlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/09/from-redneck-manifesto-by-jim-goad.html]. Therefore, I find it hard to feel guilty that my parents had
the money to save me from debt. But whether it applies to you or not, I think anyone who believes the slightest in equality-of-opportunity has got to see this college-debt system is fucked up.
This is especially the case seeing that the fucked-up-ness is
getting worse. To quote Roberts and Roberts again:
On July 1, a new bill raised the
interest rate on Stafford loans -- the primary program for undergrads -- from
5.3 percent to 6.8 percent. PLUS loans, which go to
parents not
students, zoomed to 8.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, over the last three
years, Congress has failed to increased funding for Pell grants, the main
direct-aid program. The maximum is stuck at $4,050, while the average annual
cost at a private university has risen to $32,000. Even public colleges
cost about $15,000.
The Robertses suggest that Pell grants be made to keep pace with inflation, that the interest rates on PLUS and Stafford loans be decreased, and that both private charities and "[m]odest government programs that forgive loans for students working in public service jobs" be encouraged. I don't think any of this sounds like a particularly bad idea.

I've also considered the possibility that colleges and universities themselves can do more to reduce costs for students. One of the first things that comes to my mind is reducing salaries for both college administration and faculty. I am naive enough to assume that at least a few of the left-leaning professors out there would be happy to reduce their salaries in the name of promoting greater socioeconomic equality. Finally, a solution both liberals and conservatives can get behind! Liberals in general will have to support it because it's so obviously egalitarian. Conservatives, I imagine, will love it because they hate liberal college professors. As far as more conservative-tending administrators go, well, the kids'll have a lot of fun occupying the dean's office til the administrators agree to reduced pay too.

Why should we do this? Because human capital is our future. If a big-time pro-rich-people person like David Brooks can say that education is the key to greater equality as well as greater overall prosperity, then a good education clearly counts as equality of opportunity rather than of result.

Sources:

Brooks, David. 12 Sept. 2006. "Human capital is the smart investment." Akron Beacon Journal. Page B2.

Roberts, Cokie and Steven V. Roberts. 10 Sept. 2006. "Storefronts instead of high rises." Wooster Daily Record. Page A4.

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My Hypothesis Is Right in One Person's Case

2006-09-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, I had a hypothesis confirmed for me, at least in the case of one person.

I had hypothesized (some long amount of time ago) that traditional/fundamental Christians' primary objection to the theory of evolution was not, as is often said, that evolution's random chance does not make room for God. Rather, I hypothesized that their main objection was that evolution would basically rule out the literal historical existence of Adam and Eve, and that this was a problem because without Adam's Original Sin, there would be no reason for Jesus to die on the cross for humankind's salvation.

Anyway, I'd had this hypothesis banging around in my head for a while, half-forgotten, until I happened to have a conversation about evolution with my friend Ryan. Ryan is unquestionably very intelligent -- I think he's likely more intelligent than I am. He also happens to be a devout Christian of what we may call the born-again variety.

Ryan had been reading two books on Intelligent Design -- one for and one against. Intelligent Design is the current alternative to evolutionary theory being advocated by traditional Christians. Ryan told me he wanted to be well-informed about why he believes what he does. We got to talking a bit about something how stupid we both think it is for some atheists to use evolutionary theory as evidence there's no God. I made sure Ryan knew (he already did) that not all subscribers to evolution are atheists, but that many believe God was sort of responsible for evolution -- which is my opinion.

I don't remember what I asked Ryan then exactly -- I basically asked his opinion of the God-and-evolution-both idea, since he understood that one did not rule out the other. Ryan began to explain -- entirely without any coaching from me -- how he did not believe in evolution because that would mean no Adam, no Original Sin, and hence no vicarious death of Jesus.

I respect Ryan quite a lot; he's been one of my best friends since we were in elementary school. I don't want to make it seem like I devalue his opinion on its own merits because I can use it to validate my hypothesis, and I don't want to show disrespect for my friend by using him as a statistic in some kind of study. Nonetheless, I feel personally vindicated in that my hypothesis was correct for at least one person. I don't know if other people who hold Jesus as their savior like Ryan does also disbelieve in evolution for the same reason he gave, but it's encouraging to know I was not too far off the mark on that.

Of course, there's the whole issue of my big head swelling again, but that's another issue. Actually, I cannot honestly say that this hypothesis is that big a deal; just kind of a neat footnote.

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Gandhi's Gonna Kick My Ass for This

2006-09-08T18:31:00.000-07:00

Violence. It makes a great movie, but in real life it can be kind of a hassle.

When I consider the possibility that some violence (even killing) may be justified, I often can't help thinking that Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Tolstoy, M.L. King and God are all up in heaven wagging their fingers at me. Nevertheless, I've basically decided that using violence in self defense (blah, blah, blah -- you've heard this before) is, if not "okay", then at least understandable in that God won't throw you in hell for too many eons for it.

You see, I've also considered the possibility that killing someone -- no matter who -- will land you in a temporary hell that may still last trillions of eons. The question you have to ask yourself when you think of killing someone is whether you think it's worth it spending trillions of eons in hell to kill that person. If you kill a dictator who's planning on killing a bunch of other people, then you might emerge from those trillions of eons in hell as a hero when you finally get to heaven. Or something like that. I kind of mean for this idea to be more of a mental yardstick to use before acting -- sort of a "what if" scenario that you can use to decide whether it is ethical to kill whoever you're considering killing.

Now, since I'm all about collegiate revolution, let's talk about where violence fits in there.

The thing about using violence in a "revolutionary" struggle is this: Violence is, at the very most, for physical self defense. It is a reaction. A political struggle to change the status quo, on the other hand, is about in some sense moving forward--starting something new instead of just reacting. It may be okay in the eyes of God and Gandhi to protect your physical wellbeing, but protecting yourself doesn't have anything to do with pushing forward your political goals.

That is, if the cop at the demonstration hits you with his nightstick, you may have the option of hitting him back in order to try to keep him from hitting you too much more -- if that even works. The various things that may happen if you do this, you can imagine. Or, you can allow yourself to be hit with the nightstick -- not because you don't have a right to fight back or because the cop should be allowed to hit you -- but because keeping yourself from getting bashed up with a nightstick is not your goal in the demonstration.

Please keep in mind that I have never been hit with a nightstick and am not trying to make light of how much that must suck. I'm not even saying I wouldn't fight back. You may not have to be a total martyr for your cause, but if you think it's important to protect yourself, you have to realize the consequences that will come of that -- escalation of violence being probably the most relevant. And because you don't even know whether fighting back will reduce the extent to which you'll be hurt -- which is your whole reason for fighting -- well, let's just say turning the other cheek isn't cowardly here.

Looking at lethal violence in the same light, we can see a similar dynamic, except that in this case it can probably be even more justified to protect yourself. If your neighborhood is plagued with members of a group of people who don't like your group of people, you may buy a gun and shoot any member of that other group who tries to shoot you or your family. And even though it might be absolutely necessary to kill members of this other group in order to protect yourself and other innocent members of the group you're said to belong to, this will most likely not lead to a situation where those others don't try to kill you anymore -- it'll be pretty certain to do the opposite, if anything, at least in the long run. But hey, I'm not telling you to sacrifice your life for a possible long run. You gotta kill who you gotta kill -- but you gotta remember what you're killing for. If killing means that the people you're protecting will get killed more, then you're not a Chamberlain for thinking that killing the killers is the wrong form of protection.

Oh yeah, and we're all children of God who are interconnected in web of blah, blah, blah ... which means your afterlife may get a little hot for at least the lifetimes of a few galaxies.

This is true, I think, whether you're an oppressed minority struggling for revolutionary freedom or just a person who belongs to a group which may or may not be oppressing some other group, and who wishes those folks struggling for freedom would quit blowing up your friends.

Basically, if you're thinking you have to kill someone, consider whether that person would still be trying to kill you if you were not trying to kill him.

After originally writing this post, I found the following, by Howard Zinn, which brings up good points about the non-feasibility of revolutionary violence [ http://notbyjlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/10/im-such-hippie-excerpts-from-zinn.html]:

614 - What of revolution? Here the balance of achievement and cost is less haphazard, though still far from rational. The four great revolutions of modern times (the American, the French, the Russian and the Chinese) though all erratic in their movement towards social progress, in the end, I believe, justified the relatively small amount of violence required to fulfill them. But today, can we still look to revolutions as the chief means of social change, and as a useful means, whereby great change can be achieved at relatively small cost?

In some exceptional instances, yes. But, as a general rule, it seems to me that the conditions of the contemporary world have removed the feasibility of revolutions in the old sense. There are several reasons for this. One is that the power of weapons in the hands of the ruling elite makes popular uprisings, however great is the base of support, a very dubious

615 - undertaking. The other consideration, and probably more important, is that revolutions like wars no longer can be contained. They almost always involve one or more of the great nations of the world, and are either crushed by an outside power (as were the Hungarians in their revolt) or are prolonged to the point of frightful massacre (as the revolt in Viet Nam was met by the intervention of the French and then the Americans, and as the revolt in the Congo was stymied by Belgians and other forces). The Cuban revolution was an oddity; it was able to subsist because it brought into the picture not one but both the two leading world powers. There, even in success we can see the perils posed by revolution in the contemporary world, for the Cuban missile crisis almost set off a global disaster.

By the way, here are some links to stuff written by people smarter than me, both for and against the philosophy of nonviolence (aka, pacifism):

Support for nonviolence:

http://www.mkgandhi.org/sfgbook/eleventh.htm http://www.unpo.org/news_detail.php?arg=01&par=3466

http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php

http://nvpf.org/np/english/resources/rstudy.asp.html http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/tolstoj/tolstoy.htm

http://afrikaworld.net/afrel/goddionah.htm

http://www.ou.org/about/judaism/torah.htm

Criticism of nonviolence:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/02/20/miller/http://web.archive.org/web/19981205224334/www.netwood.net/~hryan/nonviol.htm http://www.walterlippmann.com/mx-nyt.html

http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fanon.html http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=111454 http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-schaefer042803.asp

http://www.i3pep.org/archives/2003/09/23/contextualizing-gandhi/

http://www.i3pep.org/archives/2003/09/23/contextualizing-gandhi/ (claims that Gandhi’s nonviolence worked but that violence may at other times be necessary)

http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt (not mainly against nonviolence, but mainly against Gandhi)

Also, I'm not sure whether these two articles can be called pro- or anti-nonviolence. They're sort of both. I like 'em:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/vipac.html

http://ranprieur.com/essays/viunrav.html

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The Long-Awaited Communique on Environmentalism and Primitivism

2006-09-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

About the only opinion I have on environmentalism is this: I agree that Earth will go on with or without human beings. I believe that, as a human being, I have a vested interest in seeing the human race continue until everyone I know dies a natural death — whether or not Mother Nature gives a shit about us either way.

Therefore, I support trying to help keep our environment clean for humanity’s sake, not because humanity is the only important thing on Earth, but because the Earth itself is not essentially what’s at risk — us humans living on it is. I don’t know whether technological civilization itself needs to be done away with, but I want to try to either 1) salvage technology or 2) grandfather us into the primitivist utopia, either way in order to avoid massive human deaths.

This is why I still say “yay” for labor unions in the industrial production complex. Whether the workers take over the factories and then gradually start decreasing production to save the earth before finally going back to hunting full-time is a matter of whether or not that industrial production makes human life on Earth untenable. I figure that if humans can survive with a polluted world, Mother Nature will, indeed, kill us — but this is not what we want, so we better clean up our act to whatever extent we need to (keeping the worker’s factories or not) in order to keep Momma from killing us.

Oh, and as for animal rights -- see my post here for why I gave up vegetarianism: http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2005/12/neandertals-freak-dancing-and-case-for.html

Does this make sense?

Added 9/19/06 - Let’s just do whatever we can to avoid massive deaths, either from starvation OR from primitivist genocide. We can try to save our technology, both because (a) we like it and (b) much more importantly, it’s generally agreed that going straight back to nature would result in billions of people dying. If keeping all our toys save our neighbors from dying in a Mad Max hellzone, well, there’s nothing easier than doing the right thing when it helps you.

However, it could also be that the opposite would be the case. If it comes down between keeping our fun technology and thereby killing billions through planet-death starvation on one hand, and getting rid of our technology to save a greater amount of lives on the other, then I guess I’ll have to resign myself to never beating Sonic & Knuckles.

See also: http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1890

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Transcript of Brad Warner and me talking about "The Golden State"

2006-08-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

On Aug 5, 2006 --

Hi, Mr. Warner/Brad/whatever you want to be called:

I think you might be interested in putting your two cents into this blog-post-comment-discussion I've been having with a bunch of people at this address: http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/08/01/the-golden-state/

It's about the use of drugs in attaining mystical states of mind. I take essentially your position against a bunch of folks who sound like they've been reading Zig Zag Zen. By the way, I hope my description of this discussion doesn't sound too adversarial, because I like these guys. Thanks a lot, Justin Hart

-----------------------------------

On Aug. 13, 2006:

Justin,

Thanks. I checked it out a little. Sometimes debates like this just make my head spin. I know what my position is on drugs & I've said it. To me the argument is over. I wish more people understood what the real problem is with drugs. But I can't convince anyone who really doesn't want to be convinced. I guess they just have to go thru it themselves and see what a load of crap it is.

Brad

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Proof, Truth, and the Truthfully Aloof

2006-08-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/reality.html

For a while, I've wanted to do a post on truth/reality, how we know or think we know things, and how we share this knowledge. The link I found above inspired me to finally start this.

Basically, if you can't convince people of something, then of course they won't think it's true. But people can't be convinced of something being true unless they want to. So if people don't want to think something is true, then they can't be convinced, and if they can't be convinced, then you have no "objective" standard for saying it is true. I mean, of course you have certain objective-type measurements or methods, like the scientific method, logic, et cetera. But if other people don't believe in the validity of your methodology either, then it doesn't matter -- not convincing them is not convincing them, and all the, shall we say, objective objectivity in the world isn't going to change their minds, and thus, nobody thinks it's objective except you (hypothetically).

This can lead to problems -- at least, I believe it can. You may not be convinced.

Cutting Off Your Minimum-Wage Nose to Spite Your Estate-Tax Face

2006-08-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

Politics. Jeez.

1) So the Democrats push for a higher minimum wage, which is great--kudos, as far as it goes.

2) Then the Republicans, predictably, decide they don't want to help poor people unless it means helping their pals the rich people too, and Republican Sen. Bill Frist combines the minimum-wage-raising bill with a push to cut estate taxes, which Democrats say go mainly toward millionaires and whatnot.

3) To be fair to the Republicans, Frist also pushes for the final bill to include tax breaks for college tuition, state sales taxes (yay!) as well as business research (yawn). The first two tax breaks could at least be useful to, like, normal people -- especially since sales taxes are regressive, falling worst on the poor.

4) The Democrats don't like the idea of cutting the estate tax, which I guess is understandable -- no need for Paris Hilton to get her daddy's money for free when that money could be recirculated into actually maybe sorta helping people. However, this is where the Democrats get really boneheaded --

5) The Democrats block the bill.

Okay, so to recap: The Republicans are assholes enough, in the first place, to try holding the minimum-wage hike for ransom if they don't get their precious estate-tax cut for the people they really work for. But then the Democrats are assholes enough in their own way to decide they'd rather hurt their enemies than help their supposed friends.

I can see not wanting to cut estate taxes -- whether the Democrat argument that they go mainly to millionaire heirs instead of family farmers is true is another issue. But to oppose these cuts enough to effectively torpedo your own goal of a higher minimum wage -- isn't that what's called cutting off your nose to spite your face?

Now the Republicans have not behaved like total assholes here, as much as they may have the capacity to do so at any time (just like the Democrats). I have to admit the Republicans were nice enough, in their own way, to offer cuts to state sales taxes and tax breaks for college tuition.

The Democrats have not behaved like total assholes here either. The Democrats may have their reasoning for opposing these like they do the cuts to the estate tax, and if it were simply a matter of opposing or support these particular cuts (the tuition and sales tax), I could see the honest populism in an argument either way-- i.e., the whole "we need tax money for populist programs" versus "it's populist for people to have tax-break money in their pocket." Which is actually more populist in practice is, again, a matter of debate for another place.

Oh yeah, and this whole debate sidesteps the issue of whether an increase in the minimum wage is actually good for those lower on the totem pole. Economists will rave that raising the minimum wage will decrease the number of workers being hired, thus leading to higher unemployment. Don't know if this is true (it could be that depending on the situation, a firm might have to hire around a certain number of people just to do the job, however high the price of buying the labor). Again, it's a toss-up whether it's more populist to call for higher wages or less unemployment. I'm taking a more-or-less solid stand that raising the minimum wage is a good idea, but I could be wrong.

By the way, the info for this post came from this actual news source:

Taylor, Andrew [Associated Press writer]. 6 Aug. 2006. "Minimum wage workers only clear losers in battle." The Daily Record [Wooster, Ohio]. Page A6.

2006-07-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

List of Blog Entries

View Who Am I Talking About?

View I'm Still Alive, If Anyone Cares

View Music and Class

8/25/07This Computer Supports Genocide: Cell Phones and Coltan in the Congo
http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/08/just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to.html

View Are Unions Obselete?

View ANARCHY!! (That Got Your Attention)

View I Shall Return

View http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20

1/14/2007 "Just a Better Human" View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/01/just-better-human.html

1/10/2007 The Nine Conservative Statements View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/01/nine-conservative-statements.html

1/10/2007 Random Ideas View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/01/random-ideas.html

1/3/2007 Well, Gee! I Guess I'm Liberal after All! View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2007/01/well-gee-i-guess-im-liberal-after-all.html

12/26/2006 Morality and Direct Experience: Which Comes First? View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/12/morality-and-direct-experience-which.html

12/19/2006 Multicultural and Monocultural Hypocrisy View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/12/multicultural-and-monocultural.html

11/9/06 Could Be Worse View http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/11/could-be-worse.html

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9/08/2006
Gandhi's Gonna Kick My Ass for This
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9/05/2006
The Long-Awaited Communique on Environmentalism and Primitivism
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8/13/2006
Transcript of Brad Warner and me talking about "The Golden State"
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8/06/2006
Proof, Truth, and the Truthfully Aloof
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8/06/2006
Cutting Off Your Minimum-Wage Nose to Spite Your Estate-Tax Face
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7/09/2006
South Central Farm Eviction: What Bullshit Is This?
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6/25/2006
Carl Jung stole my idea (okay, so it was copyright-free in the collective unconscious!)
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5/21/2006
I Have a Solution to the Affirmative-Action Issue, but It Might Not Work and Everyone Will Laugh at It
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5/03/2006
JEFFERSON LAWRENCE HART September 7, 1951 - Apri...
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Sorry, sis!
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3/20/2006
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2/23/2006
excerpts from "The Essential Kropotkin", with commentary
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12/28/2005
Neandertals, Freak Dancing, and the Case for Cutting Off Hakim Bey's Balls
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12/25/2005
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12/11/2005
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11/07/2005
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11/06/2005
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10/10/2005
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9/03/2005
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8/31/2005
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6/17/2005
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2/24/2005
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2/23/2005
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Also: link to a blog with cool stuff I transcribed that other people wrote:

http://notbyjlhart7.blogspot.com/

South Central Farm Eviction: What Bullshit Is This?

2006-07-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of South Central Farm before, but I just found out about the bullshit thing that happened to it. Apparently a bunch of people in South Central L.A. were using an abandoned lot as a place to grow food. The bullshit started when there was a property dispute about the land -- somebody wanted to put a warehouse there. Because the desire of entrepeneurs to build warehouses is obviously more important than the right and need of people in less-than-totally-comfortable financial conditions to work to grow their own food, a judge had the South Central Farmers evicted. This ended up being done by police office with riot helmets and batons. Check it out at the South Central Farmers' website or in these news articles.

http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003059913_garden14.html

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Urban_Garden.html

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-14-09.asp

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/06/15/south-central-farm-peoples-park/

Carl Jung stole my idea (okay, so it was copyright-free in the collective unconscious!)

2006-06-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

Shortly before his death, Jung informed his assistant of his "last dream." He dreamed of a huge block of cut stone in a landscape, a symbol of wholeness and, he declared, a promise for the future.
Jung, too, had been hit by the Stone.

-- Churton, Tobias. 2005. Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions. Page 370.

For many years (I don't know how long), I have had a picture in my head; just one of those visual ideas that I couldn't find a story to put in. This mental picture is of a stone -- six-sided, rough-hewn and bumpy on its faces instead of smooth -- sitting alone in the middle of a big empty space. It is not really a spontaneously appearing image, and sometimes when I imagine it, my imagination makes it look different. When I was a kid into Native Americans, I used to consciously project a little Native American "circle of life" symbol -- a circle with four quarters, one each in white, black, yellow and red -- onto the broadest face. I don't know i f I always thought of it being the same size and exact shape, but I seem to picture it (and remember picturing it) as slightly taller than it is wide, with two broad sides at right angles to two narrower sides.

I do not remember having considered it any kind of vision of anything external, but the fact that it just was a sort of random visual idea that wasn't connected to anything -- and that I do not remember the circumstances under which I first thought of it -- always made it feel kind of mysterious.

Now, of course, I've read the excerpt above, and I will now continue to wonder whether I actually did think of it independently, and even if I thought of it before reading that paragraph. I do not recall ever having recorded this visualization before, either in writing or in my bad drawing skills. Therefore I have no evidence of having come up with this mental picture independently of psychologist Carl Jung. Do I even need to mention that because Jung was the guy who wrote about the collective unconscious of shared symbols, the coincidence is even more spooky? Of all the people to share a symbolic thought with -- the irony.

I don't think I'm going to make anything big and mystical out of this vision shared between ol' Jung and me, though -- when I was a young, gullible kid, I got burned by that kind of magical thinking. Whether it does actually signify anything, I know that thinking of it that way can mess you up in the head if you read too much into it. Maybe it is really something mystical, but Brad Warner and other have said that you can't get caught up in a particular mystical experience any more than you can any other experience -- getting caught up in it is anti-mystical.

I'm reminded of the story my friend tells about how he was saved in the Christian sense after he saw his name written in the clouds. Hey, maybe there are such coindences. Maybe there aren't. Maybe God wrote my friend's name in the clouds, and maybe I tapped into the collective unconscious and have been carrying around Jung's last dream in my head. Maybe not. Supernatural activity or otherwise, the important thing is to try to be a good person and to just keep going along one's spiritual/religious path.

I Have a Solution to the Affirmative-Action Issue, but It Might Not Work and Everyone Will Laugh at It

2006-05-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

Okay: the first two paragraphs or so of this post, you will think are really stupid, but please bear with me.

I can't say how it would work, but I think the only hope for the whole racial affirmative-action debate might be to actually try hiding the racial identities of job/school applicants as much as possible before they're approved.

How to do this? How the hell should I know? But since I'm being stupid and unreasonable, let's brainstorm: First, of course, there'd have to be an end to any "race" box to check on the application sheet. In this I agree with the anti-affirmative-action folks. Second -- and this is where I might start losing people -- it might be necessary to stop having personal, face-to-face interviews, or maybe (and I know this sounds ridiculous when I say it), put up some kind of wall between the interviewer and the applicant, maybe even with voice-modification technology. Again, I know this sounds like a terrible idea that would cost too much and everything, but what else are we going to do?

This is where you tell me whichever you believe: That we should just get rid of affirmative action but forget the walls thing since it's obvious there is no systemic racism to keep that from being fair, or that we should keep affirmative action since systemic racism against non-whites obviously exists.

Well, I don't know what is or isn't an obvious fact in this case, but I know about the strength of people's perceptions, which are basically like this: A white person and a black person with the proverbial "same qualifications" apply for a job. If the white person gets the job, the black person is sure that it was only because the other was white. In the same way, if the black person gets the job, the white person is sure it was only because the other was black. Oddly enough, this will most likely be the case whether or not the institution being applied to actually has an affirmative-action policy.

This is most important because this means that if a black person is chosen over a white person, the white person is still likely (and who knows if it's correct?) to feel discriminated against in the name of informal political correctness. To paraphrase one white person I talked to, the company (this person believed) is simply afraid of being seen as racist if it doesn't hire the black applicant.

I'm a white male who has never personally been reverse-discriminated (although I've talked to people who say they have), and I don't know whether there exists either widespread systemic racism or reverse discrimination in the abscence of formal affirmative action. The point is that race relations in this country will only get worse (as working people have to tear each other to shreds to stay afloat in our current "race to the bottom") if something is not done to satisfy BOTH whites and non-whites that they are not being discriminated against by either white racism or by institutions' fear of looking racist.

I oppose affirmative action as we have it now because I believe that, among blue-collar working-class whites, affirmative action and the threat of reverse discrimination are the biggest things keeping racism alive. That is, I oppose affirmative action not because I believe one way or the other that reverse discrimination against whites is true, but that the perception of reverse discrimination is pretty much the only thing fanning the embers of the racists fire among blue-collar working whites (among my native white-collar, upper-middle-class honkies, of course, racism is still alive as a part of classism-- which the pencil pushers also extend to working-class whites).

Needless to say, if either systemic white-supremicist racism or reverse discrimination against whites really does exist -- and perhaps both do, in different institutions -- then such discrimination of either type would be a travesty of justice. I am not downplaying the importance of factual truth. I am just saying that what we believe to be the factual truth can lead us to kill each other, and it's factually true that this is bad, especially because it's also likely to be factually true that we cannot convince each other of what's true.

You're not going to convince the applicant who wasn't picked (from my white-vs-black scenario above) that he/she was not discriminated against, as long as the institution knew both applicants' races.

That's why, however dumb my vague ideas may sound, I'm afraid that people who should be brothers and sisters will turn more and more against each other unless we can take race out of the applicant process as much as possible. Which leads me to my stupid ideas.

Largely to keep this whole analysis simple, I have avoided talking about gender-based affirmative action. I think such gender preferences should be eliminated, but I hesitate to offer the same "hidden-identity" solution to this because (a) it might be even harder to disguise the gender of an applicant; (b) some jobs may actually have good reasons to require a particular gender, such as home providers for a female MRDD group home; and (c) men and women are not quite as likely to start lynching and shooting each other over jobs and colleges -- I would assume. However, it might not be a bad idea to extend the hidden-identity thing to gender as well as race, at least wherever it can be.

2006-05-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

JEFFERSON LAWRENCE HART
September 7, 1951 - April 20, 2006

My Father
My Hero

http://www.pleasantonweekly.com/story.php?story_id=629

Resistance to the Resistance

2006-03-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine told me awhile ago about something called the Resistance Manifesto, which he thought I'd be interested in due to my fondness for paranoia chic as a lifestyle choice. A bit more recently, I was browsing around the Internet and by conincidence (or conspiracy?) found the link below, which talks about the Resistance Manifesto and offers a sort of left-wing critique the right-wing-ness of the RM, as well as a further link to the original manifesto website.

http://www.snant.com/fp/archives/the-resistance-manifesto/

It's funny; in high school I said that the right was the new left, and I had a muddled vision of labor unions and the Christian Right joining forces against satanic global capitalism (or something like that). Only mentioned that because this whole thing reminds me of my high school days.

Also (semi-relatedly), here's a Sojourners article ripping on the Left Behind series, which is kind of like the Resistance Manifesto, only it's more-or-less supposed to be fiction.

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=news.display_article&mode=C&NewsID=5485

"Don't Be That Guy"

2006-03-30T19:00:00.000-08:00

A lot of times I read someone or listen to someone who writes or talks like they *know* what they are talking about, and if I do not agree with them there will be DIRE consequences. I am so sick of this. Everyone seems to think that *not only* do they know what’s going on, but that if others don’t follow what they say, those others will (a) have intolerable suffering (b) become evil or (c) both. People on opposite sides of an issue say these things. I am tired of having people say that I will descend into an unethical morass of pain if I don’t live my life exactly like they think I ought to — think, act and even feel how they believe I should. Fuck that.
I’m tired of people saying, “But if you don’t dedicate to Buddhism and really concentrate hard on meditating, you will be stuck in samsara and spend your life making everybody miserable.” I’m sick of people saying “If you don’t allow free trade and corporate globalization, the poor people will starve.” I’m sick of other people saying “The poor people will starve if you do allow free trade.” I’m sick of people saying “You’re selfish for valuing individuality” and for saying “You’re a statist authoritarian with ‘priestly morality’ for valuing altruism.” I’m sick of people telling me “One or the other, you can’t just balance things like individualism and altruism.” I’m sick of Brad Warner and I’m sick of the Ohio Working Group on Latin America and I’m sick of “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers and I’m sick of CrimethInc and John Zerzan and I even feel like beating up Thich Nhat Hanh.
AND I AM REALLY, REALLY SICK OF PEOPLE TELLING ME I’M NOT ALLOWED TO BE ANGRY.
I’m sick of the guilt for everthing that I do. I’m sick of feeling like I should be strong, and I’m sick of feeling like I should be weak. I’m sick of feeling like I should be masculine and I’m sick of feeling like I should be feminine. I’m sick of the feeling of “Don’t Be That Guy” (as my friend Will Driscoll said) extending to every “guy” I could possibly be.

Sorry, sis!

2006-03-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I posted something evilly bashing Christianity, or at least the whole God-had-to-kill-himself-instead-of-you-to-forgive-you variety. But then recently I got these two e-mails that seem to dovetail together nicely, in terms of being totally opposing opinions.

First, here is an e-mail story forwarded to me by my sister. I did not realize she went in for this sort of thing, but it did come from elsewhere. I think just reading the story gives a pretty good refutation of the very message it's trying to convey. Nevertheless, I have sumptin' else posted below it that discusses why my sister (whom I don't mean to seem like I'm bashing; she's a great young lady) and whoever originated this story seem to be off the mark regarding a little theological smoke-plume called atonement theory.

Will You Eat The Donut ?>>>>There was a certain professor of religion named Dr. Christianson, a >>studious>>man who taught at a small college in the western United States. Dr.>>Christianson taught a required course in Christianity at this >>Particular>>institution. Every student was required to take this course >>regardless of>>his or her major.>>>>Although Dr. Christianson tried hard to communicate the essence of >>the>>Gospel in his class, he found that most of his students looked upon >>the>>course as nothing more than required drudgery. Despite his best >>efforts,>>most students refused to take Christianity seriously.>>>>This year Dr. Christianson had a special student named Steve. Steve >>was only>>a freshman, but was studying with the intent of going on to >>Seminary. Steve>>was popular, well liked and an imposing physical specimen. He was >>the>>starting center on the school football team and the best student in >>the>>class.>>>>One day, Dr. Christianson asked Steve to stay after class so he >>could talk>>with him. "How many push-ups can you do?">>>>Steve said, "I do about 200 every night.">>>>"200? That's pretty good, Steve," Dr. Christianson said. "Do you >>think you>>could do 300?">>>>"I don't know," Steve replied, "I've never done 300 at a time.">>>>"Do you think you could?" again asked the professor.>>>>"Well, I could try," said Steve.>>>>"Can you do 300 in sets of 10? I have a class project and I need >>you to do>>about 300 push-ups in sets of ten for this to work. Can you do it? >>I need>>you to tell me you can do it," said Dr. Christianson.>>>>Steve said, "Well... I think I can... yeah, I can do it.">>>>Dr. Christianson said, "Good! I need you to do this on Friday. Let >>me>>explain what I have in mind.">>>>Friday came and Steve got to class early and sat in the front of >>the room.>>When class started, the professor pulled out a big box of donuts. >>Now these>>weren't the normal kind of donuts, these were the big fancy kind, >>with cream>>centers and frosting swirls. Everyone was pretty excited that it >>was Friday,>>the last class of the day, and they were going to get an early >>start on the>>weekend with a party in Dr. Christianson's class.>>>>Dr. Christianson went to the first girl in the first row and asked, >>"Cynthia>>would you like one of these donuts?">>>>Cynthia said, "Yes please.">>>>Dr. Christianson then turned to Steve and asked, "Steve, would you >>please do>>ten push-ups so that Cynthia may have a donut?">>>>"Sure." Steve jumped down from the desk, did ten quick push-ups, >>and then>>returned to his desk. Dr. Christianson put a donut on Cynthia's >>desk.>>>>Dr. Christianson then went to Joe, the next person, and asked, "Joe >>do you>>want a donut?">>>>Joe said, "Yes.">>The professor asked, "Steve would you do ten push-ups so Joe can >>have a>>donut?">>>>Steve did ten push-ups and Joe got a donut. And so it went, down >>the first>>aisle. Steve did ten push-ups for each person before they received >>a donut.>>Dr. Christianson continued down the second aisle until he came to >>Scott.>>>>Scott was on the basketball team, and in as good of physical >>condition as>>Steve. Scott was popular and never lacking female companionship. >>When the>>professor asked, "Scott would you like a donut?">>>>Scott's reply was, "Yes, if I can do my own push-ups.">>>>Dr. Christianson said, "No, Steve has to do them.">>>>Scott said, "Then I don't want one">>>>The professor shrugged and then turned to Steve and asked, "Steve, >>would you>>do ten push-ups so Scott can have the donut he doesn't want?">>>>With perfect obedience Steve started to do the push-ups.>>>>Scott yelled, "HEY! I said I didn't want one!">>>>Dr. Christianson said sternly, "Look, this is my class, these are >>my desks,>>and these are my donuts. Just leave it on the desk if you don't >>want it" And>>he put a donut on Scott's desk.>>>>Now by this time, Steve had begun to perspire and was starting to >>slow down>>a little. He just stayed on the floor between sets because it took >>too much>>effort to get up and down. As Dr. Christianson started down the>>third row, many students were beginning to get a little angry.>>>>Dr. Christianson asked Jenny, "Jenny, do you want a donut?">>>>Jenny's answer was a firm, "No!">>>>Then Dr. Christianson asked Steve, "Steve, would you do ten more >>push-ups so>>Jenny can have a donut that she doesn't want?" Steve did >>ten...Jenny got a>>donut.>>>>By now, a growing sense of uneasiness filled the room. The students >>were>>beginning to say "No" and there were all these uneaten donuts on >>the desks.>>Steve also had to put forth a lot of extra effort to get these >>push-ups done>>for each donut. There was a pool of sweat on the floor beneath his >>face and>>his arms were beginning to turn red because of the physical effort >>being put>>forth.>>>>Because Dr. Christianson could no longer bear to watch Steve's hard >>work go>>for all these uneaten donuts, he asked Robert, the most vocal >>unbeliever in>>the class, to watch Steve do each push-up to make sure he did all>>ten in each set.>>>>As the professor started down the fourth row, he noticed some >>students from>>other classes had wandered in and sat down on the steps along the >>radiators>>that ran down the sides of the room. He did a quick count and>>saw that there were now thirty-four students in the room. He >>started to>>worry that Steve would not be able to make it. He went on to the >>next person>>and the next and the next. Near the end of the row, Steve was >>really having>>a hard time. It was taking a lot more time to complete each set.>>>>Just then, Jason, a recent transfer student, came to the room. He >>was about>>to enter when at once all of the students yelled, "NO!! Don't come >>in!!">>Jason didn't know what was going on.>>>>Steve picked up his head and said, "No, let him come.">>>>Professor Christianson said, "You realize that if Jason comes in >>you will>>have to do ten push-ups for him?">>>>"Yes, let him come in. Give him a donut.">>>>Dr. Christianson said, "Okay Steve, I'll let you get Jason's out of >>the way>>right now. Jason, do you want a donut?">>>>Not even knowing what was going on, Jason said, "Yes, I'll have a >>donut.">>>>"Steve, will you do ten push-ups so that Jason can have a donut?">>>>Steve did ten very slow and labored push-ups. Jason, bewildered, >>was handed>>a donut and sat down.>>>>Dr. Christianson finished the fourth row and started on the >>visitors seated>>by the radiators. Steve's arms were now shaking with each push-up >>in a>>struggle to lift himself against the force of gravity. Sweat was >>profusely>>dripping off of his face and there was no sound except his heavy >>breathing.>>By this time, there was not a dry eye in the room.>>>>The very last two students in the room were two young women, both>>cheerleaders, and very well-liked. Dr. Christianson went to Linda >>and asked>>if she wanted a donut.>>>>Linda said, very sadly, "No, thank you.">>>>The professor quietly asked, "Steve, would you do ten push-ups so >>that Linda>>can have a donut she doesn't want?" Grunting from the effort, Steve >>did ten>>very slow push-ups for Linda.>>>>The Dr. Christianson turned to the last girl, Susan "Susan, do you >>want a>>donut?">>>>Susan, with tears streaming down her face pleaded, >>"Dr.Christianson, why>>can't I help him?">>>>Dr. Christianson, with tears of his own, explained, "No, Steve has >>to do it>>alone. I have given him this task and he is in charge of seeing >>that>>everyone here has an opportunity for a donut whether they want it >>or not.>>When I decided to have a party this last day of class, I looked at >>my grade>>book. Steve is the only student with a perfect grade. Everyone else >>has>>failed a test, skipped class, or offered up inferior work. Steve >>told me>>that in football practice when a player messes up, he has to do >>push-ups. I>>told Steve that none of you could come to the party unless he paid >>the price>>by doing your push-ups. He and I made a deal for your sakes.>>>>>>Steve, would you do ten push-ups so Susan can have a donut?">>>>As Steve very slowly finished his last push-up, with the >>understanding that>>he had accomplished all that was required of him, having done 350 >>push-ups,>>his arms buckled beneath him and he fell to the floor.>>>>Dr. Christianson turned to the room and said, "And so it was, that >>our>>Savior, Jesus Christ, plead to the Father, 'into Thy hands I >>commend my>>spirit.' With the understanding that He had accomplished all that >>was>>required of Him, He yielded up His life for us. And like some of >>those in>>this room, many leave the gift on the desk, uneaten.">>>>Two students helped Steve up off the floor and to a seat, >>physically>>exhausted, but wearing a thin smile.>>>>"Well done good and faithful servant," said the professor, adding, >>"Not all>>sermons are preached in words.">>>>Turning to the class the professor said, "My wish is that you might>>understand and fully comprehend all the riches of grace and mercy >>that have>>been given to you through the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior >>Jesus Christ.>>God spared not His only begotten son, but gave him up for us and >>for the>>whole world, now and forever. Whether we choose to accept His gift >>to us,>>the price for our sins has been paid. Wouldn't it be foolish and >>wouldn't it>>be ungrateful just to leave it laying on the desk?">>>>>>

Suffice to say that the atonement theory of Jesus' torture by hierarchical authorities makes as little sense as one guy doing pushups for somebody else to eat donuts. If you looked at the donut story by itself, I don't think you could tell me that the pushup scheme would make sense. Same with the atonement theory -- which, by the way, was first articulated in the form we know now back in medieval times by St. Anselm of Canturbury in his book Cur Deus Homo. Before that book, people had different theories -- ransom paid to the devil, etc -- for the Passion of the Christ.

Okay, now here is an e-mail I got that contains a Q&A with Bishop John Shelby Spong, who usually comes across as an insufferable hippie rainbows-and-lollipops liberal Christian. Despite this, I find myself agreeing with the self-aggrandizing bastard about atonement theory. This post has Spong answering a question about atonement theory and why, (all respect to my actually quite intelligent sister and my actually smarter-than-me friends who believe this), it's dumb:

The Rev. Dr. Kathleen from Michigan writes: "Overcoming the widespread Christian belief that "Jesus died for my sins" seems an insurmountable challenge! Preachers, liturgical rites, hymns and religious education curricula continue to reinforce "atonement theology/theories." Would you do a series on "atonement theology/theories" - their origins, rationale, continued justification, etc.? Personally and pastorally, "atonement" thinking creates a mire of destructive results and I, for one, would well appreciate your cogent analysis of how we might best approach this. "

Dear Kathleen,Thank you for your letter and its challenge. There is no doubt that atonement/sacrifice theology constitutes a deep burden that weighs down the Christian faith today. I work on this subject constantly. It is a major theme in two of my books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World. I am still engaged in this study as I begin to work on a new book scheduled for publication in 2007 and tentatively entitled, Jesus for the Non-Religious.
Atonement theology, however, involves far more than a salvation doctrine. It brings into question the theistic understanding of God and even the morality of God. This theology assumes that God is an external Being who invades the world to heal the fallen creation. It also assumes that this God enters this fallen world in the person of the Son to pay the price of human evil on the cross. It was the central theme in Mel Gibson's motion picture; "The Passion of the Christ" which might have been dramatically compelling but it represented a barbaric, sado-masochistic, badly dated and terribly distorted biblical and theological perspective.
All atonement theories root in a sense of human alienation and with it a sense of human powerlessness. "Without Thee we can do nothing good!" So we develop legends about the God who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. For Christianity, I am convinced that our basic atonement theology finds its taproot not in the story of the cross but in the liturgy of the synagogue, especially Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In the Yom Kippur liturgy an innocent lamb was slain and the people were symbolically cleansed by the saving blood of this sacrificed Lamb of God. Jesus was similarly portrayed as the new Lamb of God. As we Christians tell the story of Jesus' dying for our sins in doctrine, hymns and liturgy, we quite unknowingly turn God into an ogre, a deity who practices child sacrifice and a guilt-producing figure, who tells us that our sinfulness is the cause of the death of Jesus. God did it to him instead of to us who deserved it. Somehow that is supposed to make it both antiseptic and worthwhile. It doesn't. I think we can and must break the power of these images. Just the fact that you are sensitive to it and offended by it is a start.
Consciousness is rising on this issue all over the Church, and as it does, Christianity will either change or die. There is no alternative. I vote for change, obviously you do too.
-- John Shelby Spong

I don't have exactly the same objections to the theory as Spork does, but it's sort of close. I don't really care about whether the theory posits "human powerlessness" or whether the theory advances the idea that God is "outside" the universe, whatever that means. I'm cool with the idea that humanity is essentially powerless before God (however God can be defined), and I really don't see what the point of God being "inside" or "outside" the universe is -- but that's another rant, perhaps. I do think the theory makes God look a tad ogre-ish, but without the layers. If not ogre-ish, at least as illogical as someone cutting off their hand in order to forgive you or something like that. The whole "somebody has to pay for the sin, even if it's not the sinner" goes back literally to the medieval thinking and the legal tradition of feudalism.

Okay, so not real long after posting this whole thing above, I got another Spong e-mail that also deals with the crucifixion/atonement:

Allan Hytowitz from the Internet writes: "How do you personally, and Christian doctrine in particular, reconcile the contradiction of that biblical prohibition against child sacrifice with the claim that "God sacrificed his child" in explaining the horrific death of Jesus? It seems to me that rather than the "sacrifice of Jesus" being of benefit to Christians, it serves more to threaten them with death and/or eternal punishment if they are not obedient to the wishes and decrees of the Church."

Dear Allan,I think you have hit the Christological nail right on the head. The whole sacrifice mentality that permeates Christian theology needs to be raised to consciousness and expelled from Christianity. However, it is so deep that many feel that Christianity will die if it is ever separated from this idea.
Child sacrifice was part of ancient religion even in Judaism as the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac suggests. It was later replaced with animal sacrifice that was very much a part of worship in the Old Testament. The Passover observance was marked by the sacrifice of the paschal lamb. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement was also marked by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, whose blood was thought to cleanse the people from their sins.
It was all but inevitable that the crucifixion of Jesus would be interpreted against the background of these two Jewish worship traditions. Paul calls Jesus our "new paschal lamb" and the images of Yom Kippur are present throughout the Gospels in such places as when Paul says: "he died for our sins"; when Mark calls his death a "ransom;" and when John the Baptist refers to Jesus as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." Even the story of the cross in which we are told, "none of his (Jesus') bones were broken," was drawn from the liturgy of the Yom Kippur sacrifice.
Because that was how the 1st century Jews interpreted the death of Christ does not mean that we are bound by that thinking forever. Human attitudes toward child sacrifice are today violently negative. Attitudes toward animal sacrifice are expressed in such words as "cult worship," "black magic" and "devil liturgies." I wonder why these negative concepts are not allowed to flow toward the interpretation of Jesus' death as a sacrifice required by God to overcome the sins of the world. That idea makes God barbaric. It makes Jesus the victim of a sadistic deity. It introduces masochism into Christianity and it deeply violates the essential note of the Gospel, which is that God is love calling us to love.
Why can we not see the cross, not as a sacrifice, but as an ultimate expression of the humanity of one who was so whole he could give his life away and of one who wanted to demonstrate that even when you kill the love of God, the love of God still loves its killers? Why can we not get away from that message of guilt and control that is found in the pious but destructive phrase, "Jesus died for my sins"?
I believe that the future of Christianity rests on our ability in the Christian Church to escape the language of sacrifice and punishment and begin to think in terms of finding in Jesus the power to live fully, the grace to love wastefully and the courage to be all that we can be.
Thank you for your question.
-- John Shelby Spong

Again, I differ from von Sporkingham in that I'm not much bothered about the atonement theory necessitating guilt: guilt is as guilt does. The point as I see it is that the way to actually deal with guilt from a religious angle -- which for me emcompasses most of the rest of what Christians consider "repentence," with contrition and attempting to do better -- doesn't have jack shit to do with some guy nailed to a piece of wood, whether or not that guy is God. And as far as sacrifice goes, I believe that sacrifice is essential in spirituality. The thing is though that we don't sacrifice sheep or cows or toddlers or divinely infused Jewish carpenters -- what is really required of us is a sacrifice of our own egos. Anything we have to give up in order to do what is right is ultimately what God asks of us -- no more, indeed, but no less. That's my theological profundity for the day.

Anyway, I think that the Losing My Religion site puts my own personal objections into words better than that foil for the fundamentalists babbling college-talk above. The funny thing about the Losing My Religion site is that when I discovered it, I was fascinated because I had already thought of so many of the objections to Christian atonement theory already after my educational stint as a Jesus freak. Please don't think I got all my ideas about putting down Christianity from that site, because the truth is I came up with most of those same arguments before I knew about Losing My Religion.

Also, please do not think I agree with everthing they say either. I think they're a bit unnecessarily hard on the idea of God being a bully just for wanting you to be ethical. I do think that ethics can really not be justified without some kind of carrot-stick scheme such as a god would implement. On the whole, however, I agree with them well enough.

Here's the link:

www.losingmyreligion.com

Part II: The Next Top Model...of Sociopolitical Interaction

2006-03-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

I was just reading this little excerpt of the appendix to the Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson novel(s) The Illuminatus! Trilogy

http://www.rawilson.com/whistlepiss.html

which just got me thinking again of two conflicts, and how they relate to each other.

The two conflicts are these:

(a) the struggle between producers and parasites, Haves and Have Nots, bourgeoisie and proletariat -- whatever you want to call the workers and the "employers"/rulers

(b) the struggle between "the individual" on one hand, and on the other, the social forces which keep a person from being free to do what he or she wants.

Both of these conflicts have been used as a sort of story or "narrative" (damn I sound dorky) to explain or interpret social interactions and social change historically and contemporarily. My question is, are they both right, in terms of being ways to interpret society and history? Or do they contradict each other? Also, which one, if either, is primary? Which explains more? And not least is this: If they do not contradict each other, is there any way these two "narratives" can be put together to make one big explanation?

It occurred to me that putting them together in a neat little egghead model might look like a cross.

MODEL 1

ruling class/rich

individual ------------------------ social repression

working class/poor

Of course, a maybe more interesting model thingy (and perhaps closer to the truth) would have the repressed individual be identified with the working class, and the forces of social repression that deny individuality be from the ruling class that takes his/her money and makes him/her do all the work.

MODEL 2

working-class individual ---vs--- ruling class that represses individuality to make a better cog

I haven't done an in-depth anal-ysis (which might require a trip to the proctologists to plumb the depths, since "anal" sticks out in "analysis" like a sore bum), but I suspect this second model might be close to the truth. Of course, Wilson and Shea would kick my pre-postmodern ass for talking about "the truth", especially after I just got done reading their appendix-thing about how interpreting something in a specific way makes it "Damned" and how interpretations cannot account for reality. I'm sort of distrustful of putting in too much New Left with my Old Left laborism, but the acidheads may have a point there. Perhaps there is no reason for me to even have bothered typing up this post, since both interpretations fall short of the po-mo mark> Maybe it's like all that quantum shit in Whatshisname's Uncertainty Principle about not being able to measure the velocity and location of a particle at the same time or whatever. Maybe "individual" and "working class" are two ways of looking at the same protagonist.

Remember Curtis White? Whom I quoted/agonized over/ made fun of in my last post? Well, his little "The Spirit of Disobedience" essay sez sumptin' else I think may be pertinertinent to the conflicts over these conflicts (pages 37-38):

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of
the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for
how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution.
Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human
interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked
together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's
first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the
proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the
worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A
revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace
one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the
cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most
human, which is to say most spiritual.

This passage speaks fucking volumes about the debates in my last post and this one.

There's also the little matter of materialism versus idealism/spiritualism. I wish I still had that copy of A People's History of Science that I'd borrowed from the library; it had notable stuff to say on this matter, from the materialist side at least.

Finally, let us acknowledge the presence, as always, of Mr. Jim Goad over this and all discussions of fancy-pants social philosophers. See, I also just got done reading my old post of the excerpt from his book The Redneck Manifesto, and I wonder how much he would want to throw out the whole debate.

Well, we know that people of whatever class are individuals, after all, and it's not for fancy-pants types to de-individualize anyone, especially individuals who happen to work for a living. Make your own theory.

Part I: Go with Thoreau or the CIO? Free Your Mind As Well

2006-03-20T16:11:00.000-08:00

From Alchemically Braindamaged, "Amplified Reality for Dummies"

( http://uroboros.wordpress.com/2005/08/04/112317738201331379/ ):

it’s an article of faith amongst most of us that we operate from a more attuned sense of awareness to the world and it’s happenings than the guy who sits there numbing himself with reality TV and junk food. Which is fine but it raises the question of what you’re doing with all that extra awareness? Are you using it to find reasons to be scared, anxious, angry, oppressed and hopeless? Or are you using it to find reasons to be open, hopeful, ecstatic, loving and inspired? Is the world a good place at every turn, or a threatening and evil place?

--------------

I've been wondering lately, off and on, about a few conundrums (conundra?) of the proper direction of politically "subversive" activities -- a.k.a. hippie stuff.

1. Should we go with Thoreau or the CIO? That is, should our resistance to capitalism include a refusal to provide jobs for workers? This question was raised for me by an essay in Harper's entitled "The Spirit of Disobedience," written by Illinois State University professor Curtis White (pages 31-40).

To be fair, White supports an ideal in which 'we can confront work in a way that reconnects us spiritually with human "fundamentals."' (40). This sounds close enough to an opposition to "wage slavery" that a unionite can dig it. Also to be fair to White, I cannot fault him for criticizing Marx, 'cause God knows Marx deserves criticism from even the most steadfast labor radical. However, what really bugs me is a passage in the essay. I will quote it below, and watch out for White's quote of Emerson within my own quote of White, as well as for the bold type (but not capitals) that is my own emphasis, not White's:

There is a line in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men that begins to capture my sense of what is necessary to confront our culture of duty and legality: "What is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." So the question we might ask of the future is, "When will we again share the same impulse?" Now, this might sound like a merely self-absorbed wondering after and waiting for the next zeitgeist, the next Age, the return of the '60s counterculture. It will certainly disappoint the more practical and ideological on the left. But I would contend that what is needed is not simply the overthrowing of the present corrupt system in the name of an alternative political machinery that will provide something like "authentic participatory democracy. The appeal of this familiar leftist position is that it can tell you what needs to be done NOW: Take to the streets. Overthrow state power. But I think that part of our reluctance to share this particular revolutionary impulse is that we remember the little Lenins and their big ideas, and we remember where these guys led us: group gropes on the Weathermen bus as a prelude to bombing a post office. Or, worse than that, endless boring meetings with the next "progressive" Democratic candidate who is going to "turn this country around" and "return it to the people." Right. All you really need to ask the John Kerrys or Howard Deans of the world is where they stand on free-market trade issues. They're all ultimately for it, the whole complex scheme of World Banks, NAFTA, WTO, etc. And they're for it out a sense of duty to "national interest," "jobs for working people," or whatever other shameful thing it is that they use to paper over violence. The rest--corporatism, militarism, environmental disaster, human disaster--follows automatically.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Since when are "jobs for working people" a "shameful thing"? How dare White pass himself off as someone the left should look to if he dismisses the actual needs of actual working people so damn casually?

This passage starts out good, from my standpoint. The thing is, I don't think we have to necessarily choose between taking to the streets and freeing our minds. I agree with White that too much emphasis on what to do tactically can and most likely would lead us the way of either Lenin or John Kerry, and that we do need to work on what White calls "a return to the fundamentals of being human." (39). I am glad White refuses to be sucked in by either the temptation of the Democratic Party and its global-capitalist apologists, or by the temptation of bombing post offices. Furthermore, I think consciousness raising and engaged Buddhism and Ralph Waldo Emerson are the shizz-nit. In fact, I have very little to say against most of that paragraph of White's essay.

For awhile, I've liked to tell myself that "the revolution is every breath" -- in part to justify myself for not rushing to the barricades, yes, and in part to console myself for not knowing which barricades to rush to -- but also because I believe that how one lives one's own life is an important part of bringing a "revolution" of values to the world. I just don't see where White gets off both dismissing the need for participatory democracy and, even worse, calling "jobs for working people" something "shameful".

It's one thing to call for the revolution to be inner as well as outer, and for a rejection of greed. It's a whole other bag of organic potatoes to just totally wave off the bread-and-butter issues facing working people. That'll really swell the ranks of the Reagan Democrats here in the 21st century, now won't it? Jeez, mister college professor, could you possibly do any more to alienate regular paycheck-to-paycheck Americans from the left than they already are?

"Free your mind and your ass will follow," says the old saying (was that George Clinton who first said that, or who was it?). I believe that freeing your mind is at least a necessary path to pursue if you want to change the world and shit; at most it could be argued that you need to free your mind before you even start changing the world, or else you'll either be coopted like Kerry or corrupted in your opposition like the Weathermen. However, I'm afraid that if we all wait until we reach Nirvana to take to the streets, we'll let social injustice pass us by. Enlightenment is said to take countless reincarnations over eons to attain. What do we do in the meantime?

There seem to be so many wrong ways to go in terms of politics that there doesn't seem to be any right way -- not even the choice of not choosing. Go one way, and you're Stalin. Go another way, and you're a Democratic-Party sellout to the capitalists. Go still another way, and you're just another Curtis White, and the workers whose jobs you so cavalierly dismissed the need for will kick your pansy ass and burn down your cabin. Of course, you could always be conservative, but that makes my stomach turn, too. It's like how I can wonder at the basic sanity of the various subculture groups made fun of by Encyclopedia Dramatica (www.encyclopediadramatica.com ) and still feel that they're somehow preferable to being normal.

Again I state the conclusion I used to make to resolve this debate with myself over internal vs. external change: that both are necessary and complimentary. But is this true?

On the one hand, I feel like joining a union picket line or IMF protest might be yet one more thing that would make me a bad Buddhist (if that's what I should be). On the other hand, I feel like being a true Buddhist as Gautma meant might lead me down the path of "pie in the sky when you die" that stifles actual dissent, and thus make the Curtis Whites just a different type of John Kerry.

excerpts from "The Essential Kropotkin", with commentary

2006-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

The following is taken from The Essential Kropotkin, edited by Emile Capouya and Keitha Tompkins. It is a collection of the writings of Peter (Petr) Kropotkin, a 19th-century anarchist activist. Kropotkin's words are in black; my comments are in red.

--------------------------------------

Modern Science and Anarchism [first published 1901; this is an edited version, according to the back of the book]

74 - Passing now to the economic views of anarchists, three different conceptions must be distinguished.
So long as socialism was understood in its wide, generic, and true sense--as an effort to abolish the exploitation of labor by capital--the anarchists were marching hand-in-hand with the socialists of that time. But they were compelled to seperate from them when the socialists began to say that there is no possibility of abolishing capitalist exploitation within the lifetime of our generation: that during that phase of economic evolution which we are now living

75 - through we have only to mitigate the exploitation, and to impose upon the capitalists certain legal limitations.

Contrarily to this tendency of the present-day socialists, we maintain that already now, without waiting for the coming of new phases and forms of the capitalist exploitation of labor, we must work for its abolition. We must, already now, tend to transfer all that is needed for production--the soil, the mines, the factories, the means of communication, and the means of existence, too--from the hands of the individual capitalist into those of the communities of producers and consumers.

Note: Kropotkin and I will argue against each other further down along related lines. Further down, Kropotkin dismisses the idea that the value or fruits of production--the profits--can be given to individual workers according to their own contributions.

Remember, the important point is that for Kropotkin as well as for anti-capitalist anarchists of both individualist and communist strains, what they oppose about capitalism is mainly the exploitation of workers and the stealing of profit value from them, rather than the idea of markets trading goods. This is especially true for the individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, who drew a line between capitalism and the free market, opposing the former and championing the latter. Further down, Kropotkin will talk about the individualist anarchists and disagree with them--Kropotkin himself is an anarcho-communist, who thinks communal ownership--and a more equality-based system of rewarding work--is essential. There are anarchists (anarcho-capitalists) who support both free markets and "bourgeois ownership", but we're not talking about them here.

I do not consider myself an anarchist of any type, strictly speaking. I do not believe that either anarchy (meaning modern society without government) or socialism (as defined by Kropotkin as abolishing exploitation of labor by non-laborers) is possible--perhaps not at all in the case of anarchy, and definitely not right away in the case of both anarchy and socialism. Of course, I tend to lean toward the individualists in distrusting communal economics altogether, but I also distrust selfish individualistic economics too, so it evens out :-)

Anyway--I don't know this, but it seems that when Kropotkin talks about socialists disbelieving that capitalist exploitation can be ended right away, he may be referring to the more democratic socialists of the Edward Bernstein and Fabian Society varieties, rather than militant, ends-justify-means non-democratic elitists like Lenin's Communist Party. If I remember my history right, it seems that the anti-democratic element of state socialism (as opposed to anarchism) wasn't really around in 1901 when Kropotkin wrote this. The Communist revolution in Russia wasn't until 1917, and in the period between the death of Marx and the Russian Revolution, I think I remember state socialism being mainly engaged in representative government and compromise, much like a contemporary Labor party or Social Democratic party in Europe. That would explain why Kropotkin seems to think state socialists don't believe in a quick move away from capitalism. Actually, Lenin himself thought Russia needed to go through a short, state-sponsored capitalist phase before the transition as well--in fact, it was largely the Leninists' reluctance to believe in a quick transition to Marxist utopia--which also featured no government--that led to the establishment of the Soviet dictatorship. But I am really digressing.

Thus, I shouldn't say too much (though I will) about how Kropotkin's idea that technological advancement makes anarcho-communism possible goes directly against what contemporary primitivists say--that advanced civilization and technology make anarchy impossible. But non-primitivist anarchists all think primitivists are wackos. I don't know much about how technological civilization helps or hurts anarchy--I just hope the primitivists don't start committing genocide to curb population size, which some primitivists have hinted at. All I can say is, if civilization and high population make anarchy impossible, we'll just have to do without anarchy until we can slowly reduce the number of births to reduce population without killing anyone already on the planet.

76 - [. . .] The opinions of the anarchists concerning the form which the remuneration of labor may take in a society freed from the yoke of capital and State still remain divided.
To begin with, all are agreed in repudiating the new form of the wage system which would be established if the State became the owner of all the land, the mines, the factories, the railways, and so on, and the great organizer and manager of agriculture and all the industries. If these powers were added to those which the State already possesses (taxes, defence of the territory, subsidized religions, etc.), we should create a new tyranny even more terrible than the old one.
The greater number of anarchists accept the communist solution. They see that the only form of communism that would be acceptable in a civilized society is one which would exist without the continual interference of government, i.e., the anarchist form. And they realize also that an anarchist society of a large size would be impossible, unless it would begin by guaranteeing to all its members a certain minimum of well-being produced in common. Communism and anarchism thus complete each other.
However, by the side of this main current there are those who see in anarchism a rehabilitation of individualism.
This last current is, in our opinion, a survival from those times when the power of production of food-stuffs and of all industrial commodities had not yet reached the perfection they have attained now. In those times communism was truly considered as equivalent to general poverty and misery, and well-being was looked at as something which is accessible to a very small number only. But this

77 - quite real and extremely important obstacle to communism exists no more. [ . . . ]
Be this as it may, the individualist anarchists subdivide into two branches. There are, first, the pure individualists, in the sense of Max Stirner, who have lately gained some support in the beautiful poetical form of the writings of Nietzsche. But we have already said once how metaphysical and remote from real life is this "self-assertion of the individual;" how it runs against the feelings of equality of most of us; and how it brings the would-be "individualists" dangerously near to those who imagine themselves to represent a "superior breed"--those to whom we owe the State, the church, modern legislation, the police, militarism, imperialism, and all other forms of oppression.
The other branch of individualist anarchists comprises the mutualists, in the sense of Proudhon. However, there will always be against this system the objection that it could hardly be compatible wihth a system of common ownership of land and the necessaries of production. Communism in the possession of land, factories, etc. and individualism in production are too contradictory to coexist in the same society--to say nothing of the difficulty of estimating the market value or the selling value of a product by the average time that is necessary, or the time that was actually used, in producing it. To bring men to agree upon such an estimation of their work would already require a deep penetration of the communist principle into their ideas--at least, for all produce of first necessity.

Note: This last part of Kropotkin's agrument, in the paragraph above, may be disagreed with by mutualists, geolibertarians, and others. To insist too strongly that being paid for the value of one's own work is incompatible with communual control of workplaces, etc, may give too much ammunition to those who claim capitalism to be the only way to preserve individual freedom. Of course, this largely comes down to the distinction some theorists make between capitalism--as elitist exploitation of producer/workers--on one hand and the free market--as being allowed to trade and be paid for the value of one's labor--on the other. Kropotkin seems to think this distinction--made by many individualist anarchists--is impossible, but I'm not so sure. I am recording Kropotkin's writings not because I agree with his every word, but because I respect him and think his thought-provoking ideas have relevance even for people who don't agree with him entirely. Furthermore, I agree with a lot of what he writes, just not everything.

81 - [. . .] Moreover, the whole of political economy appears to us in a different light from that in which it is seen by modern economists of both the middle-class and the social-democratic camps. The scientific method (the inductive method of natural sciences) being utterly unknown to them, they fail to give themselves any definite

82 - account of what constitutes "a law of nature," although they delight in using the term. They do not know--or if they know they continually forget--that every law of nature has a conditional character. In fact every natural law always means this: "If certain conditions in nature are at work, certain things will happen." [. . .]
So far academic political economy has been only an enumeration of what happens under the just-mentioned conditions--without distinctly stating the conditions themselves. [ . . .]
And yet, in our opinion, political economy must have an entirely different problem in view. It ought to occupy with respect to human societies a place in science similar to that held by physiology in relation to plants and animals. It must become the physiology of society. It should aim at studying the needs of society and the various means, both hitherto used and available under the present state of scientific knowledge, for their satisfaction. [ . . .]

Note: I don't remember if I got this idea from Kropotkin, but it's one I've had for a while. Poltical theory needs to be based on political-science theory, and political science needs to be as scientific as it can be.

Neandertals, Freak Dancing, and the Case for Cutting Off Hakim Bey's Balls

2005-12-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be male? That's the question I'm mainly going to talk about here. Specifically, I'd like to ask, is testosterone a poison?

It's no secret I have a bit of a Napoleonic complex because I'm 5'5" and weigh between 125 and 130 pounds. For years -- maybe even most of my life -- I've wished, off and on, that I could be more masculine than I am, or more masuline than I seem to be. I've also spent varying amounts of time and energy trying to become more masculine in my own eyes.

Since graduating in May, I've become somewhat more serious about the weightlifting routine that I have been doing, to some degree, since even before high school. This increased dedication has gotten slightly better focus after I got some workout pointers, first from my friend Izzy at Thanksgiving break, and then still more pointers from my friend Luke, who has been working out at a gym. I have combined this with cardio exercise: lots of bicycling in the summer, and more recently, skiing and some stationary-bike work.

I haven't bought protein supplements for a few months, but I've been trying to increase my protein intake and my overall food intake. This has coincided with my no longer eating at the college cafeteria, where I had been experimenting with vegetarianism while investigating Buddhism. Because I now get most of my meals from my parents, vegetarianism is not an option most of the time anymore. And frankly, I had decided that I would not bother with vegetarianism -- for better or worse -- even when not around my parents. This has been largely because of the following:

1. My increased need for protein

2. My parents' serious worry about my being malnourished -- for a while I hovered between 115 and 125 lbs. while at college, both before and after trying vegetarianism (I used to make an exeption the week before I was due to be able to give blood to the Red Cross again; I would eat beef and any other meat and take iron tablets for a whole week to bring up my iron for my red-blood-cell count, as I was borderline anemic);

3. The fact that I usually eat either a) with my parents or from my parents' fridge, or b) with my friends. My parents would NEVER let me be a vegetarian, and my friends -- mainly conservatives -- would just be annoyed at my not being able to eat where they want;

4. A bad personal history with regard to both animals rights and the consequences of following religious rules too closely. See, I've got Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and concern for animal rights once compelled me to do all sorts of crazy things in order to avoid killing insects. I only got over that when I actually forced myself to stop caring about animal rights. Also, I went through a Christian fundamentalist phase in high school that really freaked my parents out and ended up really annoying me myself. Third, when I was a young child, I had gone through an Obsessive-Compulsive "session" in which I thought God was threatening me with hell if I didn't do pointless OCD-type things to prove my faith. Because my vegetarianism was brought on pretty much entirely by my investigation of Buddhism, I was aware of my own history regarding these matters and didn't want to let them get out of hand. Thus, now that vegetarianism would be so difficult to follow, I cannot let myself get dragged into another compulsive schtick based on religion and animal rights.

5. The fact that I cannot avoid the suffering and/or death of both humans and non-humans (ie, my leather hiking boots; all my sweatshop clothes; bananas and sugar; my SUV I can't get rid of yet) making it seem

rather -- I don't know -- illogical to deny myself protein BECAUSE (AND THIS IS IMPORTANT):

6. The similarly illogical yet more closely obeyed feeling that failing to be masculine would mean failing to be moral, and that being veggie and cutting out protein would keep me from being masculine.

Failing to be masculine would be failing to be moral? I can't really explain it, but yes, that's how I felt. I could venture some partial and tenative explainations dealing with my medical deferment from the military and my admiration for both my father and my friends Ryan and Rob, but I can't say for sure that those are the whole story. The point is this: I know (or sometimes think I know) two things about myself. One is that I'm not very masculine. The other is that I'm not very moral. Deep down in my brain, I feel my wussiness and my immorality are linked. Largely this is connected to the ideal of self-sacrifice that I sense most viscerally when I think of men who are brave enough to die in wars.

Now, I know this not one-to-one, and I've kept in mind that I consider to extremely it immoral to be misogynistic or to think women could be inferior (I've often wondered if I have any misogynistic streak, both because I have few females friends and because I used to intensely dislike my sister growing up. I have struggled NOT to be misogynistic). I even think that self-sacrifice--even to the point of death as in war--may more properly be considered a feminine trait because of all that women sacrifice as mothers to their children.

In fact, I had come up with a theory that not only preserves the importance of both masculinity and femininity, but also contributed to making me want to be more masculine. The idea goes something like this:

There are character traits that our society wrongly or at least partly wrongly believe to be either masculine or feminine. Some of these stereotyped traits are virtues, and some are vices (in whatever objective morality there is, not in society). Some of these supposedly masculine traits are virtuous -- courage, the ability to get things done, tough love, maybe even "energy and drive". Some of these "manly" traits are bad -- aggression, lack of empathy, basically the last 4000 years. Likewise, some of the supposedly feminine traits are virtuous -- empathy, gentleness, nurturing, lack of aggression, being slower to anger, self-sacrifice (which men mainly shown in war), not committing the vast majority of murders and assaults. And some of the stereotypically feminine traits (according to men), whether or not any notable number of women exhibit them, are bad -- cowardice, excess prissiness, lack of know-how, and basically everything you saw in the movie Mean Girls.

Of course, it is not my concern here whether most people of either sex have the stereotypical traits for their sex without any for the opposite sex. And I most emphatically deny that women are cowards, because history has shown innumerable women being brave, and scientific studies have shown women take pain better than men; how many men go through anything as painful as childbirth on as often a basis? The point is, whatever the sex of the individuals to whom these traits attach, some are good traits and some are bad. Society -- rightly or wrongly -- says some of these are masculine and others feminine, but what a person of either sex trying to be moral should do is acquire as many of the virtues and and as few of the vices as possible, without regard to whether the virtues being acquired or the vices being renounced are stereotypically of the opposite sex. That is, we all should try to be brave, have savoir-faire, energetic, empathetic, kind, nurturing, forgiving, and slow to anger -- no matter what sex we are.

Anyway, I digress. The main point here is that I thought I needed to be more masculine because I thought I basically had all of the vices of both sexes without much in the way of the virtues of either; the worst of both worlds. See, I've always had a temper; although the only two times I tried to assault anyone happened in elementary school (and didn't hurt the intended victims either time), I do have a history (mainly before taking Paxil for OCD) of screaming, saying mean and stupid things, even crying, and sometimes hitting things like doors and walls when angry.So I thought becoming more masculine would solve my problem. That is, I used to.

I'd heard of the book Demonic Males, and I knew that so much of masculinity in our culture revolves around having the ability to hurt people physically, which of course makes you a bad Buddhist. Ever since I started learning about Buddhism maybe a year ago, I've wondered about the implications and interconnections of anger, violence, and the "masculine" cultural flotsam I like, especially my favorite heavy metal music. So the idea that testosterone might be a poison did not come upon me all at once, not really. Until recently, I'd comforted myself by thinking of my theory that masculinity and femininity both have virtues.

However, what really brought home to me that being masculine might not be a good thing was a novel -- Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer. It is a science fiction book --the third in a trilogy called The Neanderthal Parallax -- but a small portion of the book talks about what happens to one of the characters, a formerly very angry man who had raped two adult women; the man's testicles are removed as punishment for his rapes, and in this section, he looks online for information regarding the effects of castration. Here are some excerpts:

Sawyer, Robert J. 2003. Hybrids. New York: Tor Books (Tom Doherty Associates, LLC)

note: there are not quotation marks around the outside of the text, for reasons of clarity regarding quotes within quotes in the text. The text of the book is shown here in green. Gaps where I did not record the text are indicated by [...]; places where the text itself has elipsis dots are indicated as they are in the text, with: . . .
--------------------------------------------------------------
p. 87 -- He had spent years being livid over this.
[...]
Now, he was just angry: an anger that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, seemed to be under control.
[...]
The answer, apparently, was yes. As he continued searching the web, he found an article from the New Times in San Louis Obispo, interviewing Bruce Clotfelter, who had spent two decades jailed for child molestation before undergoing surgical castration. " 'It was like a miracle,' Clotfelter said. 'The next morning, I realized I had gone through the night

p. 88 -- without those horrible sexual dreams for the first time in years.' "
[...]
Some more spelunking took him to the Geocities page of a person born male who underwent castration, with no hormonal treatments before or for years after. He reported: "Four days after my castration . . . it seemed that waiting for traffic lights and other little annoyances did not bother me so much . . .
"Six days post castration I retured to work. This workday was unusually hectic . . . and yet I still felt so calm when the day was all over. I was definitely feeling the effects of castration and most certainly felt better all the time without testosterone.
"Ten days post castration I felt as a feather floating around everywhere. I just kept feeling better and better. For me the serenity was the strongest of the castration effects, followed by the decrease in libido."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought about my own lifelong struggle with my temper. I had recently lost my temper, in a sense, on the

e-mail listserv for the Ohio Working Group on Latin America (OWGLA), in an argument about whether the other listserv members' support for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is justified (I said no). In the course of my e-mail communications on Chavez with the listserv, I used some cuss words. I don't remember anything besides "damn" in one of my earlier e-mails -- ironically, however, the big commotion came after I had calmed down somewhat, but still wanted to make a point.

I had signed off on a calmer, slightly apologetic later post with a farewell I thought was tongue-in-cheek and which I believed would convey the residue of anger I still had, as well as reminding the old hippies that we don't have to be so boringly unexcited even when we're pacificistic. Instead of "sincerely," I ended the e-mail with "Namas-fucking-te", a play on the traditional hippie salute of Namaste, taken from India. A few of the other listserv members chastized me for cussing, and one of them told me about how Martin Sheen, the liberal activist Catholic and movie star, carried a rosary he used whenever he cussed. I more-or-less told them that if we couldn't cuss, we weren't much different than the fundamentalists. I realized now that this was majorly stretching it, but nothing makes me more angry than being told not to be angry, especially by a bunch of hippies who are trying to essentially shout down my argument by telling me to lower my voice. That kind of languid schtick gives pacifism a bad name, I had thought. Then, after more e-mail exchanges, I was told that the OWGLA listserv just isn't the venue for cussing, not that cussing is wrong. This made me feel calmer, and I apologized (I hope I did a better job than at first time).

Anyway, the OWGLA argument happened over a couple days around the time I was reading Hybrids. I thought about my temper. Suddenly the lesson of Demonic Males was brought home to me. Now I wondered, is testoterone a poison? I used to think I wasn't masculine enough, and pretty much only thing to put a break to this feeling was the metaphorical idea of Buddha and Gandhi tsk-tsk-ing about my death metal CDs. After reading Hybrids, though, I had an even stronger sense I was too masculine.

Maybe discouraging all anger and cussing is only languid and weak if you look at it with the ideal of masculine "hardness". Adjectives of limpness and weakness came to mind when I was stewing over the OWGLA folks telling me not to get angry--actually, I thought I understood Nietzsche's complaints against "priestly morality." Maybe if I was a woman, the idea of never being angry wouldn't bore me.

I may be a failure as a man where it counts to be a man, but I'm still just enough of a man to have all the faults that go along with balls. I later read on Wikipedia that some sexual predators have still committed such crimes after removal of their testicles, but that's all I know for now, and Wikipedia's not always right.

Okay, backtrack. A few days before reading the above section of Hybrids, I had just read an interesting article on the web titled "Religion and Revolution", by a man named Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing under the pen name Hakim Bey. I thought this article was inspiring. For a couple of days I wanted to find out more about Hakim Bey on the web, but didn't get the chance. Then I read the Hybrids excerpt above, which was sort of a downer. Finally I got the chance to look up more on Bey/Wilson. I hoped that some of what he would have to say might cheer me up and give me hope despite feeling that I was dirty and sinful for being male.

Well. I found out Bey is a goddamn pedophile. I haven't found any info on whether he's ever been accused of molesting a specific child, but in his writings, he does sometimes try to defend pedophilia, and other writings of his describe children in erotic terms. Just for the record, I REALLY do NOT like that shit at all in any way. I want to make it as clear as possible that I deeply and totally hate anything related to hurting children.

Needless to say, now I was really pissed off. I still don't know what to do about being male. In the days since these events first happened and I started writing this, I've more or less come out of my funk, like I always do. I get in a bad mood over some abstract philosophical problem for a day or too, and then I explain it away or stop thinking about it. That's basically what I've done now; I've lately been telling myself that my original theory about masculinity and femininity both having necessary virtues is good enough for now.

However, I should mention that the blame against testosterone for aggression is at least partly justified, as can be seen in this excerpt from the Medical Science Monitor article:

------------------------
Testosterone is a determinant for the onset of aggressive behavior
in animals and in man. This assertion, drawn from
empirical observations, has been confi rmed by several experimental
studies performed in animals and man. Testosterone
receptors in the CNS are located above all in neurons belonging
to the hypothalamic nucleus, which is involved in
aggressive behavior. After testosterone links to its receptor
it is aromatized into estrogens within the neurons. The estrogens
determine the increase in aggressiveness in animals.
In order to show aggressive behavior in adult age, the presence
of adequate testosterone quantities in the fetal period
in primates and in the prenatal period in other animals is
essential; the aromatization of testosterone into estrogens
in this period of life steers the brain in a masculine direction,
not only from an endocrinological, but also a behavioral
point of view. The effect of testosterone is correlated
with the infl uence that it exerts on some neurotransmitters
and neuromodulator levels, as well as on their own receptors.
In particular, an inverse relation between plasma and
cerebrospinal fl uid testosterone levels and brain 5HT levels
exists, as a lack of brain 5Ht leads to an increase in aggression
in all the considered species.
It is necessary, however, to apply common sense when extrapolating
the convincing experimental data from animal
to man. In the case of the latter, it is indeed also necessary
to take into account the environmental, social, and cultural
factors which can attenuate or increase the infl uences of
biological factors.
------------------------------------------------

So there's that.

I should add some more stuff that, in timeline, is going to make all this more confusing. About maybe a month before I read either Hakim Bey or Hybrids, I had gone dancing up at a club in Akron; it had been only my second time ever going clubbing. That night, I had danced with a lovely young lady in what can most modestly be described as the contemporary style. This had been the first time in maybe eight years that a young woman had even demonstrated attraction to me, to say nothing of freak dancing. I had a great time, and I extend my deepest thanks to the mystery woman wherever she may be. Nonetheless, this messed with my emotions and my mind for a couple of days afterward; the following night, I broke down weeping for no reason. Then the month past, and I read first "Religion and Revolution" and then Hybrids, and also had my OWGLA argument. I worried about testoterone poisoning for a few days, then cooled down through rationalizing it like always.

Then came New Year's Eve, which as I write the words of this very sentence, was just last night (other parts of this post have been written at different times). In a better mood about my maleness, I freak danced with three different young ladies, whom I extend my most gentlemanly graditude here in cyberspace. I had also tried to initiate dances with some other women there; I had (more-or-less) tried not to be too invasive of any young women's personal space without their consent, although I know a few of the other women with whom I tried and failed to dance most likely did not appreciate my advances (I was completely sober and drank nothing all night or earlier, by the way).

I wonder if I had seemed creepy to any of the women who had rebuffed me. I also wonder if I'd done anything too wrong in the minds of the women I did dance with. I did make the mistake of being a bit too forward with my first dance partner, who gently redirected my explorations (which may or may not have led to her walking away from me a little later). The next two times, I let the ladies take the direction of such matters to a larger extent, and I think the results were more pleasing to them. At any rate, I hope I didn't come off as too much of a boor. I've heard some women say they don't like having men grind on them while dancing, and I don't want to have made anyone uncomfortable in that sense. I don't know however much these two nights of dancing relate to how sinful my masculinity is, but it's another factor in the equation.

In closing, the jury is still out in my mind as to whether it's a sin to have balls, but then, there are several everyday not-thought-of-as-sinful things that may or may not be sinful. Some things are for sure, though: rape, child abuse, murder, and many of the other things that have unfortunately gone along with having balls are most definitely a sin in my view of the world. And I hope I am "man enough" to live righteously, whether cussing out Martin Sheen's rosary, cutting off Hakim Bey's balls, or just cutting a rug with those of my fellow human beings called women.

Some websites related to this post are:

An exposé and denunciation of Hakim Bey as a child molester:
http://libcom.org/library/leaving-out-ugly-part-hakim-bey

"Religion and Revolution", the article by Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson):
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/millennium/religion.html

The Medical Science Monitor article quoted above, in PDF format, about testosterone and aggression:
http://www.medscimonit.com/pub/vol_11/no_4/4259.pdf

A news article about a violent rapist who wishes to be castrated to stop his desires to hurt women. The story quotes real-life castrated convict Bruce Clotfelter. I believe this might be the article refered to as real-life infor source in the excerpt from the fictional book Hybrids I quoted above:

http://newtimes-slo.com/archive/2003-09-11/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_04252002.html

Why Hugo Chavez sucks

2005-12-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the OWGLA listserv, by coincidence I also got in an argument with my co-listservers recently about Hugo Chavez, president-til-who-knows-when of Venezuela. They told me to get better info on Chavez, so I damn well did. Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to the OWGLA listserv with links to stuff condemining Chavez for being a megalomaniacal son of a bitch.

========

Here's some documentation. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to read through all of these entirely at such short notice, but here you go. Amnesty International distrusts Chavez, Human Rights Watch distrusts Chavez, even the BBC distrusts him. Oh, and look into the events of April 11. Last but not least, should I mention the evidence that Chavez has been supporting Middle Eastern terrorists? YES, i KNOW Bush supports terrorism against the poor of the earth, and that is certainly bad enough. But I'm talking about the people who blew up the Trade Center towers. Chavez supports those people. Do you want to prove those Republicans who accuse leftist pacifists of aiding terrorism right? Jeez, I thought it was just rhetoric, but maybe not. Now the burden of proof is on you, my friends, to show that you're not the proverbial "useful idiots" Lenin talked about. I'll be damned if I'm ever a useful idiot for bin Laden, and if you let your hatred of Bush make you think Bush is worse than bin Laden, then I guess I know which side you're on. Why don't you try convincing me Amnesty International is a reactionary tool.
http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/ven-summary-eng

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/24/venezu10368.htm

http://www.aporrea.org/dameverbo.php?docid=19524 (español)

http://www.11abril.com/index/especiales/destino_RR.asp (español)

http://www.npwj.org/?q=node/1545

http://www.analitica.com/va/ttim/international/4969131.asp

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3247816.stm http://venezuelatoday.net/jimmy-carter-center+venezuela+referendum.html

Peace out, Justin

Aging gracefully at Cleveland Screaming, or, Zen and the Art of Moshing

2005-12-11T11:32:00.000-08:00

Last night (Dec. 10, 2005), my friend Rob (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=63438600) and I went to a punk concert at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, an event called Cleveland Screaming. One of the bands there was Zero Defex, the former hardcore-punk band of Brad Warner, Zen master and author of Hardcore Zen.

Rob and me aren't real big punk fans-- we're both more metalheads, sharing an interest in System of a Down and Metallica. But we also like Motorhead and each have a dash of punk found in our respective CD collections, so when I invited Rob, he said okay. For my part, I figure that, frankly, it all sounds close enough for a live concert with the dials up to 11, especially when you want to get your mosh on. And while we both kind of fault punk for having a low level of musicianship and originality, well, SOAD has been known to spring some simple, cliche chords too, and anyway, that's not what I want to blabber about tonight.

Getting back on topic: Cleveland Screaming featured local bands, a mixture of both current bands as well as (and this was the really noteworthy part), a few bands that hadn't played together since the '80s, including Zero Defex (they played fourth).

The show had a solid enough opening by a current-generation band, a trio with two females called ... something I don't remember (no, that's not the name, but it would be a good name for a punk band, huh?). They had good attitude--always good to see the ladies rockin' through the glass ceiling/ Then came one of the reunited '80s bands, called the Chrome Kickers.

Now, do a little math here. When these guys in the Chrome Kickers had formed their angry, snotty hardcore punk band in the '80s, we can assume they were roughly in their twenties. In 2005, they were now approximately in their forties. Onto the stage came four chubby, balding guys who each looked like they could be some teenager's dad, and probably were. Who knows what had happened in their lives in the twenty-odd years since they had last kicked chrome together onstage. They're not quite as old as my dad, but close enough. Hard to think of them being hardcore punks.

And wouldn't you know it? They fucking rocked. For a good part of their set, I couldn't stop laughing. Not really at them, but just because it was kind of funny -- these potbellied soccer dads flailing at their instruments and bellowing hearty, snide sing-along choruses -- but also because it made me so goddamn happy. And they really fucking rocked. That bears repeating. If you'd have had your eyes closed, you wouldn't have guessed they were middle-aged.

After a few songs, the Chrome Kickers got off the stage and came back five minutes later with a different drummer, now calling themselves The Plague. This seemed to reflect some lineup and name change undergone in their formative years, but by whatever name, they still rocked.

Anyway, I digress. What made me so happy about these old guys rocking out was basically this: I'm 24 years old right now. I just graduated college, and was SUPREMELY lucky enough to get a great job (ie, one that doesn't make my knees give out). I like my job, sure, but I just feel like I'm getting old and that all the cool things I should have spend my youth doing never got done. I only went to one political protest in my college career (in Columbus, against the SOA), and I sorta wish I'd gone to more. I wish I'd had a drum set in high school. I wish I'd done some of the more harmless Cacophony Society-type shit. I wish I knew what I wish I'd done in more than a vague way.

I guess the point is, I figure once I hit 30 it'll be more or less illegal for me to do anything really free-your-mind-y. I mean, grownups don't have fun. You ever see anyone over 30 having real fun? I don't just mean occasional social drinking (which I've come to understand can be fun as long as you don't actually get drunk). I mean real fucking antiauthoritarian fun. No, you probably haven't. Everybody over 30 is miserable; that's the rule. And if you try to have any real fun -- or even more than that, if you try to stand up for your unorthodox political beliefs, or even be a bit of a friendly non-conformist -- well, everybody just gets on you for being immature. I mean, having ideals and being unafraid to show personality is a kid thing, right? (as far as ideals: First, the only grownups who are liberal are NPR twits, everybody knows that. Second, even conservatism is looked down upon in politely tepid society, if it's too inspired).

Well, rock is supposed to shake you up, and that night the Chrome Kickers/the Plague showed me that you can actually be cool and non-conformist and fun when you've gotten a bit older. Just because you're out of school and have a job doesn't mean you have to start taking miserable pills (at least not when you're off work). Thanks, guys.

And thanks, too, to Zero Defex. Do not think that I would forget them. Because although this realization about getting old came to me during the Chrome Kickers' set, I should definitely mention that Zero Defex not only hammered this message home, but inspired me in an even greater way.

The main reason -- well, pretty much the whole reason I'd giving up a chance to go skiing in Mansfield that day -- was because I wanted to meet Brad Warner. I realize I've mentioned Warner a couple of times in this blog, and I don't want to seem like a stalker, or, almost as bad, some kind of sycophant. I don't necessarily agree with Warner on everything -- I have a bit more lenient approach toward angry instincts, I often read while I'm eating, and I gave up vegetarianism. But it's pretty much due to his book Hardcore Zen that I really got interested in Buddhism, and even though I cannot in good conscience call myself a Buddhist, learning about Buddhist ideas have radically changed the way I think about things. I cannot go back to how I philosophically organized things before learning about Buddhism, and the changes to my thinking have been a breath of fresh air (no other phrase comes to mind) for my approach to politics, religion, and most importantly, interpersonal relations. And I have Warner to thank for much of this.

Before I went to the concert, I listened to some MP3s of Zero Defex from a link on Warner's blog (see my links page). I wasn't really impressed, so I didn't expect them to be great. But you know what? They were great. To give them their due, they also fucking rocked. Because of my low expectations, I'm pretty sure I don't just think that because of Warner. Hearing them live helped me "get it", I daresay, in a way that wasn't clear for me hearing their MP3s.

See, Zero Defex didn't sound much like the Chrome Kickers/the Plague. The first one-and-a-quarter bands had a really cool hardcore sound that appealed to both Rob and me as metalheads; it was almost like metal, so balls-to-the-wall aggressive. Now Zero Defex was aggressive too; they had energy out the proverbial ying-yang. But they were more ... I guess you could say avant garde.

That sounds like it sucks, I know. And actually, I can see how someone would think it sucks. Rob didn't really think it was all that great; he didn't complain about it, but he did mention that it seemed kind of incoherent -- like I said, Rob told me he prefers vocals to be a bit more distinct and sing-along-able, and I can understand that. (We were both singing along to SOAD's song "Toxicity" on the way home). And I'm sure you could complain about how short some of the songs were. None of them were very long, and a few were so short they were basically absurd -- "Drop the A-Bomb on Me" really is about eighteen seconds long, like Warner's book says. I hadn't understood how a song could possibly be that short.

Anywho, I liked what I heard. It was, as Warner says in his book, "dirt simple" (page 24), but as much as I may be starting to develop in interest in tech metal, the minimalist approach is still cool too. It was just really different and really energetic. You could have moshed to it if you'd had the time to start before it was over.

I really got to give kudos to Zero Defex's vocalist, Jimi Imij -- he really stole the show. Basically think of a hyperactive homeless person with Tourette's. What could be more rock star than that? Plus he's got the coolest stage name ever. It kind of sucked that Tommy Strange, the original guitarist, wasn't there -- Jimi told the crowd that the guy playing guitar was a replacement from another local band they admired, I don't think I caught his name or his band. That guy said he was the young guy there at 38. Oh, and the drummer was awesome too. He fucking stood up through the whole show and wouldn't stop smiling.

I got to talk to Warner after the set. I told him I'd gotten into Buddhism from reading his book (I didn't tell him I don't consider myself a Buddhist, but I don't think labels matter anyway). He said that was cool and he commented on my shirt, which said "I'm a Poser". I told him I was a poser in Buddhism too.

Notes: Some from years ago, some newer

2005-11-07T17:01:00.000-08:00

The following is taken from notes of mine that are all at least some months to a year, and in some cases
several years, old. Where i wished, i added or changed things while typing them here. I cannot stress enough
that many, perhaps most of these notes are, as far as i can remember, at least a few years old as ofthe
time of this posting:

---------------------------------------------------------

1. 11/22/04

If you care about people, please allow them to rule themselves. If you do not believe people are capable of
ruling themselves well, please do not care enough about them to keep them from ruling themselves.

------------------------------------------------------------

2. (date unknown --probably about same year as "level where the spirit" poem):

[dealing with "political thermodynamics"]

1. Power abhors a vaccuum. If rulers are forced out of power, new rulers will take their place.
2. An institution will tend to remain as it is unless acted upon -- change started will keep going unless
stopped.
3. Power has entropy -- powerful because less
4. Political actions have reactions.
5. Democracy is equilibrium of power among individuals -- state power tries to get to
6. Better to yield to natural flow than to fight.

Force = mass X acceleration --> what are political equivalents?
Thermodynamics: 0. There is no "power-over" between two people with the same amount of power.
1. Political power cannot be created or destroyed -- any power one loses, another may take and vice versa.
2. Power will not go by itself from a less-powerful person to a more-powerful person.
3. Absolute zero? -273.16 degrees C (-459.67 degrees F)

mass maybe = entrenched power
acceleration = change
force = political movement

Powerful and powerless do NOT equal hot and cold, but rather giving and taking power (?) This is where
natural "should be" is contradicted. Those taking power may have more power than those giving, UNlike in
physics. This is because of free will. Political dynamics work with himan free will. In order for the powerful
not to "leak" power, he/she has to keep taking more power from others --> imperialism, expansion, "active"
tyranny, as opposed to decaying "passive" reactionaries. This is why capitalism works as a status quo,
because it changes. How easy it is to change a system depends on how entrenched the system is.
Marc 17 on the Internet [ http://www.painandgreed.com/marc17/pages/marxthermo.html] writes that the
powerful keep power by "insulating" themselves with laws, etc, or by taking energy from outside as in
imperialism, etc.

Addition 6/12/07: See also

http://www.punkerslut.com/articles/physicsofanarchy.html

God created what is (1) and what should be (2). (1) constantly changes, but (2) stays the same for any given
moment of (1).

Andrew Galambos, who invented "Volitional Science", said that all creatures need to make "profit" by taking
more energy than they give in order to counter entropy -- called life "primordial property". He defined
morality as the absence of coercion, and defined coercion as taking another's property, since one can only
take more energy from a system by increasing entropy.

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" --> like Tao, each has opposite. One person, (A), forces
another, (B), to do what B does not want to do by giving B pain. this pain is physical force applied the the
"system" of B's body in order to disorganize it (creak the skull, etc). This causes the psychological reaction of
pain in B. Pain tells B to avoid the force that's trying to disrupt his/her body's order (this order is what B's
body "wants" its form to be according to God's Will). Violation of another person's gift of free will equals
coercion, which equals force, which equals pain for the coerced person.
In our universe, time is one-dimensional, that is, it moves in a line, so God's Purpose is revealed as a process
to us even though it really is already complete, fully revealed in universes where time is three-dimensional.
[In my notes, i draw a diagram of a Jewish-style Star of David, with one triangle labeled "time" and the other
labeled "space". I meant the three points of each triangle to stand for the three dimensions of space and the
hypothetical three dimensions of time.]

Is pain a signal that the Tao is being violated, or is pain only one side of the yin-yang? Maybe the unfolding
plan of God is to eliminate pain by smothering from avoidance.

In a free market, profit = zero, like the law of thermodynamics says that heat cannot flow between two bodies
of the same temperature. Zero profit is "heat death." Therefore, a free market leads to economic/politcal heat
death, but does this heat death equal "anarchy/democracy"? Does it equal a uniting with God like in Vedanta?
Life forms need the "profit" of extra energy input to live, but is that necessarily coercive and/or immoral?
If love is attraction, then maybe it is like gravity -- but does any aspect of love let things stay separate by not attracting?

How does entropy fit with the tendency to complexity? Entropy happens when the heat in (A) equals the
heat in (B). This is what causes movement, and it is stopped when the heat in A equals the heat in B. The
tendency to complexity happens when a "vacuum" of cold exists near heat; entropy sets in when the
accessable vacuum is filled.

The heat moves into a vacuum; heat --> movement --> complexity --> consciousness?

The Big Bang singularity may have been the original hot place, and it expanded to fill the original cold
vacuum to start God's plan toward life. Was the singularity the same as heat death?
"Matter is nothing in pieces" -- heat death -- infinite singularity -- infintesimal--> same thing?
Maybe that is what restarts the cycle --> but entropy spreads out while complexity draws together in
love/gravity. Love/gravity => new singularity --> entropy => heat death; opposites but the same in the
Tao? If so, what are we counteracting by fighting entropy? Schrodiger's cat is NOT both alive and dead at
once.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

3. (date unknown -- year of class on presidential management styles)

(M) monotheism ethics - because of God's love for persons
(P) pantheism ethics - because everything is part of God - is this sort of self-interest?
maybe P is from the right side of the brain (loving, emotional) and M is from the left side of the brain
(rational) -- but P is for self-interest and M is for love. Is love because we're all connected a type of big self-
interest?

individual community
--------------------------------
left right
reason emotion
soul no-soul
change stay same
personal God "impersonal" Ultimate Reality
transcendent God immanent God
"Thou" "Thou and I"

note: I do not know whether any of the particular terms in the "individual" and "community" columns actually belong in the columns they are in and not the opposite column.

We can never be God because we can never get rid of our egos.
Love is pleasurable -- one wants to act good toward those whom one loves.

love -> God - pleasure
pleasure/pain -> heaven/hell
[arrows pointing from "heaven" to "God" and from "pleasure" in "pleasure/pain" to "pleasure" next to "God"]

---------------------------------------------------------------------

4. (date unknown -- probably about same year as "be the new you" poem)

Other's rights should be worth more to one that one's own rights
Life [greater than ( >)] liberty greater than > property - BUT third party's rights are worth the same as other "others'" rights:
A = oneself, "me"
B = one other person
C = a third person, a "third party", second other than oneself
life of B = life of C
life of B > liberty of C
life of B > life of A
but is the liberty of B > the life of A?

land/capital: "ownership of something without working to produce the value from it -- illegitimate

capital/labor: workers who get provisional rights to part of the common store by working to mix their labor with things and thus bring value -- legimitate -- workers

How to make free-market system that gives benefit of production to the workers instead of to the "employers" and "owners"?
The bad thing is NOT the market - free society would have to allow trade - but rather the bad thing is rule by the "capitalists" who "own" without Lockean right to own - or any other elite.
1. market socialism 2. workplace democracy 3. syndicalism 4. consumer and producer co-ops 5. microlending 6. labor unions 7. mutualism

land/ source of capital -- environment exploited by rulers, belongs to God, to be used by everyone equally with Locke's labor thing [Locke's idea of property and "mixing labor" with things] for private ownership.
Workers are also exploited -- environment and workers are on the same side
Indigenous people --> enslaved: peasants, proles -- workers descend from "natives" with environmental spirituality

--------------------------------------------------------------------

5. (date unknown -- same year as Contemporary Poltical Ideologies class)
(taken from studying Hegel and Marx and dialectical view of history, with thesis, antithesis, synthesis)

Attempts to put an end to history mean squashing the antithesis that challenges the status quo. This is bad, so attempts to end history in order to make perfect the historical progress means that rebellion against the status quo is squashed. This rebellion is what would actually make things better (although not perfect). Real progress needs the antithesis and so real progress must not EVER assume it has reached perfection.

-----

6. (following notes taken on date unknown from a book written by someone else):

Eberly, Don and Ryan Streeter. 2002. The Soul of Civil Society: Voluntary Association s and the Public Value of Moral Habits. Lexington Books [city of publication unrecorded]. Page 110

Properly reactive Properly proactive
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
equality - justice benevolence
liberty - restraint entrepeneurship*

[*my note: the authors, Eberly and Streeter, define "entrepeneurship" as duty, courage, hard work, and I quote, "the ability to agressively pursue opportunities in the face of uncertainties" (quoted page 105)

---------------------------------------------------------------

(date unknown - maybe same year as "new you" and "obj/subj, guest/host" poems; 1 of the years i had Kille in class?)

From another book by someone else
Ward, Keith. (publication date unknown). God: A Guide to the Perplexed. Page 76. (publisher & city unknown). Chapter 3 (pp. 67-100) "The Love that Moves the Sun":

"the most basic meaning of sacrifice: that you freely give to the gods part--perhaps the best part--of what they have given to you, but which you have increased by your own effort, to show what you have done (that you have 'worked well') and to express gratitude for the gods' basic provision of the necessities of life, and for their protection and help."

* * * *
my own personal comments on this passage below this in my notes:

\/ \/
like Lockean proviso sacri-fice = make sacred
subject of God
citizen of the universe

The antichrist is anyone at all you'd call the Christ

the following is also from yet another book, but i didn't record which (it was on Judaism). My bad. Interspered with the stuff from that book is my own comments - the author's and mine are mixed together. The comments that i'm almost totally sure are mine are in blue below. Also, on a separate paper i have this same chart without the Hindu gods' names or the Christian Trinity, and the words "NOT a model of God, but of his Acts"):

Yodh - starting Heh - Creation Vav - revalation Heh - return
Creator Sustainer Redeemer/ Destroyer
<--------------- Brahma Vishnu Shiva
Father? Holy Spirit? or Son? Son? or Holy Spirit?

------------------------

3/2004
from Layard, Richard. 2005 (sic; it seems to be emphasized that this was 2004). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. New York: Penguin Press. Page 21.
[note: I could not copy the actual diagram in this format, so I have just paraphrased what the diagram said. The diagram was in the shape of a square with a cross in the middle; a horizontal and vertical axis. The vertical axis had "aroused" at the top and "unaroused" at the bottom. The horizontal axis had "happy" on the left and "uhappy" on the right]

aroused and happy: joy

aroused and unhappy: agitation

unaroused and happy: contentment

unaroused and unhappy: depression

Personal note from myself paraphrased from information in the book: It is only possible to be in one of these dimensions at a time. It is not possible to be happy and unhappy at the same time, only one or the other.

10/27/04

I feel hope. I just prayed the Lord's Prayer with my mind wandering for a long time in the middle of it. When my mind wandered, i thought about my friends and what i'd like to tell them. Earlier i had felt a bit of hope and happiness, and i had thought i should write about it, but figured it was fleeting (it was during prayer, so i also thought i should continue praying as i had been). Not only did i think i was fleeting, but also that happy feelings might for me be filled with back-of-my-mind dread that things may go wrong after all and that i'll feel bad when they do go wrong. But now i do NOT think i feel that way -- hard to say. I prayed that God would not let me be tempted or let me be in bad luck/pain/poverty/disability, etc, but that instead God would help me do the right thing even if God did let me be tempted or have hardship in Wisdom (paraphrase of Lord's Prayer). Because it is NOT because of good luck that we do should do good, but rather because it is the right thing to do. The feeling that God would help me through any possible bad times was comforting and gave me hope and cheered me up.

11/1/04

I think maybe the "kernal of truth" in the ancient Israelites' insistance that their God was the only real god and that their neighbors' gods were idols, was that they vaguely perceived that God is more than just someone who gives you stuff if you do the magic spells. God is the source of all existence and the force behind the moral law of all Creation. This, perhaps, can be likened to Gautama Buddha when he dismissed the idea of the Hindu gods being immortal or all-powerful. Instead, Gautama turned toward a less anthropomorphic conception, a conception of the Dharma and of the ultimate ground of being, the truth of reality, being describable by metaphors of Nirvana.

11/4/04

Desire to rule is linked to desire for one's own freedom (libertarian militias and union fundamentalists [sic]; pre-1917 libertine leftists and Soviet dictators; economic laissez-faire tied to respect for law and order and state and strong military; communists and anarchists). One wants one's own will done => so one wants to be free, but also wants to have others do what one wants too.

11/7/04

Democracy is a kind of social organizational technology for achieving the purposes of freedom, equality, and so on. The freedom etc are the ends-- the democracy is very good to have, but it is only a technology, like a sewer system for the purpose of sewage disposal. It is thus NO more tied to Western culture than are modern sewer systems or electricity. It is used because it works. Freedom and equality MAY also be means to achieving the purpose of the pursuit of happiness (ethically).

11/20/04

The Haves are too weak (physically and character-wise) to oppress the Have Notes, so they get the Have Nots, who are strong (physically and character-wise), to either oppress each other and/or oppress themselves.

---> [note says (thought of before)]:
If you would not give someone food, why would you care about his or her freedom? (i seem to remember writing this in regards to libertarian opposition to the welfare state)

2/8/(probably 2005 [same page as 4/17/05 below], but maybe 2004)

modernism/liberalism => says that society is the aggregate of individual persons
post-modernism => says that individual persons are "constructed" by social forces
BOTH are right

2/13/(05?)

Believing that video games, etc, make kids violent is similar to believing that capitalism makes us greedy. Greed and violence are innate, going back before these things in culture that we're attracted to (violent entertainment and capitalist "getting-rich"). In fact, we are attracted to violent media and capitalism precisely because of these innate drives to violence and greed.
HOWEVER, it is true that capitalism gives us the incentive to be greedy (incentive other than the drive itself; incentive that could be redirected). Is it the case, then, that violent movies, video games, etc, give incentive for violence? I think probably not, because one has no more incentive to be violent in the real world due to violent media than one would have without such media.
Of course, there is obviously an incentive when one is playing a violent video game to be violent in the game, and both games and movies may show characters being given incentives to act violent. Does this mean (and i don't know) whether this teaches kids falsely that they have an incentive to violence in the real world that they don't actually have?

4/17/05

The Iron Law of Oligarchy means that there cannot be any "tyranny of the majority" and that all supposed examples of such majority tyranny are instead examples of demagoguery. This means that "tyranny of the majority" is NOT a possible danger of democracy. However, would majority tyranny be a possible danger of democracy if we were able to overcome the Iron Law of Oligarchy (which is what i think we should do for democracy's sake)? If such majority tyranny would not be a problem in democracy without the Iron Law, then that would mean that democracy would be the least tyrannical form of government -- but is itpossible to overcome the Iron Law of Oligarchy?

-------------

(date unknown: on page with another copy of Yodh-Heh-Vav-Heh diagram)

It should be noted that i had not necessarily meant for the following speculation to describe what i thought happened in the actual history of the world Jesus (or Buddha) were born into. This is less because of me having any particular trouble seeing Jesus or Buddha having divine inspiration as it does me having trouble thinking that any historically existing society would have had ALL of its members doing nothing but immoral and antisocial "defections" against one another all the time. Furthermore, i'm not sure it's even definitely known if the spread of Christianity or Buddhism even brought about a larger amount of altruistic behavior in general in their societies.
It might have been the case that Jesus and/or Buddha were divinely inspired in some way, and perhaps it was even the case that "defecting" was so widespread in either or both of their societies that the introduction of Christ and Buddha's altruistic teachings made a difference by appealing to people's compassionate side (ie, a sort of little everyday-type miracle). But i think the important thing is that that's how it might have worked in an ongoing series of Prisoner's Dilemma games played out in a society. And it has nothing to do, as far as i can see, with any actual blood-for-sin or evangelical "justification by faith."
The Prisoner's Dilemma games i'm talking about (with ALLD and other strategies) was run by some scientists on computer simulations described in a book called The Evolution of Cooperation that i found in the Wayne County Public Library, but i did not record the author of.

Pain in the Tao is unable to be ended because compromise in democracy leads to people not getting exactly what they want. God's Will is not coercive because we all want what God wants when (if?) our illegitimate, imaginary wants (the wants that hurt others) are stripped away. However, we can be happy without our bad wants being fulfilled. This is true because of the "mystical connectedness" that eliminates those bad wants (ie, cravings in Buddhism). The connectedness that eliminates bad desires may lead to a form of "pleasure" beyond what we think of as the pleasure-pain dichotomy.
That is why the Buddha and Christ were revolutionary. Christ introduced a form of altruism that permitted/called for self-sacrifice in order to "invade" a society populated by people living according to a strategy of ALLD (all defect) in the Prisoner's Dilemma. This "invasion" of ALLD society in turn introduced cooperation that eventually would come to be reciprocated so that cooperative strategy could replace ALLD.
The eventual reciprocation of cooperation in ALLD socierty was a miracle, because it was a transformation of consciousness that went beyond preprogrammed response --> love --> God intervened in the "game" of society to break the ALLD program mold in individual consciousness. This makes the person in question "born again." Such a consciousness change in society needed self-sacrifice to jump-start the cooperation. God had to intervene in the ALLD society to start this. He needed to be the original self-sacrifice to start the cooperation. Could this be the kernal of truth in the Christians' "salvation" story?

What we humans think is bad is pain for us, but what is good and bad to God goes beyond that --> that's why you can say God is neither foolish nor wise, but you would say He is wise if you had to pick. This is because the positive value (wise or good) means good according to God's judgment, NOT ours. God does have a standard of good and bad, right and wrong, but this is beyond our small conception -- rather a higher good.

Elitism is wrong for a country because an elitist leader cares more about his or her own power than about the people.

--------

(date unknown - probably year of presidential classes)

i got the following information from some Wooster College library book, i'm not sure which:

Jesus supported the oral Torah, which upheld saving life over purity laws (ie, the parable of the Good Samaritan). He supported this position against the position in the written Torah of the religious elites.

my comments, perhaps with other stuff from the book: The Torah that can be named is not the Eternal Torah, like the Tao.
-- elites tried to "name" Torah by writing down ritualistic laws that devalued life and real ethics, putting these things under the (bureaucratic?) legalism of purity laws
-- NOT that purity laws to be ignored - Jesus said the Law would never change - but life takes precedence

Parable of the talents says God rewards people's faithfulness in doing His Will. He is NOT said to reward people so much according to the amount of things they do in doing His Will --> goes back to rabbi teachings.

(arrows point from above to following:) like the Taoist denegration of speech -- nature being silent, the sage teaches by silence -- action of words?

"Is it not because he is selfless (wu szu) that he can fulfill himself (ch'eng ch'i szu)." (no question mark in notes)
-- Tao Te Ching 7.2

Alternative Translation:

"Isn't it simply because they are unselfish that they can satisfy their own needs?"
-- Daodejing 7.2 (Ames and Hall)

Ch'eng ch'i szu = wu szu --> everlasting ch'i power -- self is non-self -- first will be last, last shall be first -- the meek shall inherit the earth -- no-self in Mahayana Buddhism

Ch'i -- power of the Holy Spirit
Ch'i = Sanskrit prana = Hebrew ruach = Greek pneuma = the last two of these (ruach, pneuma) mean wind, breath, and/or spirit . This is all hypothetical: The terms may not actually equal each other.

Second commentary:

"Therefore in the being (yu-chih) of a thing, There is the benefit (li). In the non-being (wu-chih) of a thing, there lies its use (yung).
-- Tao Te Ching 11.2 (Chen)

In the coming into being of things is the benefit. In the non-being of things is use (service). Creation, coming into being, is good, but we serve each other by "non-action"; that is, by altruism, self-denial, self-sacrifice to make room for each other.

"The highest efficacy is like water.
It is because water benefits everything (wanwu)
Yet vies to dwell in places loathed by the crowd
That it comes nearest to proper way-making.
-- Daodejing 8.1 (Ames and Hall)

Paraphrase of and commentary on Tao Te Ching 8.1 (Chen): Water flows to the lowest point geographically, the place that others reject, because water forgets itself. The place the water flows to might be like the stone that the builders threw away that becomes the cornerstone, according to the Gospels. We serve the "lowest" among us--"the least of these"--through self-denial

Bibliography for this section:

Ames, Roger T. and David L. Hall. Daodejing - "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003 [first trade paperback edition 2004).

Chen, Ellen M. The Tao Te Ching. A New Translation with Commentary. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

A link to a science and magic article and another update on my soul's progress toward hell

2005-11-06T18:56:00.000-08:00

First, i have a link to an article about the history of science and how it is opposed to superstitions of magic. What i find most interesting about this article so far (not done reading) is that the author states that magic attempted to influence events by trying to reverse or stop or otherwise work against the laws of nature, while science does exactly the opposite.

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/magic.html

Second, an update on the state of my religiosity. I should mention that this post is actually more "recent" than the post above/after it, because this post here describes my thoughts now, while the post after/above this one is simply a transcription of written notes about my thoughts months and years in the past. I hope that is not too confusing.

I haven't done buddhist medidation for probably a few months now. Once or twice i sat on my bed with my feet on the floor and my back straight and tried to medidate that way for just a few minutes. I don't know if that position works (Brad Warner says posture is very important, but I gather from him and KP and probably some others that the back being straight is the main thing). I didn' do too well in those half-ass sessions as far as concentrating.

The question for me now is not whether i am a buddhist, because i know i'm not. The question is whether i should try to be a buddhist. In my boredom and dissatisfaction with buddhism, i've read a little on the Net here and there about, among other things, Aleister Crowley and Thelema. I also read the book Strange Angel, about rocket scientist Jack Parsons' involvement with Crowley shit. Don't worry though; i'm certainly not a disciple of that guy. I don't think it's wise to take advice on spiritual/mental discipline from a heroin addict. In addition -- dispite being far from "the wickedest man in the world" -- Crowley was not very much of an ethical paragon; he was kind of a vain jerk. Most troubling, he abused his power as head of the OTO; Strange Angel reveals how Crowley got rid of one OTO chapter leader by blatently inventing a "prophecy" that the man was a reincarnation of a god and had to go on a vision quest, thus exiling him. Perhaps more pertinent to Crowley's status as a spiritual advisor, he did not say much -- and said some things contradictory and some things troubling -- about ethics, which is the cornerstone of any spirituality i'd want to be into. A major part of my investigation into this stuff was not just the desire for religious direction as such, as much as it was scholarly curiosity and a desire to research religious/metaphysical takes on the duality between individual and community, on which i plan to write more. By the way, i found a pretty interesting article on Crowley (for whatever it's worth) here: http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/GreatBeast.htm It is what it is.

All this, of course, in addition to "magick" being a load of bullshit*. Even if magic were real, i do not think it would be spiritually healthy to use because of the major possibility (in that hypothesis) of abuse, or at least the use of magic for selfish, unspiritual ends. My spritual goal is to learn how to walk through the world in ethical harmony, not find out how to voodoo up the stock market. Nonetheless, in my made-for-TV rootlessness i looked into various other magic-related takes on religion, because let's face it; for a hippie like me, there's really only two options: buddhism/hinduism or some version of what's essentially wicca. Man, a big part of me hopes all my Christian friends don't read this; they'd freak out and they'd be even more assured i need a big-ass dose of Jesus, a gospel suppository. I can assure them that my scholarly interest in the dreaded spiritual smorgasbord does not stem from the irritations of demons from a Frank Piretti novel. In fact, a major part of my investigation into this stuff was not just the search for religious direction as such, as much as it was both scholarly curiosity and a vague plan to research various religious takes on the whole question of "individual and community" for the sake of further philosophical blog babbling of Babylon.

Altogether, for now i've decided to hold onto the teachings and mental mini-practices of buddhism that i know i agree with; that is, basically trying to be a compassionate person and realizing anger and compulsive desires for things cannot be allowed to rule me. When i get angry, i (try to) tell myself it's not skillful to act on my anger in that situation, and when i feel the need to have shit that will be detrimental to my spiritual standing, i (try to) tell myself the desire for it is no big deal and that i'm not gonna die without it. I believe, so far as i have to to get through the day, that the long arm of the universe bends toward justice, and that forgiveness is possible if we try to make amends and try hard to do better next time. (yes, and that humans are innately sinful, don't freak out). I believe (despite not putting it into practice) that THE REVOLUTION IS EVERY BREATH, whatever that means. I believe that i should do good and not do bad, and have ideas about what that means in everyday life that are not, i think, too much different from what the average person of either Christian or secular default-American understands to be ethical.

*at least, the unequivically supernatural stuff, of course, which i understand is not really emphasized today and usually dismissed as false even by magic groups. As far as the "wishing really hard to get money/ heal the sick/ find a date" stuff, i am inclined at the moment to consider that at least as good as bullshit, at least so far as i don't expect God to give me what i want when i pray for it. You see, that wishing type of magic is more or less indistinguisable from petitionary prayer, which i understand traditional Christians to believe very strongly in. I've prayed the Lord's Prayer ALMOST every night i can think of (except when i stay the night somewhere other than home) for probably several years, and as part of that, i do ask God to "give us this day our daily bread" -- which for me includes healing my dad's cancer and used to include having my now-safe-at-home friend Chris come back safe from Iraq. I don't know and cannot prove one way or the other if either prayer or hippie magic can influence events; i cannot prove it because i strongly suspect a test of such things would not reveal any statistically clear findings one way or the other regarding prayer/magic versus none on say, a patient getting better. I thank God that Chris is home safe and that my father has a higher-percentage chance of living a year than he used to; i find it spiritually healthy to attribute good things that happen to God in retrospect -- since after all, they were, as far as we theists and semi-theist optimist-agnostics know. Just because God was responsible for an event, however, does not mean that your prayer (or spooky ritual) was responsible for influencing God's Will regarding the matter. That in turn doesn't mean we stop praying for things, of course; we just don't tap our foot waiting for what we asked for because we know the statistics prove nothing, and besides, it's rude.
Perhaps Zen master Taisen Deshimaru said it better:

"In some religions people are always trying to acquire magic powers but those are not true religions ... 'To want to acquire magic powers is an egotistical desire, trivial, and ultimately of no importance. It's no different from wanting to become a prestidigitator or a circus artist. Religion is not a circus."

-- Taisen Deshimaru, from page 76 in the book "Zen Master: Practical and Spiritual Answers from the Great Japanese Master."

Great News! Chris is back!

2005-10-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

Great News indeed, orange title-words! My old high-school friend Chris Fulton is back from Iraq. On Saturday, he had a big get together. He's got all his body parts un-exploded too, which is wonderful. I am so relieved. Of course, the war goes on, and other people's friends are dying and losing limbs both in Iraq and Afghanistan. I still don't know about the war's justification. For now, I give thanks to the god of hippie liberal semi-agnostic wannabe-anarchists that Chris is okay and safe.

Ave Caesar? or, how i support the troops

2005-09-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

The following is a link to a Newsday article by Michael A. Babcock, an assistant professor of humanities at Liberty University. In it, Babcock defends the idea of America as a empire, although a benevolent one, and suggests that America embrace its destiny as an empire to actually make the world a better place. He singles out the Roman Empire as a model for America to follow in this regard.

http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=239558&Category=14

I put a link to this article because I disagree with it very strongly.

Babcock thinks he knows why i disagree with him. He writes that "Liberal elites" can't understand the rhetoric of imperial destiny because they "believe history is the product of material forces - and is never nudged onward by a transcendent will." He also writes, "Bush embraces the transcendent view - and its clear-cut vocabulary of war."

Babcock maintains. "What we're fighting for cannot be reduced to 'one set of interests' struggling against 'another set of interests.' We are fighting for things that matter - not the right to wear pith helmets or drill oil wells in distant lands. We are fighting for transcendent ideals - of freedom and human dignity." (By the way, in the original text, the single quote-marks around 'one set ...' and 'another set ..." are actually double quotes since there's no quotes around the original text of the bulk of the article).

Let me make myself as clear as I can. I don't know what reasons Bush and the rest of his administration and Congressional supporters have deep down for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know that, like Babcock says, my friend Chris Fulton, and my friend Ryan's friend Chris Rosenburger, and my acquaintance/friend Shelly's husband, and my old high-school classmate Jordan Faught have not gone to Iraq thinking they were going to fight for the right to drill oil wells, but for things that matter - specifically, for the people of America not to be killed by terrorists or by the WMDs that Saddam probably sent to Syria. And certainly they would like to see the Iraqi people have human dignity and freedom, and are glad to see that Saddam will not have his reign of terror over them anymore.

None of the reasons they are fighting, as far as I know, have anything to do with an empire. Mr. Babcock, you believe that life is not all about material forces and the battle of selfish interests, and that our war has nothing to do with the material interests of either us Americans or their corporations? Fine. I know my friends are not fighting for material interests, as i said, whatever reasons Bush himself may have -- and i have no way of knowing that one way or the other.

However, an empire is always about material interests. There has never been and never will be an empire not founding for the sake of material gain -- and gains in power -- for those in charge of the empire. Babcock, I imagine, would snort and roll your eyes at this. Typical of a liberal elite schooled in atheist Marxism to think that "material forces" are behind imperial ambitions. But again, let me be clear. If what Babcock says is true about America fighting the war on terror for freedom and dignity, then that particular rationale cannot be leading us toward any empire. And if what he says about America having a destiny as an empire is true, then what he says about freedom and transcendent values being the reason for fighting -- whatever the brave and moral soldiers on the front believe -- cannot be true.

It is not that no moral, transcendent, or even spiritual inflences can be behind the actions of humankind in history on the world stage. Indeed, I believe that they can. But with an empire -- by whatever name -- those higher, better influences are always merely invoked for the purpose of masking the true desires of elite greed. Believing this doesn't make me a Marxist any more than Babcock's own distrust of liberal elites makes him a Marxist.

True empires require domination, and domination is never just. If one believes that domination is just, then one is not actually on the side of human dignity and freedom.

As to the war on terror, i will grant that some form of violence is necessary at the very least to keep us Americans alive. I am not enough of a military strategist to know whether this or that manouver in this or that part of the world is necessary to keep Saudi engineering students with nail clippers from killing more Americans than there are American soldiers sacrificed in those manouvers. If my friend Chris and his fellow heroes believe, in their knowledge of military tactics, that such actions -- and the personal sacrificies entailed -- are necessary, then I will say, "Go ahead -- I salute you." I know the terrorists don't primarily want to take away Americans' freedom - they just want to take away our lives, which is bad enough. The Iraqis and Afghanis, for their part, have each lived long enough under dictatorships, and whether democracy is a Western invention or not, would certainly be preferable to either Saddam or the Taliban. I do not know what the future holds for those long-suffering people, but I know that the presence of American soldiers like my friend are NOT adding to these civilians' miseries, tragic mistakes and unavoidable crossfire victims notwithstanding.

I drive a Ford Escape, a big car with relatively good gas mileage for its size (I came to have it -- and pay for it -- semi-voluntarily through a complex set of circumstances). I like to have a car, and I like having gasoline, as long as real alternatives are not available yet. However, I don't think many of the people who know and care for American military personnel fighting terrorists overseas would want to those brave people to be fighting to secure oil -- whatever the ruling classes may wish. But if Babcock is right, then oil must indeed be what we're fighting for, because that's the only type of thing an empire like the Romans would ever fight for.

The point here is not haggling over the mere word "empire," as if a shift in semantics could change everything. The point is the type of reality behind that word. America could be an empire like the Romans without calling itself an empire, and, theoretically, it could call itself an empire without actually acting as with imperial dominion over far-flung lands and peoples. However, if what Babcock is advocating does not entail such dominion, then it would be foolish to call it an empire. If it does entail dominion, then it is indeed an empire like Babcock says -- although it could not then be a force for transcendent justice.

No one dominates -- as in an empire of any name -- for the purposes of universal peace and idealist principles. I believe strongly in such moral principles, which is precisely why i cannot support any empire.

It's funny -- hippie kids and activists have long called America an evil empire, burning the flag and insulting those who fight in its wars (because their parents didn't pay to send them to college). This has made some people understandably very angry to hear their beloved democratic republic seemingly slandered in that way. But then comes along someone like Micahel A. Babcock to remind us all that we leftist brats didn't originate the idea of this flawed-yet-beautiful jewel we call America being an empire.

In short, I believe in the transcendent ideal of not living under an empire.

You can't call America an empire and then berate someone for burning the flag in the same breath. I support my friend Chris and his companions-in-arms in whatever they feel it necessary to do to keep me and my loved ones at home safe from attack, and hopefully to give some Iraqis and Afghanis a taste of life without dictatorship as well. This has nothing to do with empire or oil, and if Bush or any other elite decision-makers have it in their heads that that is what our American heroes are dying for, then in that case, they would deserve whatever criticism and opposition they are receiving.

I am not one-hundred-percent certain that the particular courses of action undertaken by our government through its armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are indeed the best courses of action in terms of actually meeting the goal of stopping terrorist killings. That is, I am completely certain whether "the war is right". But I believe that whatever God is in charge of the universe's morality and reward/punishment system will forgive the soldiers on the ground in the event of any killings on their parts which are not strictly necessary (if that occurs). I hope that doesn't sound too self-righteous. Basically, I'm saying that the U.S. armed-forces personnel involved in these conflicts should kill whoever they need to kill to come home safe.

You ought to know that Liberty University, where Babcock teaches humanities, was founded by Jerry Falwell, a nationally known evangelist and frequent political actor. The Romans killed his savior.

i'm one with the universe and you're not: group and individual

2005-08-31T19:01:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder if the much-discussed division between the individual on one hand and the collective group on the other is a false division, a false dichotomy?

It seems fairly obvious to me that we are all interconnected with the people, things and world around us, and that what we do usually seems to come back to us through some sort of cause and effect. Therefore, i would claim that there is no point in trying to separate oneself from the universal oneness, or to harbor illusions of making one's personal separate consciousness immortal, because we are irreversibly part of the universal oneness just as a consequence of being alive, and there is no other way to be.

At the same time, those individualists who still feel uncomfortable with this should not dispair. Taking some vocabulary from certain turn-of-the-century British heroin-addicted brewery heirs, I think it might make sense to talk about the idea of the "True Self". According to this theory similar to that of Rousseau, we can say that whatever it is that gives your True Self its jollies is in line with everybody else's True Self anyway. The stuff you think you want to do that goes against other people is probably not your True Self, in this idea. I don't have any more proof for this than certain British heroin junkies did, but I figure it's about as good as any a way to trick yourself into doing what's best for you and everyone else in the long term -- and I do believe it is better in the LONG long term to be moral.

(i'm using some relatively esoteric terms here, and i hope you don't mind -- i got the "True Self" stuff from the crazy-ass Thelemites -- not that i'm into that, don't freak out. i've just been poking around the net looking for religious perspectives on individuality and the whole.)

Now, you may think the True Self stuff is a bunch of bullshit and that only the regular old self -- which has desires contrary to others -- actually exists. Okay, whatever -- i can't argue metaphysics that well. But for me personally (so to speak), Buddhism and personal experience have both shown me that following this normal everyday self after its every passing whim and screech for immidiate indulgence is not going to make me happy, and is not my idea of a viable religious-philosophical path.

At any rate, i figure that even if there is no such thing as a True Self out there on the astral plane eating Doritos with Aiwass, then i still don't see why we people can't find some balance between what we all want to some degree that we're all -- not really "only sort of happy," that's not what i mean -- but satisfactorally happy, to the extent that whatever other things you want can be forgotten about. Most of the stuff we want is not stuff that we actually need to live, and only the necessary stuff will be too insistent on our desires. Even if nobody really wanted to, as it turns out, reality all by its fucking self makes us compromise with each other and with certain external factors anyway, in terms of getting what we want.

If one's True Self -- or however you think of it -- does not truly desire anything (at least to a pressing degree) that would stand in the way of anyone else's True Self (and again, i can't prove this is true, but i figure that some balance can be achieved) then how is that different that being absorbed into the Right-Hand-Path Brahma-plasma that all the Randians are so scared of?

i had an idea a while ago. i think maybe the Buddhists and others are right -- that the individual ego, or self, is indeed the thing that most hampers one's own freedom, and that to be truly free, one must be free of this ego. However, i wonder if maybe the only person that can free one from one's ego is oneself.

By this i mean, only you can free you from yourself. No government or religious hierarchy or any outside authority (to use everyday, samsara terms) can get rid of the atman-monkey riding on your back but you. i am drawn to this idea because it's paradoxical, which means i don't understand it, and since i don't understand it, i can pretend i do. Or is that paradoxical?

After you have been liberated from all outside tyranny and oppression, the single most oppressive force acting to keep you enslaved -- unhappy and with your full potential unrealized -- is yourself. But while authorites have tried to save people from themselves -- or at least pretended to while fleecing them -- that doesn't work. When you've been freed of everything else, there is still the chains of yourself, and paradoxically, only you can break them.

At any rate, i don't like government or authority too much -- although i'm holding off on proclaiming myself an anarchist because of the suspicion that some of this necessary evil might in fact be necessary. And no, I don't particularly want the "mob" or "herd" to keep me from doing things I want that don't hurt anybody. I never said the masses weren't stupid -- it's just that we're all part of the masses, and we're all about equally as stupid when you look at every part of the IQ test. Most of the time, though, I've noticed that "mob" actions to keep free-spirited individualist hippie mallgoths (not too much unlike myself in spirit) from burning the flag and smoking weed while having sex with same-gender partners -- or to keep black people from voting, to use a more important example -- there usually is some sort of small, elite group or elite individual behind the whole oppression. I can't say this is always true in history, but I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a "poor-majority-oppressing-the-Nietzschean-minority" without some other Nietzschean minority egging the majority on.

I could probably write a whole damn book about why elitism in general is wrong. Or, if "wrong" rubs you wrong", we can use Buddhist terminology more digestible for nihilists -- let's say "unskillful", not to mention irrational. No, I do not think we should keep down individuals' natural talents like Diana Moon Glompers in the story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut I just think that no one can be trusted totally with deciding for the course of another's life, and that we have no neutrally objective way of deciding who should be the Nietzschean god-kings fit to rule the sheep. Because of these considerations, we must allow each individual to have as much say over his or her own life as socially possible, with some sort of democratic-ish compromise taking place in whatever situations where we must act collectively or interact with others' personal space.

But what if the "sheep" are not fit to rule themselves after all? Well, I would ask this: if you aren't going to feel good enough about most people to let them rule themselves, then why would you care about them enough to try to rule them for their own good? If you would rule people with an iron fist, you are at least misanthropic enough to leave them alone and let them ruin their own lives. If you care enough about them to want to rule them for their own good, then (a) you would let them rule themselves, and (b) you wouldn't be under the elitist-crowd-hater umbrella anyway. Why would such an altruist wuss let people rule themselves? Because said wuss would not consider him- or herself up to the task of ruling them -- 'cause after all, nihilists as well as bible-thumpers and jaded half-buddhists are pessimistic about human nature, including one's own. And if you're not pessimistic in this way (though i think one should be pessimistic) then one would believe in democracy for the old lefty reasons.

Suffice to say that it doesn't seem to make sense to uphold individualism for the blessed Ubermensch few and then turn around and say that, since nature doesn't care about individuals, we should feel free to eugenically prune the societal tree anytime the philosopher kings think that some random so-and-so has bad genes to blame for falling short of the Zaranthusra/Fountainhead ideal. Triage will be triage as far as utilitarian necessity goes in dire survival situations. This, however, does not mean kill the cross-eyed guy.Oh, yeah; since when is any society in the world at large primarily controlled at present by the power of sheep keeping the Zaranthusras down? Seems to me like we have plenty of elitism in society as it is. Or if you think it's not elitist enough, you probably would agree that most people are selfish enough. Whether you think that's good, bad or indifferent, widespread selfishness does not denote that the masses have been kept from embracing Nietzschean dreams by christian ideas like Nietzsche thought.

Speaking of Nietzsche and company, it should be noted that his nth-generation acolyte LaVey admitted that his own whole Halloween setup was just Ayn Rand with spooky rituals - you dress it in a suit and call the devil God, and you got yourself a Republican think-tank. You might not think that's bad, but think - nobody can function going through life without any delayed gratification, which is really what any rational right-hand-path "abstinence" is all about. The same with forgiveness versus revenge: sure you can defend yourself if your life is in danger, and in some select cases it might be judged expedient to retaliate to stop further attacks. But on the whole, an eye for an eye really does make the whole goddamn world blind, not to mention fucking up the middle east with all the religious-war shit I thought Nietzsche and co. looked down on.

In the end, I'll just go back to my Ninja-Turtles-level understanding of the yin and yang and say, hey, it's a balance of opposites. Individuals need each other, and the "collective" -- to whatever extent it exists -- needs individuals to make it up. And I still like the idea that no one can free you from yourself but you.

-----

"Of old there were certain things that realized oneness:/ The heavens in realizing oneness became clear;/ The earth in realizing oneness became stable;/ The numinous in realizing oneness became animated ... Thus for something to be noble it must take the humble as its root;/ For something to be high it must take the low as its foundation."

Daodejing Chapter 39

a minor note on the labor theory of value (not long enough to be boring)

2005-08-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

The following -- after the astericks and in italics in this blog -- comes from the geolibertarianism FAQ that i have a link to in my "links" section. It discusses the land value tax (LVT), which means a 100% tax on all rents taken from land, ideally to replace all other taxes:

* * * * *

7. Isn't the LVT based on Karl Marx's labor theory of value?
No. Karl Marx’s labor theory of value asserts that the value of an object is a result of the labor expended to produce it. Henry George flat-out rejected this view:
"It is never the amount of labor that has been exerted in bringing a thing into being that determines its value, but always the amount of labor that will be rendered in exchange for it." -- The Science of Political Economy, p. 253
Why, then, do some mistakenly identify Marx's labor theory of value as being one of the core premises of the LVT? Because many LVT-advocates often describe land value as being produced by the community, and, in so doing, unwittingly sacrifice clarity for brevity. What they actually mean is this. It's not that members of the surrounding community produce land value itself, but that they produce the goods and services which give rise to that value. Max Hirsch put it this way:
"The value of labour-products is the measure of the service which their rightful owner has rendered to the community. The value of land is the measure of the service which the community is expected to render to the owners of land." -- Democracy vs. Socialism, p. 348

* * * * *

I'd always based my core ideas about property rights on something similar to, or derived from, an admittedly vulgar understanding of the labor theory of value. As a note, i have to agree with the above that, yes, strictly speaking labor does not actually determine the value that others will pay for an item of property in a market exchange.
However, i consider this to be a determination of price rather than value as such. What i personally mean when i think about labor bringing forth the value of produced property, i mean its use for people. That is, you cannot make use of some material from nature until you expend some energy -- some labor -- in bringing it somehow out of nature, essentially "producing" a finished product. I think this would probably include, although obviously to a small extent, even the labor expended to pick an apple off a tree, for example -- in addition to, say, taking metal from the ground to make automobiles or whatever. So technically, both George and Marx are correct.

update on the buddhism thing (remember that?)

2005-08-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

If you look over my postings (if anyone is looking, or if anyone cares for some unknown reason), you will see that many of my early postings had to do with my exploration into Buddhism and my questions regarding that. Then, you'd have seen that i switched after a while to talk about other topics equally as hippie-related, but not Buddhist. You may have wondered if i gave the whole thing up (again, if you're reading and if you care). you might even have chalked it down to me using buddhism as a passing fad that a stupid spoiled hippie brat doesn't have the discipline to stick with. You're probably right, but i'll get to that.
Basically, several things happened. First, i've gone through a period when i didn't force myself to meditate very much, because i am undisciplined and have a short attention span (exactly what meditation would help if i did it, of course). You see, because i'd rather my parents not find out i'm meditating (they freaked when i became a born-again christian in high school), so i have to meditate when they don't know, usually at night, since during the day i want to do other stuff anyway. but at night, i like to stay up -- either hanging with my friends or, if at home, watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Network or even typing on the Internet like i am now :-). When i get done with that, it's ususally later than i should stay up for sleep reasons (at least on weeknights), and so i go to bed without meditating so i get enough sleep to function. And yes, i've wondered if i should give up adult swim altogether (i typed the first part of this now before it comes on; the second time, as i am sitting down to finish this on a different night, it is Friday and Adult Swim isn't on). The basic point is that i don't really want to meditate.
Also, when i do try to meditate, i don't or can't concentrate at all, which i know is normal, but still.
i can blame this all on my undiscipline (which is undoubtably part of it), but it doesn't help that i have real reservations. While some Buddhist apologists claim that "real" Buddhism addresses these reservations, the problems still appear widespread. Some problems:

1. The problem with the whole Third Noble Truth, the end of craving and suffering, becoming an arhat or buddha. i admit, i still don't know the difference between nirvana and satori, but basically, i do not believe it is possible to get rid of all the craving, desire, aversion, and ignorance that leads to suffering. i am convinced that these are the causes, but do not think we can short-circuit them completely. Most troubling, the basic gist of this teaching is that when one becomes totally awakened in this way, one no longer does wrong deeds -- one is basically infallible. Now, the only buddhists i know of that do not believe in this nirvana are those in the Japanese school of Soto Zen -- and even in their case, i don't know if all Soto folks disbelieve in nirvana or just downplay its importance. Brad Warner, a Soto Zen guy , insists that this infallibility and total cessation of craving is a load of bullshit, as is so obvious. His Japanese teacher, Gudo Nishijima, teaches this too, though again, i don't know if all the Soto teachers do. Of course, there are several kind of agnostic western Buddhists who don't believe in this either, like that guy (Stephen? or Richard?) Bachelor and that British dude who wrote The New Buddhism. Being western hippies, though, they of course do not represent the authentic teachings of anybody ever.

2. Sometimes i feel really bad about this next point. i just don't think it is even a good idea to totally get rid of all desire or aversion, even if it were possible. i mean, obviously you can't just live like anton lavey or a standard authority figure and just do whatever you want -- like i said, i know craving and aversion are the sources of suffering.
i just think that in the right situations, they may be good or even necessary in small, controlled doses, and the point is learning to control them and try to see things as they really are -- selfless and interconnected -- so that we can do that. Now, i've read before that some ancient eastern sages -- i don't remember who -- have taught that it is sometimes necessary to go against the rules of the Eightfold Noble Path in order to act ethically in some situations. i'm not sure if this is the same thing as what i'm leaning toward. Some western Buddhists have jumped on this too -- James H. Austin, author of Zen and the Brain, says (to paraphrase majorly) that when the big ego is taken out of the picture, a smaller, unobtrusive ego remains. Again, i don't know how orthodox that is.

3. Kind of related to the above is the idea of intrinsic goodness in human nature, which is more crap. i hate that whole question, because although i tend to agree with political conservatives that human nature is nasty, i find myself leaning policy-wise and ideal-wise toward the leftist stuff that supposedly depends for its bedrock on the buddhistic idea of a good human nature.
Actually, to be more specific: i sort of doubt human nature can totally be known, and to the extent i think it can be, i don't believe that this human nature is totally sinful or nasty like in Christian original sin (although the original-sin doctrine has an obvious grain of truth, i agree with the Rouseauian chimp-lovers that the doctrine overall is fucked up --- Augustine of Hippo was basically an over-intellectual dweeb like me, and since when do people like us know anything?) I kind of lean toward the Jewish idea of a dual human nature, the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra, the good nature and bad nature respectively.
In short, i believe people are basically self-centered and individualistic, but that they also have instincts for group preservation and for attachment to other individuals. Such self-giving instincts can be especially strengthened when it is in the best interest of the individual to do what's best for others. i think thatin the long run (particularly when dealing with whatever happens after death; call it a hunch), it truly is in the best interests of the individual to care for others, since from a truly objective standpoint, we are all interconnected and lacking essential selfhood. i suspect that human self-preservation instincts may be turned in the direction of this larger interconnected-hippie-holistic-whole to some extent, but not entirely. But again, who cares what i think? i'm the fucking reincarnation of fucking Saint Augustine the Hippie of Hippo or something.

Oaybe it doesn't matter if some of these original authentic teachings of Buddhism are wrong, and we hippies can just choose those parts of the teachings we do believe. However, if we do that, then (a) why call it Buddhism? and (b) how will we know how much of the proverbial baby's bathwater to throw out?
Also, most feedback i've gotten from reading has tended to say that you gotta pick a spiritual path and stick to it, without all that New Age mixing-and-matching, which is basically undisciplined bourgeois shit with no deep understanding of any one tradition. Fine, but if we leave out whatever we want, how is that different?
Plus, if Buddhism is not "the true religion", then what does meditation actually accomplish? It doesn't bring us to nirvana, 'cause that doesn't exist. Brad Warner and the Soto Zen school say meditation should be done for its own sake, because meditation essentially is enlightenment. i've kind of been operating on this theory when i have been meditating. i guess i'll stick with that, even as i wonder if it does me any good. That probably means it's not a sin if i decide i don't want to meditate before i go to sleep tonight, and that somehow makes me more receptive to the notion.
Oh, my Marine friend in the guard with the Purple Heart is risking his life, so none of this bourgeois spiritual-search crap of mine actually matters. But hey, it's a fucking blog.

fyi

2005-08-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

i'm not whining or complaining, and i don't expect anybody (if anybody sees this blog) to care, but i figured i ought to record that my father currently has cancer. He's getting chemo and radiation (he started today), and he's in good health otherwise. like i said, i'm not boo-hooing (i'm staying optimistic, at least as far as not thinking about it too much). just thought it ought to be recorded for cyber-posterity.

A thought experiment on the war on terror

2005-08-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

There's no point, I've decided long ago, for me personally to belabor whether the war in Iraq is justified or not. It's happening, and it's not gonna stop from kids protesting. I've probably stated somewhere that I (honestly!) have a legitimate medical condition that prohibits me from joining the military. (Okay, I take Paxil for obsessive-compulsive disorder). Since I'm not fighting, and my friend Chris is, for me to criticize the war could disappoint him and would just make me look bad. However, since I'm not fighting, and my friend Chris is, there is no way I can stand on the sidelines like a college Republican chickenhawk and talk about the Iraq war being a noble cause. Personally, in my heart I wouldn't mind every Iraqi dying if my friend Chris were guaranteed to come home safe -- even though in my brain, I know that Iraqis are just human beings too and I wish them well. My personal feelings on that matter do not add to my internal debate on the war's overall justification. Therefore, no point in me weighing in either way.

As regards the larger U.S.-led war on Islamic terrorists (remember that), my feelings are similar but maybe a bit more chickenhawk. I don't want any other Americans to get blown up by terrorists, and if bombing Afghanistan is necessary to keep that from happening, my reptilian brain considers that acceptable. There is the question of whether bombing innocent civilians across the ocean actually will reduce terrorist attacks on Americans, but again, I'm just a hippie with a medical deferral, so whatever my opinion is is probably wrong.

Having no opinion on the war on terror or the war in Iraq, I nonetheless thought I'd do a little thought experiment. This thought experiment is specifically for supporters of the war, but will hopefully help clarify the thinking of the opponents of the war as well. The experiment I've come up with will probably seem most relevant to American conservatives who, like me, live in the "red states" (God bless Ohio!). The point of this experiment is to help pro-war fellow Americans see why anyone in their right mind might oppose the war on terror/Iraq war.

In this experiment, I'd like you to imagine that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Instead of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, let's say it was the United Nations building that was hit with airplanes, with thousands of people killed (I don't know off the top of my head if the UN building holds thousands, but I assume it does). Also -- and this is most important -- instead of Muslims from oversees, the attacks were orchestrated and performed by American members of the Christian Identity movement.

The Christian Identity movement was semi-big news in the '90s. They were a white-supremacist movement who considered themselves to be Christian. The basis of their beliefs was that the original Israelites had been white people, that Christianity is a religion meant only for white people, that modern Jews are basically just faking being Israelites so they can go about their liberal-elite-Jewish-banker-Communist-world-domination plot. They think nonwhites are bad, et cetera -- you've heard this before. They also hold what has come to be seen as basically conservative Christian positions on culture-war issues -- they oppose abortion as murder and they hate gays. They're some of the folks you heard who blew up the abortion clinics and gay bars in the '90s.

Anyway, when the Christian Identity people pilot planes into the New York UN building, killing thousands, everybody in the country is pretty upset. The victims included not only a bunch of foreign diplomats and Frenchies we don't normally care much about, but also regular Americans we do normally care about -- I don't know, maybe they were in the buildings next door. Okay, so all Americans (and foreign people) are upset by this, even conservative Americans -- they may have never liked the UN much, but hey, people are people, and they really didn't need to get killed -- plus real Americans died too. The segment of the American populace most pissed off, though, is the American liberals, who clamor for harsh measures to be taken against the so-called "redneck terrorists." Bill Clinton -- who just recently, let's say, won a very close election with a big 'ol hanging chad controversy -- comes on TV and announces to America and the world that the terrorists will be punished. "These terrorists tried to destroy the unity of nations," Clinton says, "but the world stands together as one, stronger than ever. Whoever is not with this united world is against us."

To this end, Clinton and the surviving delegates of the UN and represented countries form a military alliance. Bomber planes -- maybe U.S. planes under a UN mandate, whatever -- are sent to drop bombs on the hideouts of the Christian Identity movement remote wilderness areas of the Southern and Western United States. Of course, many people who are not in Christian Identity are killed and/or seriously injured by the bombings, but the people in the blues states figure that -- and I quote a New York editorial from this imaginary parallel universe -- "It's them or us. Besides, it is widely known that these rednecks are known to hold several ideas similar to those of Christian Identity -- they may not bomb abortion clinics or gay bars, but they do oppose abortion and gay rights. Plus, all those ignorant people want if they got what they want would be a theocracy that would oppress women." So goes the logic, and the bombing continues.

Soon Clinton moves troops -- UN, U.S., take your pick -- into the bombed areas to apprehend and neutralize those of the right-wing terrorists who remain from the bombing runs. Picture the whole shebang with curfews, mistaken shootings, maybe some prisoner mistreatment -- you get the idea. Then Clinton gets a big idea. There is another racist group, called the World Church of the Creator. The name is misleading, because unlike Christian Identity, the World Church of the Creator folks do not consider themselves Christian -- the Creator the name refers to is the white race. Clinton produces some evidence that World Church has been working with Christian Identity and may have even helped the UN attack. Some protests are heard, saying that World Church doesn't even like Christianity, while Christian Identity considers Hitler -- whom the World Churchers admire -- to be too pagan and socialistic. Some find it hard to believe these two groups, bad as they each are, would work together. Nonetheless, Clinton insists the two groups' shared hatred of nonwhites, of the United Nations, and of liberalism in general means that they would cooperate despite their differences. Thus, Clinton sends planes and troops in blue helmets to attack and occupy World Church of the Creator bases throughout the country, killing more innocents, largely in the red states, and taking troops and resources away even from Christian Identity areas. Through all this, people in the areas under military pressure are subjected to the whole curfew-shooting-thing, especially if they are known to be religiously conservative Christians. After all, New Yorkers and Angelenos do not know how many Christian Identity racists are hiding behind the facade of supposedly innocent non-racist Christianity. Conservative Christian leaders protest that not all born-again or evangelical Christians are racist -- in fact, the vast majority are not racist at all, listening to DC Talk and all that. But in vain. Meanwhile, non-Christian conservatives (lower-tax agnostic minarchists, Jews like David Horowitz, et cetera) begin to protest what is being done to their Christian political brethren. In response, several liberal pundits and citizens speculate that these secular conservatives may have more in common with those religious and/or racist terrorists than they let on. "If you're not with us of the united world against the redneck terrorists, you're against us," the liberals say. Furthermore, many liberals insist that Clinton is by far the greatest president ever, and applaud his faith in one world of love. Through all this, conservatives of all stripes -- both non-terrorist, non-racist Christians and secular-minded conservatives -- honestly feel nothing but contempt for those racist killers, but it is so obvious that the liberals and Clinton and the UN are out of control ...

I could go on with this imaginary description, I guess, but I don't think I need to. If you who are reading this are a conservative and/or support the current war on terror and/or war in Iraq, this description is not expected nor intended to change your mind. However, it just might help you see that liberals who oppose the war and criticize the administration of George W. Bush are not necessarily conspiring with bin Laden to destroy America. If you're an opponent of the war and of Bush, please do not think I am on your side, either. And finally -- yes, I am aware that the current real war does not have blue-states being bombed, so of course my thought experiment is not perfectly analogous. I did not intend to suggest that blue-staters under Bush have suffered at all like the foreigners killed in the war on terror (as well as our own American soldiers, of course). I just wanted you conservatives to see how a hippie like me -- not me, but like me -- could come to the conclusion that the war on terror could be wrong without being evil. That's all.

A long tired rant from a horny hippie in an existential crisis

2005-06-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

i should say that i've still been caught in the tanha (pardon the hippie jargon) of being dissatisfied with buddhism because, deep down, my little monkey brain doesn't think it fits my supposedly hard-rockin' self-image. it's not that i even like metal that much. would i give it all up to be a pacifist hippie talking in quiet tones and smiling all the time while reading Thich Nhat Hanh? or would i go down the path of anger, selfishness and opposition to my core values of democracy, populism and egalitarianism for the chance to listen to the cool music i like and wear t-shirts too black for the summertime? are music and style the only things behind my tanha type aversion to the path of alieviating aversions, or does it come down more to the fact that KP Hong, my trusted advisor and college minister, kind of creeped me out with his quietly smiling, politically correct beautific-ness (despite talking with me in that beautific tone through many questions)?

Should i commit to total Amish pacifism? Should i recommit when i move to vegetarian eating, at the expense of what little muscle my working out to heavy metal has brought me (because after all, as a pro-lifer who doesn't want children, i can never have sex, so who needs muscles)? Should i listen to music like that monk playing those awful acoustic folk songs like "Samadhi Shoes" i just heard -- which won't stir the inner demons of anger or lust -- or should i consider anger and lust to be key ingredients in "rock 'n' roll 4 ever"?

Furthermore, should i say that abortion before quickening or brainwaves is okay (i can never support partial-birth), or is that just a cop-out 'cause i wanna get laid? is looking at porn okay, since the porn actresses might get pregnant and have abortions -- not to mention the whole degrading-women issue? Also, if we are ethically obligated to do positive good for others, exactly how much are we talking about (i discuss this in my Peter Singer post in more detail)? And on the "thou shalt not" side of ethics, what are we not supposed to do to others? Treat them unlike they want to be treated, i guess -- that's fine and steady, as far as it's defined. ("An it harm none, do what ye will" is the only reasonable thing the sociological/religious catastrophe of Wicca ever had). But of course we have to stop third parties from harming the second parties or reducing their freedoms -- A must stop C from hurting B, even if that means hurting B. Fine. But when do we know what to allow?

i feel guilty about most things i do, including staring at a computer screen till 12:30 a.m. when i should have meditated and gone to bed early instead of ruining my eyesight. What i'm trying to say is, i'm too sexy for this song and i'm logging off.

Peter Singer and our ethical obligations

2005-06-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

i found a link to a site with controversial ethicist Peter Singer's essay on famine and the moral duty of giving to those who are starving.

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm

Singer's sentiment both jives with what i feel and also disturbs me. What i want to know is, how much is enough when it comes to giving to those who need it? Singer says a minimum of 10%, but how can we tell? one line of reasoning would be that you would give away to the starving and dying enough so that you would not have anything but what you need to survive. but how much is this? as an altruist, would one give away so much of one's income that one is left with only just as many calories of food, say, as would be necessary to keep one alive and functioning in the pursuit of income to give to the starving? or would make do with slightly more, enough food for oneself to be healthy and happy, and if so, how does one measure that?
on a less dire level, does Singer's ethic -- which i find hard to refute -- mean that we each have the ethical responsibility of giving away/doing without anything that is not strictly necessary for one's survival? i'd have to get rid of all my books, CDs, television, most of my clothes, phone, probably my car, and a large amount of the food in my house. i wouldn't be allowed to set any part of my income toward frivolous entertainment. i'm not saying that this is not what i should do; maybe it is, and in a way, i can't see how it couldn't be, except that the implications seem somehow illogical. are we all mean to live purely with the smallest possible amount of necessary things? and if we are altruists, wouldn't the duty of putting others before oneself mean that one should do more even than that, let oneself get sick or even die in order for others to live -- and would those others be allowed to live from what one gives only at the extreme subsidence level, or would each of those others also be ethically required to die for all of his or her fellows?
So we come to a conundrum or dilemma. it seems to me that living without altruism makes life meaningless, and only an altruisitic form of ethics can be truly ethical and meaningful. on the other hand, altruism taken to its logical conclusion would mean we all die, which is absolutely absurd. Again i ask: how much is enough to give?
i hope that i will have the courage and the inner strength to give as much as i am ethically obligated to give; if i must live at a subsidence level or even die (for some reason), i REALLY would not enjoy that at all, but i hope that i would do my duty, although i probably would not, of course.
What do any of you out there in blog-land think? i would appreciate any comments.

All Your Mean of Production Are Belong to Us

2005-05-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

Imagine you own a pizza place. For the sake of simplicity, we'll have you be the only person working at this pizza place; it doesn't employ anyone else. The place makes enough money to break even and to provide you with what you need materially, but not much more.
One day, some representative of the government -- doesn't matter which branch, or who it is -- comes to you and says that it is going to shut down your pizza place, your only source of income. "Why?" you ask, naturally quite taken aback.
"Oh, it seems your pizza shop has not generated a lot of revenue," the government person replies.
"Yeah, not a whole lot," you say. "Enough for me, though. So what?"
"You see, without a lot of access revenue, your business has not been paying much in taxes," the gov rep says.
"Well, I pay the percentage of my income -- both business tax and personal income tax -- and it's considerable for me, but yeah, I guess you could say it's not a lot by an absolute measure," you answer, not sure what this person is getting at.
"Exactly," your new buddy says. "And because your shop isn't generating a lot of tax revenue for the government, the government has decided -- measuring the income versus what the government has put into founding this shop -- that the shop is unprofitable and must be shut down."
"What?" you cry. "Where do you folks get off doing that?"
"Simple," s/he says. "We own your shop, of course. Like i said, we've put a lot into this shop, and we expect a bigger return if we want to stay competitive with the other world goverments."
"What do you mean, you own my shop? No, you don't," you insist. "I do. I do all the work here, i put up the money to buy the building and the property and the overhead ..."
"Ah, but what about all the things the government did to found this shop and keep it going?"
"Like what?"
"For example, you have police that keep the shop safe from robbers, you have garbage collectors, et cetera, et cetera," s/he says.
"Well, what about the money?" you ask.
"If you recall, the government did a lot from a financial or monetary standpoint to start the shop," the rep says. "You got loans from the government to buy the building and overhead, the other money you used was insured by the full faith and credit of the government in the bank so you had guaranteed access to it, oh, not to mention, you happened to attend public schools that helped your business skills --"
"I had no college," you protest (let's just say).
"But you went to public elementary and high schools that taught you math and what-have-you." (let's just say)
"But what if I'd gone to private schools? And what if I hadn't borrowed government money?"
"The point still stands. The property belongs to the government, as you know."
"No one told me!"
"Ah, yes. The land happened to have been sold to the government by the native tribes long ago." the rep says. (i won't get into the mess with that for now).

--And so you and the gov rep keep arguing. Now, you could make a bunch of arguments that the property belongs to you, but chances are the gov drone rebuts with some arguments to government ownership that -- although they don't totally seem to make sense -- you somehowcannot seem to poke through entirely. In the end, you can come up with one primary argument as to your claim -- you have done the work at that pizza place.
What i'm doing here is NOT defending government ownership of your pizza place or anything else. We'll assume that the government drone here is an asshole and that the pizza place is rightfully yours. What i'd like you to do, though, is imagine that, instead of a pizza place where you're self-employed as the only worker, you work at a larger company (let's say, not so randomly, a Hoover plant in North Canton, Ohio); and that instead of a government wienie, you have some wienie from higher up in the corporate organization coming to tell you and your coworkers that your plant is going to be shut down because it's just not making a profit for the company. You didn't know it wasn't making a profit; your wages had kep up with inflation 9let's say) and you'd been doing as well as you always had, although not making a lot. They explain to you that when they say profit, they mean a bigger chunk of the overall money generated from selling Hoover products or other widgets or services or whatever that goes not to you, but to the higher ups in the company. You protest that they don't make the products, and the rep replies that they do a bunch of things that are necessary for the running of the company, like, for example, putting up the money for the buidling of the factory and the purchasing of the original overhead. The rep might even say that it puts up the money to buy materials and pay your wages, although of course you know that money comes from the stuff you make.
I could go on, but you might start getting the idea. Remember, the idea of property rights we protect here in the U.S. -- which i won't critique here, for this post's purposes -- comes from philosophical ideas holding that the right to a piece of property comes when one has taken something from God's natural world and mixed it with one's labor to produce something else of value. Think about that, and think about how much the CEO or the stockholder would be seen to have the right to own a company under this idea -- relative to the worker, who does the labor.

See also this comic I found, which makes basically the same argument:

http://www.apolitical.info/images/carefuldollar.jpg

Don't be a player-hater to the unions

2005-05-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

The following is from State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein.

p. 142 - "individual trade unions were now internal oligarchies, administratively top-heavy with technicians and officials, and increasingly prochial in their bargaining strategy and political outlook. This was a product of much history and politics: the birth of the new unions under and New Deal wing, the forced-draft quest for production and social peace during World War II, and the anti-Communist purge that chilled the union movement's more adventuresome spirits.
"But even more important, the stolid quality of postwar U.S. unionism reflected the institutional constraints and legal structures under which the unions were forced to function. Ironically, it was the very decentralization and fragmentation of the poswar bargaining system, the hostility of management, and the relative weakness and vulnerability of the labor movement that generated a huge stratum of full-time officials, put a premium on authoritarian leadership, devalued independent politics, and opened the door to a whole set of corruptions that became an integral part of the postwar union mythos."

--
As my boy Nelson (I'll call him "Nelly") Lichtenstein explains here, all that bad stuff you heard about unions is actually the fault of the hostile environment in which American unions were forced to develop. I try to never believe anything I read right off the bat, but there is a part of me that wants to say, "So there! Hah!" to all the union-haters out there. The moral is, don't hate the union players, hate the postwar industrial bargaining game.

i am in control of my fucking anger, you shithead part II: Brad Warner kills Mr. Spock

2005-05-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

[here is an e-mail I wrote to Brad Warner earlier this month]:

Dear Brad Warner:
-- If emotions get in the way of our being human (as you said in your DharmaLife article "Kill Your Rage" http://www.dharmalife.com/issue22/killrage.html ), is it better not to have any emotions and go through life without them? At this point, I'm not going> to resist the idea. I just want to know.
-- Also, what IS your opinion on whether violence of any kind is ever> necessary/permissible? Thanks, Justin Hart

[and here is Brad's response, dated May 20, 2005]:

Hello Justin,
Emotions are a funny thing. When people read about the Buddhist way of avoiding emotionalism, they immediately picture Mr. Spock from Star Trek. It's not like that at all. Feelings come. But you don't latch on to them. This doesn't mean you're never happy or sad. But you're not on the kind or emotional rollercoaster many people like to ride. You'll feel better -- even, dare I say it, happier -- if you just let your emotions go.Violence may be necessary sometimes. This is unfortunate. But often it is true. Obviously you should always make an effort to avoid violence. But when it becomes necessary, then you need to do what is necessary. It's often very hard to see where to draw the line. So you need to be careful.I mean, if al Quaeda is hijacking your plane, it is your duty to use whatever means at your disposal to stop them. If that means bashing the hijackers over the head with a suitcase full of Bibles, then that's what you have to do. Still, most of us don't encounter such situations. So you need to establish a balance within yourself in order to understand what needs doing and when.
Brad

-----------------

By the way to you blog readers: I thought this would be a good place to post this, which I found in March 2006:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/06/16/anger-is-a-gift-merry-christmas/

Also, there's this, which shows a similarly accepting view of anger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anger_management

i am in control of my fucking anger, you shithead part I: Going to Dagobah to seek the wisdom of KP

2005-05-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

Note: after looking over my past posts (pthew), i saw that i had three in a row dealing with anger management. Therefore, i decided to give these three posts a title and divide them into three parts. The title is a joke and is not meant in any way to imply that either my friend KP Hong or my favorite buddhist author Brad Warner are shitheads or have heads composed of any other excretory substance (i talked to both KP and Warner through email in this "series").

Three posts in a row dealing with anger management may lead one to believe i have some anger issues. Well ... not that i am a man particularly prone to unprovoked acts of lethal violence, but on occasion i am known to lose my cool in embarrassing ways.

The following e-mail exchange took place in October 2004, between me and KP Hong, a campus minister at my college (now alma mater) who had been leading meditation sessions i'd been going to. And now, without further ado:

////////////////////////////////////////

>> Justin Hart 10/28/04 08:11PM >>>
First, I won't be able to be at Sitting on Fridays tomorrow because I'm going to have a take-home test for Monday.

Second, please read the essay at this link this whenever you get the chance:

http://www.dharmalife.com/issue22/killrage.html

What do you think of it? Does it mean all emotions are bad? I can get maybe never expressing our anger, but not expressing any emotions? What does he mean? More importantly, is he right?

I'm afraid if I say he's wrong I'll just be retreating into the "alcoholic" justification tactics in defense of my selfishness, like he talks about. But I don't want to be a robot with no emotions.

I don't think I can be a Buddhist. I don't think it's possible or even necessarily always desirable to totally get rid of our root anger (I don't think it's possible to get rid of greed or ignorance either, but getting rid of those would probably be more desirelable). But I'm afraid that if I'm not a Buddhist, I'll fall deeper into my sensuality (I won't get into details, but suffice to say my life revolves around sensual indulgence and anger at nobody in particular)

I don't want to feel like I'm doing something wrong every time I'm in a bad mood. I don't want to be a robot and I don't want to live in an environment where everybody's all calm and serene all the time. -- Justin Hart

//////////////////////////// Now here's KP's response:

Hey Justin:

Glad to respond. I've read the article and it generally speaks correctly to the Buddhist teachings... but the Buddhist teachings themselves are not so easy to understand. It takes some time and study. So let me see if I can explain and put a twist on what the article was trying to express.

Contrary to what many believe, the enlightened Buddhists are EXTREMELY humorous, FULL of emotions, and nothing at all like a robot. How is this so when Buddhism seems to advocate for "repressing" emotions?

Repression in the Western psychoanalytic sense is not what Buddhism espouses, for that does nothing to the reality of an emotion; it simply turns a blind-eye to it and Buddhist meditation is about seeing everything. In meditation, as we've been practicing on Fridays, we observe anger (or any other emotion), identify what it is (for anger usually contains many more emotions and thoughts), notice its intensity, and observe its duration. When Buddhists do this, they come to realize that emotions are integrally connected with our thoughts and our expectations for what should be versus the terrible wrong that is. And that is perfectly fine.

What is NOT fine is when we distort-exaggerate-intensify-lessen-manipulate that natural emotion into something that it is not. How do we do this? A whole list of things can distort that original, essential emotion into something monstrous:
--our ego ("How dare they. Don't they know who I am! How can this be happening to me! Etc.)
--our memories that connect this pain to past pains
--our attachment to some future ideal and the consequent gap we experience with present reality
--our fears that exaggerate this injustice to something huge

And when we express this anger, we can end up doing several things: harm others, pass along anger to others, create a vicious cycle of anger-violence-revenge, and more. Even if we express this anger to psychologically "vent", the Buddhist tradition would state that this really does not get at the truth of anger but simply deals with symptoms and may even further fuel the original anger.

So what are we to do? We are to neither repress it (in the sense of denial) nor to impulsively act on it... but to bring mindfulness to it. When we do, we come to SEE the root emotion for what it truly is, prior to any distortion we may bring to it:
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in an overblown ego, and we may ask, "What is the self? Does it exist? What if the self and other are one and the same? Then why the anger?"
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in some faulty thought, an illusion.
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in some future anticipation, some ideal, and discover that it's a mental construct perhaps built to reinforce our ego or support our desire to continue into the future. Or we may discover that it's truly an admirable goal that deserves our commitment, not our intense attachment (which disguises the presence of our ego rearing its ugly head again).

And when we truly SEE, we know that no emotion will destroy us, for all emotions flow naturally from WHAT IS. It's the distortions that create further death and suffering. When there is no attachment to anything -- which is not detachment but a non-attachment-- then paradoxically, one truly begins to respond to all things for what they are and not for what I want them to be or need them to be for me.

So the "Buddhist monk" is the one who can truly feel, truly experience emotions at their fullest, for the monk truly SEES without distortion. And its the truly awakened one who then responds and acts with coherence and integrity to the emotions experienced: action and emotion in total congruity with one another. Truth in action. The awakened one can express either kindness or anger without any desire to harm others or protect the self or any other illusion. When there is nothing to protect and nothing to identify one's Self with, the only thing that remains is the larger Truth to feel, to know, to express, and to live in.

Does that help? As always, my doors open to further conversation. Thanks!

K.P. Hong
Associate Campus Minister
Office of Interfaith Campus Ministries
College of Wooster

experiencing reality

2005-04-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

A while ago i was trying to meditate like i do sometimes do, not doing a good job concentrating. Near the end of my 30-min session, i had a feeling that was different. Sitting there, i got a vivid feeling i don't think i can describe (though i'll try). While earlier my mind had been thinking about this or that aspect of pop culture and/or sex, at the moment in question i felt what i then thought to myself was a feeling of actually being where i was. It was like, "This is me, this is my life, this is where i am and nowhere else."
It was a number of days ago -- maybe almost a week -- so how i described the experience to myself at the time is a little fuzzy (and of course, i was not "being here now" enough to avoid discursive thought about my being there then).
This was not a happy feeling. It was kind of scary. A couple minutes later, i ended my meditation session like i planned. Looking back over the past week, it seems -- although i did not think this at the time -- that a part of my experience was the realization in a direct way of my own morality.
Later, i was not mediating -- just thinking about my experience earlier that week. I don't know if i had another experience or if i just had another idea about my first experience. At any rate, i was thinking about being here now and experiencing reality and being mindful, and i believe i may have gotten a slight feeling (less vivid than last time) that the things around me were real.
I seem to remember that my first (only?) experience focused (or i focused) more on the reality of myself as opposed to the illusions of the things in my head, the songs i make up, etc. That is, the reality of myself as a 23-year-old man-child, and as someone who's going to die and (perhaps) how at any moment i'm vulnerable to pain or misfortune (although that last part may have been reading into my memory after the event).
The second time (or reappraisal of the first) gave me the idea that not only me but the world around me was truly real. The idea had to do with no-self and the idea that none of us selves exist separate from the universe. It occurred to me -- purely intellectually, not mystically -- that my being here, where i am in this real world, is a major determinant of who i am. I cannot be who i am without the context i'm in. I think i may have felt some of that in my meditation experience earlier, in terms of realizing that i was a 23-year-old man-child there in my room in Wooster, Ohio specifically, but then again, it might just be all that Foucault i've read this semester. (my impressionable mind! Gasp!)

thoughts on selfhood, altruism, alienation and other sophomoric touchy-feely bullshit

2005-02-28T18:23:00.000-08:00

i should note - at risk of seeming pretentious - that i was reading some of ol' Freud and Nietzsche (the perv and the psycho) when i made this semi-journal-ish writing of my own thoughts, which i'm transcribing and editing here from my handwriting. Sorry for the two posts in one sitting, and sorry if this seems like gibberish - i'm rewriting parts:

Isolation or a feeling of separateness may lead to a lack of empathy, a lack of care about others. The feeling of separateness may also lead to resentment of others, and to jealously at their ability to interact. It could lead to the illusion - WRONGLY - that those others are not human, when in fact they are human and worthy of ethical treatment.
In addition, a feeling of powerlessness increases one's anger. However, maybe anger at others comes from anger at oneself for not living up to one's ideals. This could be linked to one's anger at others for imposing these ideals on one (whether or not they did).
There could be an unsuccessful attempt to translate one's feeling of separateness - meaning the self/other dichotomy - from selfishness to selflessness/altruism. However, the natural, instinctual desire for self-preservation prevents this attempted translation. Also, in this case, the desire for self-preservation and self-pleasure would boost or increase one's selfishness, becuase it is not mitigated (sublimated?) by linking others as an extension of oneself as most religious/moral people can do to some extent, large or small. That is, religious/moral people can to some degree prevent their instinctual desire for their own well-being and pleasure from turning into selfishness, by finding a way to identify others around them -- perhaps all of Creation -- and thus feel like helping others is a way to help themselves like their instincts say to do.
The problem for a person who feels isolated and separate is that he or she does not feel connected to others, and so the isolated person cannot do this linking their own well-being to others in his/her own mind. Since there is a great divide in the isolated person's mind between his or her-self and everyone else, the only way he or she can often think of to try to become altruistic and giving is by trying to turn his/her instinctual self-love -- self-preservation -- into self-hatred. The isolated person figures, WRONGLY, that it's a zero-sum game between his or herself and others -- either he/she wins or they do, etc. So the person is selfish and hates everyone who gives him or her pain or who gets in the way of his/her own pleasure. If the isolated person decides to try to be altruistic (likely, in order to avoid cosmic punishment), then that person will try to reverse this dichotomy, trying to hate his or her self in order to love others, since it's supposedly a zero-sum game.
What's important to stress is that one's instincts of self-preservation make it almost impossible (and maybe even totally impossible) to truly hate oneself in the sense of really wanting to give oneself pain and deprive oneself of all pleasure (which is different from, for example, saying "i'll give myself this pain exercising now so i can feel good with endorphins/self-esteem later."). Because self-hatred runs against the instincts, trying to hate oneself in the name of loving others one doesn't feel connected to anyway simply increases one's resentment of others (one feels one has to give up so much to serve others, with nothing in return).
It should also be noted that one may try to hate oneself for other reasons - such as not seeming good enough for one's own standards -- and that this hatred or anger toward oneself, being forbidden by the instincts, must have some outlet besides oneself, and so gets directed instead toward other people. That is, you're angry at others because you're really angry at yourself but can't admit or don't want to admit it.
i'd suggest here that the only way for one to stop hating others -- for whatever reason -- and to truly become altruistic and loving is by learning to connect oneself mentally to others and to see others as an extension of oneself.
**To emphasize, doing this is NOT a mere trick to play on oneself, but instead actually does reflect reality. Won't get into that here, but think about it -- the "self" is an illusion. At any rate, even if it's impossible to see this reality of unity, it still may be possible to identify one's fate and well-being with the well-being of others by believing -- probably correctly -- that one will receive some sort of cosmic punishment if one does not. This punishment could be hell -- perhaps only for a time and not forever -- or it could be the suffering of Buddhist dukkha brought on by one's own selfishness, but either way. If you want to be cheery, think of cosmic reward for doing good (and i know this is "spiritual selfishness", but when you're incurably selfish ... i don't know)
In the end, thinking that you are "one" with someone else might just be the same thing as thinking that what you do to/for someone else will come back to bite you or reward you. Just two ways of perceiving the same reality. God bless.

Moby Dick Backwards

Let's All Make Fun of Princess Pocahonanoke

Lower Taxes on Lower Incomes

Are You Sick of Me Talking about Obama Yet?

Fried Fetuses and Watermelon

God Help Me, I'm Thinking of Voting for Obama

Leo Strauss

A Libertarian Labor Party?

Who Am I Talking About?

I'm Still Alive, If Anyone Cares

Music and Class

This Computer Supports Genocide: Cell Phones and Coltan in the Congo

Are Unions Obselete?

ANARCHY!! (That Got Your Attention)

I Shall Return

"Just a Better Human"

The Nine Conservative Statements

Random Ideas

Well, Gee! I Guess I'm Liberal after All!

Morality and Direct Experience: Which Comes First?

Multicultural and Monocultural Hypocrisy

Could Be Worse

Rational Reptilian Rapacity Ravages Reverything

How Bad of a Name Is Too Bad, Bitch?

College-Loan Debt and Why Everyone Should Be Lucky

My Hypothesis Is Right in One Person's Case

Gandhi's Gonna Kick My Ass for This

The Long-Awaited Communique on Environmentalism and Primitivism

Transcript of Brad Warner and me talking about "The Golden State"

Proof, Truth, and the Truthfully Aloof

Cutting Off Your Minimum-Wage Nose to Spite Your Estate-Tax Face

Contents

South Central Farm Eviction: What Bullshit Is This?

Carl Jung stole my idea (okay, so it was copyright-free in the collective unconscious!)

I Have a Solution to the Affirmative-Action Issue, but It Might Not Work and Everyone Will Laugh at It

Resistance to the Resistance

"Don't Be That Guy"

Sorry, sis!

Part II: The Next Top Model...of Sociopolitical Interaction

Part I: Go with Thoreau or the CIO? Free Your Mind As Well

excerpts from "The Essential Kropotkin", with commentary

Neandertals, Freak Dancing, and the Case for Cutting Off Hakim Bey's Balls

Why Hugo Chavez sucks

Aging gracefully at Cleveland Screaming, or, Zen and the Art of Moshing

Notes: Some from years ago, some newer

A link to a science and magic article and another update on my soul's progress toward hell

Great News! Chris is back!

Ave Caesar? or, how i support the troops

i'm one with the universe and you're not: group and individual

a minor note on the labor theory of value (not long enough to be boring)

update on the buddhism thing (remember that?)

fyi

A thought experiment on the war on terror

A long tired rant from a horny hippie in an existential crisis

Peter Singer and our ethical obligations

All Your Mean of Production Are Belong to Us

Don't be a player-hater to the unions

i am in control of my fucking anger, you shithead part II: Brad Warner kills Mr. Spock

i am in control of my fucking anger, you shithead part I: Going to Dagobah to seek the wisdom of KP

experiencing reality

thoughts on selfhood, altruism, alienation and other sophomoric touchy-feely bullshit