From christ-and-culture-return-728-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Fri Feb 26 09:08:21 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id JAA11420 for; Fri, 26 Feb 1999 09:08:21 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 26 Feb 1999 14:08:21 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 21192 invoked by uid 7770); 26 Feb 1999 14:08:18 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 26 Feb 1999 14:08:18 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA10442 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Fri, 26 Feb 1999 09:08:16 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199902261408.JAA10442@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com (Christ and Culture discussion list) Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 09:08:16 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] More on turning on, tuning in, dropping out Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO On cultural withdrawal -- It seems to me society is always based on something thought more important than society. That point ought to be acceptable on this list. So unrestricted commitment to cultural engagement is advance acceptance of other people's fundamental views. The monastics and for that matter the pillar dwellers of the Egyptian desert expressed a sense that Christ counted more than anything and thus the vigor of Christianity rather than cultural retreat. More recently, the uncompromising nature of the '60s Left has led to cultural supremacy. Maybe the point is that strategy isn't everything. If you don't have something of transcendent value why should anyone bother with you? If you do, you'll act as if you do, and that means conduct that sometimes doesn't look politic to other people and in fact may be quite at odds with ordinary notions of prudence, sociability, good sense, what have you. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-801-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 1 17:48:11 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id RAA25306 for ; Mon, 1 Mar 1999 17:48:10 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 01 Mar 1999 22:48:10 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 11985 invoked by uid 7770); 1 Mar 1999 22:48:16 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 1 Mar 1999 22:48:16 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id RAA08983 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Mon, 1 Mar 1999 17:48:23 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903012248.RAA08983@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 17:48:23 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Prof. Byron Curtis" at Mar 1, 99 10:47:52 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > racism is the combination of prejudice with power. This is an odd definition, since "power" is so complex. If you want to exert power over someone you can usually find a way to do it, if only by punching him in the nose. Criminals exert power over their victims, and black criminals are not unknown. One can also be more subtle. People who are relied on exert power over those who rely on them. So even someone in a very subordinate position can exert power, and thus it seems display racism, by a display of "attitude." Possibilities can be multiplied _ad infinitum_. Man is a social animal and men affect each other in all sorts of ways. Almost any of those ways can reasonably be characterized as "power." And then too, there are blacks who are in positions of power and authority in a perfectly ordinary sense. > Racism is racial prejudice on the part of a privileged group, a group > that has the political or social means to exclude members of the > targeted race from privilege. This is more specific. Here's an example. The law grants very impressive power backed with guns and prisons. So if ruling elites -- whoever they may be -- establish laws that exclude members of a targeted race from participating in some benefit on equal terms with others then it seems we have an example of racism. On this line of thought it appears that affirmative action is ruling class antiwhite racism. To the extent it's established to mollify blacks or get black votes then it would be black antiwhite racism as well. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet stocks: hype or reality? FT.com. The Financial Times online. Click here to access more than 3,000 worldwide sources http://offers.egroups.com/click/220/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From jk Wed Feb 24 21:45:47 1999 Subject: Re: you are a genuine asshole To: h Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 21:45:47 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1929 Status: RO Fantasies that grow out of hatred and bigotry don't become folk tales. They wash out, because people get tired of them and don't like to hear them or tell them. Small-mindedness doesn't last. It doesn't illuminate life. I could go on and on with reasons why you won't find the following in Grimm's. > > Once upon a time, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess > happened upon a frog in a pond. The frog said to the princess: "I > was once a handsome prince until an evil witch put a spell on me. > One kiss from you and I will turn back into a prince and then we > can marry, move into the castle with my mom, and you can > prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children and forever > feel happy doing so." > > That night, while the princess dined on frog's legs, she laughed to > herself and thought, "I don't fucking think so." -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Fri Feb 26 14:25:44 1999 Subject: Re: let me understand To: l Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 14:25:44 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 672 Status: RO > I would like to know if what you are saying is that equal rights for > men and woman is a mistake? The slogan's a mistake. It's based on a misunderstanding of social life, that rights can be the basic concern. I don't have a special objection to equality under the law, as long as government and law are limited. The political point the page makes is that the current attempt to use the law to abolish socially accepted sex roles, for example through antidiscrimination laws, is destructive and should be ended. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Sat Feb 27 07:26:47 1999 Subject: Re: let me understand To: l Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 07:26:47 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1293 Status: RO > So you do or do not support equal rights. "Equal rights" is a slogan. Depending on interpretation I could honestly say either yes or no. The answer I gave is more detailed than yes or no. What further question is there? > And do you mean by socially accepted sex roles that men are providers > and women care givers for their husbands and children? Men have primary responsibility for providing, protecting and public affairs generally, women for household management and childcare. > How do you feel that the anti discrimination acts are destructive? They attack a basic principle that has organized social and personal life in all times and places, the understanding that men and women are different and at least somewhat different expectations and responsibilities are appropriate. That has to be destructive in lots of ways. For example, if there are no complementary roles for men and women marriages are going to be less stable. Bad for all involved. Relations between men and women are going to be less cooperative, less trusting, more marked by suspicion and manipulation. Also bad. All these things have happened. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Sun Feb 28 19:20:11 1999 Subject: Re: Psychopathic Prez II To: e Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 19:20:11 -7700 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 804 Status: RO > It does seem likely that he will slip...but what do you think will > happen? How can Hill be equally evil? I would think at a certain > point someone would say...sstop!! There's enormous resistance to recognizing what kind of guy he is. It would upset too many things. As to Hill, she's strange and it's a strange relationship. Who knows how much she admits to herself about him? I agree he probably relies on other people too much in his acts as president to do anything seriously catastrophic. He can blow up a few Sudanese or whoever but there's a limit. His disorder doesn't seem to take a directly political form as in say Hitler's case and our constitutional development as a world empire doesn't seem to have reached the point at which he could literally become another Caligula. Jim From jk Tue Mar 2 07:01:19 1999 Subject: Houellebecq To: p Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 07:01:19 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 649 Status: RO News of Houellebecq has finally reached America. There was a lengthy article in the arts section of the New York Times today on the man, his work and the controversies. Most likely the article was prompted by the translation into English of one of his books. The discussion seemed factual enough, although naturally the writer didn't take it very seriously (these are foreigners, they're Frenchmen, they're intellectuals, it has to do with something that is neither economics nor the demand for equality, so it can't matter much). -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Mar 3 04:56:25 EST 1999 Article: 13579 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: The long march of PC into criminal law Date: 3 Mar 1999 04:54:55 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 24 Message-ID: <7bj0tf$m75$1@panix.com> References: <920317249snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <18441-36DC7BF6-56@newsd-121.bryant.webtv.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 920454895 26338 166.84.0.226 (3 Mar 1999 09:54:55 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Mar 1999 09:54:55 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13579 Status: RO In <18441-36DC7BF6-56@newsd-121.bryant.webtv.net> Nordicblonde@webtv.net (Greta Johannson) writes: >What surprises me is any of these laws against "hate speech" are >obeyed, I would have expected them to be ignored, especially in Canada >and the western European countries that have a strong tradition of >free speech. How about academia? Free discussion and all that. For that matter why don't academics all protest equal opportunity laws, a gross violation of academic freedom? Freedom is OK when it breaks down traditional institutions and hierarchies but that's it or so it appears. To my mind these things are a sign that people care more about equality than freedom, and that's been true all along. It's got lots of advantages over freedom. It doesn't have the same uncertainties. It's easier to define. It's a much bigger moral principle, and it's something you don't have to do anything to get the benefit of. More people can benefit from it fully in their own lives. Other people can take care of it for you, and all you have to do is complain when they don't do their job. So it's not surprising it wins out in case of a conflict. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From paleo-return-44-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Mar 5 04:47:00 1999 Received: from mh.findmail.com (mh.findmail.com [209.185.96.158]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id EAA10945 for ; Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:46:59 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mh.findmail.com with NNFMP; 05 Mar 1999 09:46:59 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 31570 invoked by uid 7770); 5 Mar 1999 09:47:11 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 5 Mar 1999 09:47:11 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id EAA05554 for paleo@egroups.com; Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:46:52 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903050946.EAA05554@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:46:51 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <2293d5a3.36deb923@aol.com> from "CraigPreus@aol.com" at Mar 4, 99 11:47:31 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO CraigPreus@aol.com writes: > What can we do to make things look at little less like South Africa or > Bosnia in the future and more like the old republic? I suppose some specific policies would be nationalism or at least anti- internationalism (restrictions on immigration, foreign trade and participation in the emerging transnational regime), particularism (opposition to multiculturalism, affirmative action and other aspects of radical egalitarianism), devolution, rejection of cultural radicalism when relevant, and so on. All those things have a lot of basic popular support. Beyond specific policies, intellectual work and advocacy is enormously important. If you don't have the grip on things you get by thinking them through and if people are unable to understand what you're saying because it sounds like doubletalk or they don't see how it ties into a general conception of the public good you're not going to get anywhere even if you have a great deal of inarticulate support. Since we've been losing badly for a very long time, the intellectual questions are quite basic. Where are we? How did we get here? What's keeping us here or moving us on? What do we want, anyway? More specifically, what is the significance of the Old Republic -- worthy ideal or Lockean Trojan Horse? What is there in America's history and the world generally that paleos can connect to? What has turned out to be a bad idea that must be downplayed? Above all, what's the vision for past, present and future? It's my impression that right wingers like other people have less culture, less intellectual subtlety, less speculative power than in the past. Where are the great thinkers? If that's right it's a basic problem that's not easy to fix. Apart from basic intellectual work we need more forceful and widespread public advocacy. Confront the statist libertines in all fora. Speak truth to power. Let people know there are alternatives to left/liberalism. Etc. So there's plenty to do. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Does your free web site address contain more letters than the alphabet? Register a domain name with DomainDirect. A domain with NO hosting fees. Visit http://offers.egroups.com/click/233/0 for full details. eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-45-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Mar 5 04:49:50 1999 Received: from mh.findmail.com (mh.findmail.com [209.185.96.158]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id EAA21307 for ; Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:49:49 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mh.findmail.com with NNFMP; 05 Mar 1999 09:49:49 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 32500 invoked by uid 7770); 5 Mar 1999 09:50:03 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 5 Mar 1999 09:50:03 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id EAA05612 for paleo@egroups.com; Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:49:44 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903050949.EAA05612@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:49:44 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <36DF37FE.91A1CAE@execpc.com> from "Kate Scot-Bryson" at Mar 4, 99 07:48:46 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > Given he really means it, and gets elected. Then goes to Washington > and all the advisors and bureaucrats fill him in on why he can't do > it. he continues to make conservative noises but 4 years later we > can't *really* tell the difference. Seems like a waste of time to me. Do you really know it's useless in advance? One thing Bill Clinton can teach us is that persistence pays. Admittedly he has the advantage of going with the flow. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Wed Mar 3 18:12:40 1999 Received: from darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE (majordom@darc.Toxikologie.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.19.12]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with ESMTP id SAA19403 for ; Wed, 3 Mar 1999 18:12:39 -0500 (EST) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE (8.8.8/8.8.5) id XAA16046 for confucius-outgoing; Wed, 3 Mar 1999 23:29:33 +0100 (CET) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 23:29:33 +0100 (CET) Message-Id: <199903032229.XAA16046@darc.TOXIKOLOGIE.UNI-MAINZ.DE> To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Confucius: A Man for all Seasons Sender: owner-confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Precedence: bulk Reply-To: confucius@lists.gnacademy.org Status: RO Robert Rosenstock writes: > Jim also noted that "... China [is not] the same as Confucianism. At > times it was. When the Confucianists were in charge - and they were > on more than one occasion - they had the opportunity to put a > "philosophy" in action - what an opportunity!! But their actions > bespoke something else. I know too little to identify or discuss the instances to which you refer. It does seem to me that the thought of Confucius is not the sort of thing you can put into effect by forcing it on people, so putting men claiming allegiance to Confucius in charge of a universal centralized empire based on regulation and punishment would not necessarily lead to reform. You may be talking about quite a different sort of thing though. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ---------------------------------------------------------+ Confucius Mailing List (confucius@lists.gnacademy.org). Via the Globewide Network Academy (http://www.gnacademy.org) Web archive (http://lists.gnacademy.org/gna/webarchive/lists/confucius) If you would like to unsubscribe from the mailing list send the following command to majordomo@lists.gnacademy.org unsubscribe confucius From christ-and-culture-return-806-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Sat Mar 6 08:14:48 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id IAA11891 for ; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 08:14:47 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 06 Mar 1999 13:14:46 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 7780 invoked by uid 7770); 6 Mar 1999 13:14:59 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 6 Mar 1999 13:14:59 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id IAA28328 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 08:14:38 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903061314.IAA28328@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 08:14:38 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Paul C Duggan" at Mar 5, 99 12:33:41 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Paul C Duggan writes: > We're talking about the definition of racism as defined to only apply > to the opressors. I'm saying I don't see much wrong with focusing on > the misdeeds of those with power in a context where many of those who > have power don't even realize it or it is second nature to them. What concrete demonstrable power and oppression do you have in mind? Differences between groups in average wealth and occupation -- the things you notice if you compare Jews to others for example -- are not oppression. Fraud is oppressive but doesn't appear to be a major factor. Specific violent crimes -- murder, rape, robbery and so on -- are oppressive, but far more such crimes are perpetrated by blacks against whites than the reverse. Actual slavery is oppressive but not an issue, so I don't understand the point of the reference to Hebrew slavery in Egypt. If whites as a class exploited blacks as a class I would think racist whites would want to have lots of blacks available to exploit. Pharaoh after all did not want the Hebrews to leave Egypt. So racist exploiting whites should favor nonwhite immigration and stay away from places like Idaho where they would have to get their own breakfast. That doesn't seem to be the case though. In this century tens of millions of innocents have been murdered in the name of stamping out exploitation. What is called a passion for social and economic justice has been the greatest of all sources of oppression. Churchmen have been complicit, and should learn from the experience. "Racist" and "oppressor" are no less inflammatory than racial epithets. They are the kind of words that kill, or at least stir up hate, so they shouldn't be used loosely or tendentiously. Also, there is actual clear-cut demonstrable oppression in the world, and we shouldn't confuse categories. > > Jesus did not particularly emphasize the misdeeds of the rich and > > powerful. I'm not quite satisfied with the wording. Jesus thought that riches are a problem, since they are a distraction, and that bad conduct by someone with a lot against someone who doesn't have much is particularly objectionable. It also tends to be easy and therefore common. On the other hand his basic concern was certainly not economic justice -- how could it have been, when he thought that economic issues were so grossly overemphasized? When two men came to him to ask him to divide an inheritance he said that wasn't what he was there for. His central concerns were not economic or managerial or political in any common sense. Otherwise supreme political power together with the solution of all economic and technological problems would not have constituted his Temptation. > Enemies of Jesus: Scribes, Pharisees, Priests, He didn't like academics, the PC crowd, or functionaries in respectable national religious bureaucracies. No doubt understandable, but what reason is there to think those people had lots of money in comparison with say rich landowners and merchants, who Jesus doesn't talk about a lot, at least not as such? In any event their offenses had to do with misuse of religious authority rather than socioeconomic position. I've been told the Sadducees were richer than most, and he hardly talks about them at all except to disagree with them about resurrection. > Herodians, Pilate, Herod, Government administrators and representatives of transnational bureaucracies, the NWO of the day. Pilate is basically portrayed as clueless, by the way, rather than someone who for reasons of his own became an enemy. > Rich Young Ruler The one who asked how to be perfect? Hardly an enemy. He and Jesus plainly liked each other. > Devourers of Widow's Houses, Tax Resiters, (rich & powerful) He disagreed it's true with those who felt obligated to resist the financial demands of the colonial occupying power. I don't see how that manifests a special opposition to wealth and power. > Friends of Jesus: Harlots, fishermen, lepers, demoniacs (poor and > powerless) What about the ruler whose daughter he raised from the dead? For that matter how about Joseph of Arimathea, who seems to have been the first man to raise his head after the Crucifixion? And how do you know lepers and demoniacs as such were poor? Members of rich families could suffer such afflictions. There are examples in the Old Testament. And the Gospels represent at least some as under the care of their families. > Tax collectors, centurions Foreign oppressors and their greedy brutal extorting agents. > samaritans (possibly rich, but social outcasts) Provincial rednecks and religious reactionaries. They hadn't moved with the times. Who is it today who would most object to having such people over for dinner? > And the prophets do focus on the sins of the powerful agianst the > "powerless". The question is what to infer from the prophets. One could define "oppression" as "retention of power by the powerful," the continued existence of social distinctions, and so interpret the prophetic demand as one for creation of an absolutely egalitarian society. If so, it seems likely to lead in fact to tyranny, universal slavery, destruction of civilization, and other bad things. You could also interpret the message as a denunciation of specific evils that aren't necessarily the same in every age. If you have an extremely diverse economy and job market, universal instant communication, ready mobility, enormous and widespread prosperity, general security of person and property, extensive popular influence on government, etc., etc., etc. it seems to me the situation becomes rather different than in Palestine 700 B.C. or so. There will still be evils and abuses in high places but they won't be exactly the same. Local landowners for example won't have the power they did at that time. Others will have far more power -- Jesus had only scribes and Pharisees to worry about, while we have a much larger and more ubiquitous symbol-manipulating and -abusing elite. > most of his public pronoucnements had the effect of making those > comfortable with their lives "uncomfortable". He treats the sins of > the "sinners" as well, but quite often the powerful believe "they > have no need of a doctor" Absolutely. So if we carry him over unaltered and assume problems now are just like problems them, he would presumably attack comfortable academics and religious bureaucrats and the moral demands they invent and try to force on everyone. That would apply double if the demands served the purposes of powerful ruling elites. On that line of thought it seems to me that bureaucratic egalitarianism -- including contemporary antiracism -- is a candidate for attack. After all, judging by experience since the late 60s it does little or nothing for its alleged greatest beneficiaries, the most badly-off blacks. For that matter if you compare trends before and after the civil rights laws and especially their affirmative action enhancements were put in place it's not clear it does much for most other blacks either. Bureaucratic egalitarianism does do something for its comfortable supporters though. For one thing, it makes them better than other people and licenses them to tell others what to do. Even better, it costs no personal effort, since all they have to do is adopt political positions that normally don't much affect them personally (they've already made it) and they can be as abusive in their personal lives as they want and remain among the elect. Further, it enhances the power of the powerful classes that support it. It delegitimates and undermines the autonomy of all institutions other than the state, since they are considered untrustworthy and even evil because implicated in traditional bigotries. It thereby promotes the triumph of a centralized formal bureaucratic order that (oddly) favors the interests of comfortable academics, who supply the expertise centralized bureaucracies run on, not to mention the interests of politicians, government officials, lawyers, and so on, all notable among the powerful. It promotes media interests as well, since their power is enhanced to the extent social life becomes subjected to rational formal systems that define situations as social issues requiring public action. (The opponents of universalistic bureaucratic egalitarianism are not among the powerful, by the way. That is why affirmative action and large-scale immigration survive in spite of enduring large majorities opposed.) Bureaucratic egalitarianism -- prominently including modern antiracism -- is also at odds with the coherence of specific cultures, since actual cultures all have ethnic and therefore racial overtones. If you try to root out all the effects of race you root out a lot of other stuff as well. All culture is specific. It follows that bureaucratic egalitarianism destroys culture as such, and thereby makes life more crude, brutal and stupid. So the conjunction of egalitarianism and barbarism post-60s is no accident. > We are specificly told in the Law to care for and not oppress the > "stranger" that is within our midst. "Stranger" seems to mean immigrant rather than member of a native minority, so the issue you're raising is what the example of the Old Testament Law tells us about treating immigrants. It's a good issue that deserves discussion. Oppression doesn't seem to be the issue though since disinclination of a private person to deal with someone might be good or bad but it's hard for it to be oppression. There are obvious differences in circumstances that seem relevant. A society in which most economic activity, education etc. takes place within the household, and what public life there is is governed by either the king or religious law, seems different from a society where public life is far more extensive and pervasive and governed by consensus and common understandings. Immigration seems to raise issues in the latter it does not in the former. Also, Old Testament religion wasn't unequivocally pro-stranger. Miscegenation was frowned on and sometimes vigorously proscribed. That in itself was enough to exclude strangers from participation in most aspects of Jewish society. Foreign religions were very definitely opposed. The Law had different provisions for treatment of Jews and outsiders, and the ones I can think of favored Jews. And the extermination of the inhabitants of the Promised Land must play some role in considering the issue. > I didn't ask about all the variations. I asked about the specific of > where it is clear that race is a primary factor in hiring. The examples I gave were intended as situations in which in one way or another race made the difference. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroup of the Day: Mun-e-news - The United Nations' Model UN news & discussion eGroup. http://offers.egroups.com/click/236/1 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-808-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Sat Mar 6 17:59:34 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id RAA02723 for ; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 17:59:33 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 06 Mar 1999 22:59:33 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 4694 invoked by uid 7770); 6 Mar 1999 22:59:45 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 6 Mar 1999 22:59:45 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id RAA11294 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 17:59:25 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903062259.RAA11294@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 17:59:25 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990306115250.0092a7f0@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> from "Russ P. Reeves" at Mar 6, 99 12:55:25 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "Russ P. Reeves" writes: > Many Jews were wealthy in Weimar Germany - in fact, it was their > wealth which in part (along with a strong racist element) made them > targets for oppression. True, but I'm not sure of the relevance. Many aristocrats and industrialists were wealthy in Czarist Russia. They also became targets and mostly ended up dead. What follows? > Surely you can see a difference between a violent attack on someone > for financial gain and members of one race tying a member of another > race to the back of their car and dragging him to his death for no > gain other than the thrill of killing a "nigger." Sure. What makes you think crime of the latter sort is distinctively white on black? There are about 3 times as many whites killed by blacks as blacks by whites, which leaves room for all sorts of motivations. They're not all profit-making ventures when engaged in by blacks. The Jasper killing got more publicity than the Yahweh killings, but the latter occurred as well. Maybe this would be a better presentation of the issue as it now appears to me: The proposed definition of "racism" requires identification of whites collectively as "the powerful" and blacks collectively as "the powerless". A problem with it is that whites as such are not the powerful. Our ruling elites do not define themselves in ethnic terms. They define themselves in professional, educational, functional, and ideological terms. It may happen that most of them are white, but they are a small minority of whites and do not represent white interests as such. For evidence, consider elite solidarity in defense of affirmative action and the transformation of the ethnic nature of American society through immigration, both quite unpopular among the population at large. If the foregoing is correct, then those professors who adopt the proposed definition are in fact showing solidarity with the powerful rather than the oppressed. They are performing the usual function of an established clerical order, to provide theoretical support for the powers that be. They get paid with social respectability and, to the extent their activities cause the social service state to expand, additional position and power on account of their role as professional trainers, experts and indoctrinators. Current ideology requires the powers that be to represent themselves as defenders of the oppressed, and therefore to identify a group of oppressors. I don't see why either their pose as defenders of the weak or their theories of oppression should be taken seriously. > I'm much more concerned about the kind of racism which denies a black > man a job because of his race than the racist complaints the man > might make in his home about white people. I agree action is likely to cause more problems than grousing about things in the privacy of your own home. Some whites grouse, some blacks act. Putting comparisons aside, it seems to me that under present and foreseeable circumstances (extremely diverse economy and occupational scheme, easy communications and movement, varied employers, far-flung enterprises, world markets, widespread opposition to racism, no legal requirement of discrimination) job discrimination is unlikely to cause serious economic problems for those subjected to it even if it is common. If there are 1000 employers and 800 won't hire you you'll probably end up in about the same place with one of the remaining 200. It's interesting in that regard to look at stats on overall black economic progress before and after the civil rights laws of the 60s and the affirmative action programs of the early 70s. (Look at Historical Statistics of the United States and the United States Statistical Abstract.) If anything black progress on the whole was slower after than before. One exception (I understand) is areas in the South where a uniform system of discrimination had been compelled through a combination of law and extralegal violence, where the destruction of that system in the 60s gave blacks a immediate one-time boost. > The real problem with the wording was that it focused exclusively on > money. Jesus associated not only with the poor, but also the > powerless, social outcasts (tax gatherers, for example - wealthy, but > social outcasts). Tax gatherers also had power -- they needed it to shake money out of people. I'm sure the discussion has been unbalanced and wording imperfect -- it's all been a tangent from something else. The original issue I think was whether the best approach is to speak of bad attitudes and conduct in common human terms or to define your language so the most opprobrious terms only apply to certain classes of people. It seems to me Jesus took the former approach. > Amos 2:7"They trample on the heads of the poor as upon the dust of > the ground and deny justice to the oppressed." Ez. 22:29 "The people > of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the > poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice."). It's certainly outrageous when the rich and powerful commit theft and violent crime. Does that show that the rich and powerful should be denounced or that theft and violent crime should be denounced especially when successful and shameless? > Luke 6:24, "Woe to you who are rich..." Where they're in the same category as people who laugh and people who have a good reputation. Then he tells us to turn the other cheek and submit to oppression. The whole passage is remarkable and deserves study and thought. > You mean Jarius the synagogue ruler? I guess it's possible that like > most churches today which seek out elders who are successful > businessmen and big givers, synagogue rulers may have been wealthy. He was certainly respectable. He seems to have been non-poor, non- powerless, non-outcaste, and what Jesus did for him was more amazing than most. The incident confirms my point that Jesus did not define good and bad by class but concerned himself with every human soul with which he came in contact. > As for the rest of the post, surely it's possible to show the > hypocisy of bureaucratic anti-racism without denying the reality of > racism today? It's not really hypocrisy that's my objection. It's more the understanding of society that bureaucratic antiracism represents and the effect of political decisions based on that understanding. I agree that men of different races sometimes suspect, dislike, fear or hate each other and should not, and that racial frictions and hatreds sometimes cause very serious problems. Other things do as well though, for example envy and resentment of those who have more and attempts to create utopias. The status of racism as a sort of superproblem or superevil seems odd to me, but I haven't thought it all through. > "The community is to have the same rules for you and for the alien > living among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to > come. You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD: The same > laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the alien living > among you.'" (Numbers 15:15-16). Is it clear that applied accross the board, or only to the particular item being discussed? The KJV makes it sound like the latter, I haven't checked other translations. More generally, do you know of a good discussion of the status of aliens in Israel? My recollection is that the same rules did not always apply, that in important respects aliens and Jews were treated differently. For example, as I recall a Jewish borrower or slave was not in the same position as an alien. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Does your free web site address contain more letters than the alphabet? Register a domain name with DomainDirect. A domain with NO hosting fees. Visit http://offers.egroups.com/click/233/0 for full details. eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Mar 7 09:02:20 EST 1999 Article: 13583 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: the metaphysics of impeachment Date: 7 Mar 1999 09:00:18 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 67 Message-ID: <7bu0pi$jqb$1@panix.com> References: <36E2074B.A92CF4E5@msmisp.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 920815218 9865 166.84.0.226 (7 Mar 1999 14:00:18 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Mar 1999 14:00:18 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13583 Status: RO In <36E2074B.A92CF4E5@msmisp.com> cjahnes@msmisp.com (Carl Jahnes) writes: >> You seem to be saying >You misunderstand. There are several miscues which it might pay to sort out over a beer but not in a newsgroup. >I'm left thinking that your characterizations, which openly speak of >connections to transcendence, do so in only a partial way...because >those characterizations still keep open the possibility of a kind of >'engineering' or a kind of return to an imagined purer past. I get >this sense when you speak about 'tradition' as if it is a class, and >not an individual. The problem with speaking about transcendence or fundamental issues of any sort is that anything you say will be misleading. On the other hand, to set boundaries to speech is to constrict the world, which is worse. The advantage of the aquarium metaphor is that it shows how impossibly difficult the situation is and how resistant to improvement through manipulation. Pointing out as you do that we are in the aquarium helps the metaphor. Impossible difficulty does not mean that there's nothing we should do in view of the situation. It just means that the means/ends component of what we should do will not be the whole or even the largest part of it. It will always be tempting to interpret in a technological sense whatever language we use in speaking of "what to do". That's the nature of language and the background assumptions that prevail today. It's also a consequence of putting things in a form that will make sense to people now. It's said that all roads lead to Rome. From the modern technological outlook the road to Rome leads through the paradox of attaining a goal where the necessary means include at least partial abandonment of means/ends rationality. As to "tradition in general" -- I think such an abstraction does have a role in developing the paradox I just mentioned. Technological rationality is not a complete formal system but rests on something else, at least tradition in general -- the principle of relying on the accumulated habits, understandings etc. of the community to which one belongs. But tradition of any sort requires abandonment of technological rationality since it requires faith and self-abandonment. Thus begins the road out of the box we're in. >Perhaps I am wrong to interpret questions such as 'What can we do? >How can our message be more effective?' as necessarily making >political prescriptions. I don't think I've used the latter language. >I think the only way one can call for the return to Tradition, is to >be very specific about the Tradition one champions I don't think so, any more than the only way to arrive anywhere is to specify what the goal is and insist on it. Is there a process that leads to truth? If there is, then you can arrive at truth by obviating things that stand in the way of the process. To the extent one of the things that stands in the way is allegiance to an abstract ideal of technological rationality then it would help to show problems with the abstract ideal that mean it won't work at all unless expanded, to include say at least the principle of tradition in general. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From christ-and-culture-return-804-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Tue Mar 2 20:44:44 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id UAA22205 for ; Tue, 2 Mar 1999 20:44:43 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 03 Mar 1999 01:44:42 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 31859 invoked by uid 7770); 3 Mar 1999 01:44:38 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 3 Mar 1999 01:44:38 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id UAA16006 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Tue, 2 Mar 1999 20:44:20 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903030144.UAA16006@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 20:44:20 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Paul C Duggan" at Mar 2, 99 12:54:04 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Paul C Duggan writes: > > > racism is the combination of prejudice with power. > > > > This is an odd definition, since "power" is so complex. > > Do the prophets by and large speak out against the bad attitudes of > the oppressed poor? Or do they speak out against the oppression > (misuse of power) of the wicked wealthy? They didn't *define* bad conduct as something only the wealthy could engage in. The point of my discussion was that the redefinition of racism doesn't make sense. It's suspicious when someone redefines inflammatory language in such a way that it only applies to other people. The apparent intention of the revised definition is to undercut objections to affirmative action and so on. In general, the targets of AA etc. are not wicked wealthy oppressors, and the beneficiaries are not the oppressed poor. So I don't think the wicked wealthy etc. are the issue. I agree I didn't prove the sins of the weak are as bad as those of the strong. My only point was that they equally constitute sins. The Ten Commandments don't have any special connection with economic or social status. Jesus did not particularly emphasize the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. The concern about wealth seemed to have more to do with its effect on the possessor than oppression of others. He said that two women would be grinding meal; one would be taken and the other left. There was nothing definitional about sin that meant only rich people could do it. As for prophets, it seems the issue is what aspects of life most need to be turned around to make lives better. For my own part I don't see that it's economics, at least within the United States. Too much concern with the economic side of life is a big issue I think, but that doesn't just affect the people with the most money. I don't think it's race relations either, even assuming redefining "racism" would contribute to better race relations. > What should a Christian do if he seems to be being hired partially > because of his shared race with the hirer? What should he do if he's hired because of his different race, to increase diversity? Is that better than hiring him for being the same race, to keep things simple? To me it depends on circumstances. Very different things can be involved. Someone might hire me because we were simpatico, or because he thought I would fit in and work well with the others. Most people hit it off best with people with a similar cultural background, and culture relates to ethnicity which relates to race. I might get hired because the employer was satisfied my credentials hadn't been inflated by AA, and that there was less likely to be a problem if things didn't work out and I got fired. Or because of a past bad experience. Possible situations and variations can be multiplied indefinitely. Is there a unique Christian view that covers them all? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-812-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 8 19:51:12 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id TAA05728 for ; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:51:11 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 09 Mar 1999 00:51:11 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 10930 invoked by uid 7770); 9 Mar 1999 00:50:39 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 9 Mar 1999 00:50:39 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id TAA12957 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:50:18 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903090050.TAA12957@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:50:18 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <46cf7309.36e428ad@aol.com> from "MnnyMoNHak@aol.com" at Mar 8, 99 02:44:45 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO MnnyMoNHak@aol.com writes: > >He didn't like academics, the PC crowd, or functionaries in > >respectable national religious bureaucracies.>> > > There was a "PC crowd" in Jesus' day? Have you completely redefined > "PC" beyond any known definition, or are you just that desperate to > Americanize the Bible? I was referring to the Pharisees. The thought was that both Pharisaism and PC are forms of moralistic pedantry that has lost sight of basics and mainly functions to maintain the authority of a class of supposed experts. If you don't like the analysis or think the comparison is too far- fetched I won't insist on it. It was an off the cuff remark. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroup of the Day: "QueerLaw" - Discuss queer legal theory, sexual orientation and The Law. http://offers.egroups.com/click/240/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-813-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 8 19:51:39 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id TAA05830 for ; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:51:39 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 09 Mar 1999 00:51:39 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 11485 invoked by uid 7770); 9 Mar 1999 00:51:42 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 9 Mar 1999 00:51:42 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id TAA13175 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:51:22 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903090051.TAA13175@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:51:21 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Prof. Byron Curtis" at Mar 8, 99 03:18:49 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: Bypassing the Institutions; Racism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "Prof. Byron Curtis" writes: > OK, and then see what happens to that [member of oppressed race who > commits a crime against member of dominant race or displays > obstructionist "attitude"] in a political community dominated by > racists. The vengeance is swift, incommensurate, and either "legal" > or else blind-eyed by the powers that be. > So, do we agree on racisms's definition? I'm all but persuaded. If "racism" were used specifically to refer to situations of the kind you contemplate it would greatly improve the quality of discussion of race relations. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Does your free web site address contain more letters than the alphabet? Register a domain name with DomainDirect. A domain with NO hosting fees. Visit http://offers.egroups.com/click/233/0 for full details. eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-74-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Mar 10 15:47:22 1999 Received: from mh.findmail.com (mh.findmail.com [209.185.96.158]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id PAA20748 for ; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:47:21 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mh.findmail.com with NNFMP; 10 Mar 1999 20:47:21 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 5438 invoked by uid 7770); 10 Mar 1999 20:47:38 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 10 Mar 1999 20:47:38 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id PAA17247 for paleo@egroups.com; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:47:17 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903102047.PAA17247@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:47:15 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <19990310170517.HRSC1437@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Mar 10, 99 11:05:00 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Rhydon Jackson writes: > Plenty of people who have a sincere interest in reducing the size and > scope of the national government will not brook the slightest > disrespect for MLK nor countenance any lessening of the federal role > in ensuring that anti discrimination measures are successful. Give in on this point, though, and how much is left? I think it's important to bear in mind how radical the antidiscrimination principle really is. Since man is a social animal it's not just a matter of looking beyond skin color to individual worth. In order to eliminate racial discrimination it is necessary to eliminate cultural discrimination, since culture is tied to ethnicity and ethnicity to race. If it's not OK to hire people because of WASP descent it's not going to be OK to hire them because of WASP culture. If taken at all seriously, the antidiscrimination principle therefore means that multiculturalism -- the principle that no institution or practice of any substantial public importance may advantage one culture over another -- is inevitable. Every culture must be denied public authority, which means that all cultures must be abolished since if a culture is not a stock of authoritative common understandings, practices, etc. it is nothing. Abolition of culture means stupidity, brutality, ersatz culture supplied by pop stars and therapists, anarchy, despotism, etc., etc., etc. > Fleming remarked in an editorial not too long ago that the advantage > of being outside the pale is the freedom to ignore criticism from > within the pale, a point that Justin stresses also. The problem is > that such a stance is not likely to effect much within the pale. The basic question is whether we have a fundamentally sound system that just needs a few tweaks to point things in a better direction, all consistent with what the dominant powers will accept, or whether the problems are bigger than that. Have the Jacobins really finally won? If the latter then the normal sort of political strategizing -- putting together a winning combination based on the existing disposition of forces -- is aside the point. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-77-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Mar 10 22:57:21 1999 Received: from mh.findmail.com (mh.findmail.com [209.185.96.158]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id WAA13645 for ; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 22:57:19 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mh.findmail.com with NNFMP; 11 Mar 1999 03:57:17 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 16209 invoked by uid 7770); 11 Mar 1999 03:46:26 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 11 Mar 1999 03:46:26 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id WAA00441 for paleo@egroups.com; Wed, 10 Mar 1999 22:46:04 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903110346.WAA00441@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 22:46:04 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <19990310231411.BTHY18356@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Mar 10, 99 05:14:00 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Rhydon says: > Well, I'm not sure. In the abstract, one can maintain the distinction > between culture and race. Perhaps it evaporates at times in practical > situations. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't have been hired > by my present employer if I didn't speak English. It goes a bit beyond speaking English. Culture is among other things an elaborate mode of cooperation. That's why diversity is the wonderful challenge we keep hearing about. Also, the civil rights laws are fanatically demanding -- you're not allowed to take anything related to ethnicity into account *at all*, at least unless there's some strong "business necessity" argument which there almost never is. > What is clear is that no move toward allowing private individuals to > make hiring decisions and the like free from government oversight > will gain much sympathy. I'm afraid that only a tiny minority is > dissatisfied by LBJ's civil rights legislation. Affirmative action > opponents are rather plentiful, but that's hardly the same thing. Startling changes can come with time, especially regarding things that have something fundamentally wrong and unworkable about them. As to the opposition to AA, I think the conventional liberal view is correct that at best it's sort of weird once the antidiscrimination principle is accepted. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-83-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Mar 12 09:33:27 1999 Received: from mc.egroups.com ([207.138.41.138]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id JAA11729 for ; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:33:26 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.egroups.com with NNFMP; 12 Mar 1999 14:32:28 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 5934 invoked by uid 7770); 13 Mar 1999 14:01:08 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by 207.138.41.143 with SMTP; 13 Mar 1999 14:01:08 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA02243 for paleo@egroups.com; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:32:04 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903121432.JAA02243@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:32:03 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "T.E. Wilder" at Mar 11, 99 09:06:26 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Blumenfeld on why conservatives lose Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "T.E. Wilder" writes: > Is it generally true that people who believe in something frighten > those with only vague ideas and commitments? If so, what are the > people not frightened by the left? If not, does not this suggest that > it is something other than vagueness, but rather some specific > opposite commitment that makes Republicans oppose conservatives? People are frightened by attacks on themselves and their world. What they find alarming is a sign of what they really are. Mainstream Republicans share the commitment of the Left to an economic and hedonistic understanding of the Good and social management to promote that Good. The important thing is to run things so people get what they want as much as possible. The Left is more universalistic but that doesn't mean mainstream Republicans have any real use for particularism let alone any notion of a goal other than fixing things so you'll have enough stuff to do whatever it is you feel like doing and maybe the chance to get more. Republican moderates are just that -- moderate leftists who don't like to push their own basic principles to extremes. They're more impressed than the Left with existing nuts-and-bolts practices, they have less imagination and narrower sympathies so to some extent they simulate a concern for the traditional and particular but that's an illusion. Any real suggestion that the world can't be managed or that life depends on things we can't control and aren't our choice or that there are basic problems that more "progress" can't cure horrifies them. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-84-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Mar 12 09:36:36 1999 Received: from mc.egroups.com ([207.138.41.138]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id JAA08971 for ; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:36:34 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.egroups.com with NNFMP; 12 Mar 1999 14:35:59 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 8451 invoked by uid 7770); 13 Mar 1999 14:04:47 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by 207.138.41.143 with SMTP; 13 Mar 1999 14:04:47 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA02561 for paleo@egroups.com; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:35:47 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903121435.JAA02561@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:35:47 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Sigma429@aol.com" at Mar 11, 99 11:49:23 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Sigma429@aol.com writes: > while race is an importnat and legitimate part of social and cultural > identity, it is not the whole f it and that while race plays an > imncreasingly important role in non-white identity as a political > bond, it is minuscule in current white identities. Moreover, I have > also emphasized that the basic confluict in the country is between > MARs and the managerial overclass and its struictures. One aspect of this is that managers like people to have interests rather than identities because they're easier to manage. Non-white identities are OK to the extent asserting them eliminates the influence of the majority identity. It's divide and rule. Also, to the extent whites take the managerial view, as they're likely to if only because whites created and mostly staff the managerial class and the most prominent whites are managers or hangers-on, they'll be suspicious of basing anything political on identity. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-85-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Mar 12 09:49:26 1999 Received: from mc.egroups.com ([207.138.41.138]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id JAA10710 for ; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:49:22 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.egroups.com with NNFMP; 12 Mar 1999 14:49:04 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 17766 invoked by uid 7770); 13 Mar 1999 14:17:52 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by 207.138.41.143 with SMTP; 13 Mar 1999 14:17:52 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA04026 for paleo@egroups.com; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:48:48 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903121448.JAA04026@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:48:48 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <19990311223045.NCJC7663@[166.35.145.36]> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Mar 11, 99 04:10:00 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Will PJB Announce Next Week??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Rhydon Jackson writes: [discussion of race and culture] My point is not that race determines culture, but that when you enforce nondiscrimination you will not be able to tolerate the importance of culture. You can't make persons of black race treated equally without making persons of black culture treated equally. Race and culture are connected. Both have to do with what we are now as a result of what people have done in the past. Culture develops as a group of people deal with each and race as they intermarry over the generations. So they arise under similar circumstances. That's why we can speak of Chinese race and also Chinese culture. There could be someone who was of Chinese race but not culture, or vice versa. Race and culture do not *determine* each other. Nonetheless, if Chinese immigration stopped and the Chinese here all intermarried, neither their race nor culture would survive. On the other hand, if there was no intermarriage then race would be preserved and presumably there would be enough social distance to maintain some cultural specificity. So the connection isn't accidental. > Even more problematic is the fact that the ethnic categories Jim > refers to are largely mythical. That's not problematic, it's helpful. It's another reason why abolition of the social relevance of ethnic categories means abolition of the relevance of cultural differences. To the extent ethnicity is a matter of habits, manners, attitudes etc. then barring ethnic discrimination means barring discrimination on the basis of such things. > Many who voted for the original act in 1964 would surely be appalled > at what they have wrought. Sure. When wishes are granted people don't like it. They don't think things through in advance. How long did it take for affirmative action to appear after the 1964 act? Do the timing, circumstances and people involved make AA look like a betrayal or a natural development? > Given the fact that even D'Souza's common sense discussion of race > relations meets with outrage by the circles that implement and direct > civil rights litigation, it is difficult to expect anything else. I never read him. He proposes abolition of antidiscrimination laws, doesn't he? > We may snicker at Bush II and his attempts at 'diversity', but he > might be elected. Should we also snicker at Buchanan? Both make an > effort to appear race neutral. The difference is that Bush makes such > an effort a primary focus. Actually I don't know that much about Buchanan. "Race neutrality" can mean a lot of things. For example, it can just mean equal rights under the law, which I haven't criticized. > is permenent, racial solidarity is the only way to deal with the > situation. Maybe this is what Jim means by suggesting that the > problems are bigger than the existing system can rectify. What I had in mind was more the technological understanding of society. Race is not the fundamental problem. Also I don't much like the idea of permanent racial solidarity if race is supposed to be clear-cut and fundamental, unified within and displaying a common front without. Life and for that matter race, ethnicity, culture are more complex than that. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Sat Mar 13 06:00:16 1999 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [198.82.162.215]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with ESMTP id GAA27592 for ; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 06:00:15 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [198.82.162.215]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id FAA25614; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 05:59:51 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8d) with spool id 8181092 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 05:59:50 -0500 Received: from panix.com (IDENT:Uhq4l9haawhWfnpVFVutm0yX/+dzbAmp@panix.com [166.84.1.66]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id FAA33846 for ; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 05:59:49 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id FAA22717 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 05:59:48 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199903131059.FAA22717@panix.com> Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 05:59:48 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: My Boss on Buchanan To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: <014801be6cd0$46c3ff80$f485c898@default> from "Chris Stamper" at Mar 12, 99 01:35:39 pm Status: RO "Chris Stamper" writes: I don't know that much about Pat Buchanan. Still, Katz talks about this as a basic division, one of general importance, so maybe I don't need to know much about him in particular in order to comment. > And that's where Pat Buchanan still sounds suspect-especially when he > talks about immigrants to America, people from other nations and > other cultures who long to taste the same grace and goodness so many > of us have enjoyed so lavishly in this society. This seems to me a repellently self-satisfied comment on American society. Does Katz really believe America is a special place for Divine Grace and for goodness as understood by Christians, which is what he claims to be concerned with? Other countries may have problems that are sometimes worse but entering America is not entering paradise. Money and license to do what you happen to feel like doing in your personal life are not the same as grace and goodness enjoyed lavishly. As I understand the matter the main motivation for immigration at this point is economic and most of those who immigrate are not down and outers. If something is an economic benefit and getting it is a major effort and costs something, why expect it to accrue to people who don't have anything? Further, America can not appreciably affect world poverty by taking in poor people, there are just too many of them. The solution has to be local development, which isn't likely to work unless the locals who are doing the developing can keep what they produce. That means excluding others. So the basic enforceable legal rule has to be responsibility for one's own rather than universalism. Local development also may be less likely to work if the goal of the ambitious is to move someplace else. It seems to me there are important considerations other than what prospective immigrants think would make their lives better. A self- governing society is in some ways quite fragile since it depends on the complex of common habits and understandings that make self-government possible. These things include common memories and loyalties, mutual trust and understanding, consistent ideas of good and bad, and common understandings of the roles of government, other social institutions and the individual. To the extent cultural coherence is lost such things become impossible to maintain. That's true even though the newly-introduced cultural complexes are in themselves wonderful things. It seems to me the grand question of political morality etc. is whether all things considered the world would be better with a regime of free immigration. Law after all is an ordinance of reason for the public good. It's not obvious to me the answer is yes. > And so he calls on the federal government to set up vast systems of > trade regulation to monitor and manipulate what he apparently thinks > the market system cannot do on its own. He may not call this > "statism"-but it is. What does Buchanan want to do? If Katz wants to call protectionism a newly set-up vast system of statist manipulation he can, I suppose, especially if likes talking to himself. To my mind the advantage of protectionism is that it's a way to moderate the effects of world markets without a vast system of regulation and manipulation. You simply put up walls so that people will tend to deal more with those with whom they have a multiplicity of connections. Also, the actual system of world trade against which Buchanan protests is notable for the role given transnational bureaucracies. It seems to me protectionism should be less offensive to antistatists. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From paleo-return-93-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 15 13:43:15 1999 Received: from mb.egroups.com ([207.138.41.137]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id NAA24274 for ; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 13:43:15 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mb.egroups.com with NNFMP; 15 Mar 1999 18:42:57 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 22138 invoked by uid 7770); 16 Mar 1999 11:26:09 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by 207.138.41.143 with SMTP; 16 Mar 1999 11:26:09 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id GAA07933 for paleo@egroups.com; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 06:57:08 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903151157.GAA07933@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 06:57:07 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "rsmith@wbalmail.com" at Mar 14, 99 07:21:51 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: My Boss on Buchanan Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > Nietszche might have been right about Christianity being inherently > suicidal. Your boss's views being a case in point. If so, it's taken a lot of years. The man just died who was the first RC theologian to say racism is a sin. The discovery postdated WWII. Presumably the religious opposition to immigration restrictions simply as such is of similar vintage. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Mergersdaily" - A newsletter covering mergers, acquisitions, investors, etc. http://offers.egroups.com/click/242/4 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-96-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 15 15:08:38 1999 Received: from mb.egroups.com ([207.138.41.137]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id PAA08279 for ; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 15:08:37 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mb.egroups.com with NNFMP; 15 Mar 1999 20:08:31 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 11785 invoked by uid 7770); 16 Mar 1999 19:32:55 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by 207.138.41.143 with SMTP; 16 Mar 1999 19:32:55 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id PAA04198 for paleo@egroups.com; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 15:03:54 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903152003.PAA04198@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 15:03:53 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <19990315173016.ZTM5455@localHost> from "Rhydon Jackson" at Mar 15, 99 11:30:00 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: Race & Culture, Witnessing & Social Change Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Rhydon Jackson writes: > It is my point that ethnicity is not a matter of habits, manners, > attitudes etc., despite the fact that who one's parents are effects > such things. Do you believe the two can be utterly separated, so that one could establish a system of laws that effectively eradicates discrimination based on ethnicity but lets people discriminate as much as they want based on habits, manners, attitudes etc.? I would have said that ethnicity necessarily has a cultural component, and that much of culture is a matter of habits, manners, attitudes etc. I'm not quite sure what it means to deny that. By "ethnicity" do you mean "race," as a strictly biological category, so that Serbs and Croats, or Scotch and Irish, do not in your view differ in ethnicity? > I'm not sure what the term 'black culture' would refer to. People believe it exists. I'm not sure why you think they're all wrong. Do you believe (1) in places where both blacks and whites live there is typically no discernible difference between the two groups in predominant habits, manners, attitudes etc., or (2) differences in predominant habits, manners, attitudes etc. between two groups with different histories should not be called cultural differences? > If Chinese immigrants settled here and maintained some cultural > specificity, the specificity would not long remain Chinese, but > develop into some variant thereof. Don't see the relevance. It still seems that if someone wanted a system of laws that utterly eliminated discrimination based on membership in the group it would have to forbid discrimination based on the variant culture. > In addition, it seems to me that a culture which feels itself to be > an isolated minority will not have the same self understanding as one > which feels itself to be the majority. So it appears that in order to abolish discrimination against isolated minorities you would have to abolish discrimination on the basis of self-understanding -- more concretely, on the basis of attitude, habit, etc. > I am not sure what Jim means by "the technological understanding of > society," and would welcome any clarification he cares to offer. Society as a rational system designed to organize all resources to give people as much as possible what they want. One of the many consequences of such a view is that traditional loyalties, for example to one's people and way of life, make no sense. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Mar 16 10:43:10 EST 1999 Article: 13606 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: European commission Date: 16 Mar 1999 08:31:39 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 4 Message-ID: <7clmfr$500$1@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 921591100 17560 166.84.0.226 (16 Mar 1999 13:31:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 16 Mar 1999 13:31:40 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13606 Status: RO Does it mean much they all resigned? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Tue Mar 9 07:12:34 1999 Subject: Re: The First Psychopath To: en Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 07:12:34 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1238 Status: RO > But why do we have to keep on suffering through it? For us, the > public, there are scattered glimpses, which over these 6 years have > merged into a hideous picture (that I wish someone would turn off!!) > but what about all those secret service agents and drivers, and his > handlers...how could they keep their allegience? It's mystifying. > It's not supposed to happen. Where were they? Where are they? Best analogy I can think of is the E. German woman athletes who obviously visibly were getting massive testosterone treatments. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall people who looked at them and said "hey, there's something funny going on" were dumped all over because if they were right then it would be too unpleasant so they can't be right and must be a bunch of crazies who probably look for commies under their beds every night. R gives the example of Joe Biden and the Russian antimissile radar which he could hear when he took a tanker up the West Coast -- they called it the Russian woodpecker from its sound. Biden simply could not recognize that it existed until the fall of the Soviet regime. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Wed Mar 10 08:05:14 1999 Subject: Re: Houellebecq To: pe Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 08:05:14 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 700 Status: RO > There are no more intellectuals in the classic interpretation of this > word, opening peoples eyes allowing them see things they haven't been > able to see earlier. The modern intellectual caste sounds more like > megaphones for the political correctness. But does it not seem as > Europe is a bit ahead of the New World thank's to Houellebecq and > Helen Fielding? I think the world's becoming too uniform, too much a single system of production, marketing, administration and consumption, for there to be a place for thought. Instead of thought we have rhetorical manipulation. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Tue Mar 16 08:17:55 1999 Subject: Re: Race, Culture, etc. To: jc Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:17:55 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <01bd01be6f4b$03d566a0$16115b80@logos> from "John Carney" at Mar 15, 99 08:19:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1734 Status: RO > Willmoore Kendall used to rail that the difference between Equality > of Outcome and Equality of Opportunity was illusory, since the > distribution established at generation 1 would always lead to > inequality of opportunity for generation 2. The only way to equalize > opportunity, then, was to equalize outcomes. Sure. If equality is the great overriding goal formal equality isn't going to do it. Man is a social animal. It's not as if what he is in society is something that can be peeled off so he can be considered in isolation from it. That's what the conception of equal opportunity including antidiscrimination demands. The only way to even approximate such a goal would be to equalize social positions. That can't be done either though. For starters, who will equalize the equalizers? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk Wed Mar 17 05:23:35 1999 Subject: Re: On color and culture To: Rh Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 05:23:35 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 4972 Status: RO > The issue I have been trying to address is whether or not a decision > to avoid discrimination on the basis of color implies an avoidance of > discrimination on the basis of culture. I don't why that question is important. Antidiscrimination laws are never so narrowly focused. If someone puts up a sign saying "no Mexicans or dogs admitted" he's going to be in trouble even though some Mexicans are of pure European blood and therefore it's not a color standard. If someone announces his refusal to hire "niggers" (as he calls them) he's not going to get off by showing that he goes to a lot of trouble to ferret out those who are passing for white and thus is clearly not basing his refusal to hire on color but rather on a biologically arbitrary cultural definition. It seems to me that the relevant conception is ethnicity, which refers to the constellation of things that go to make a people -- common history, common culture, common descent (often mythical to at least some extent), mutual loyalty at least in the face of outsiders, even attitudes of others. It is ethnicity and not color as such that normally occasions conflict and therefore it is what is of interest to the antidiscrimination laws. Under those laws a "no Irish need apply" sign would be illegal even though Irish and WASPs are pretty much the same color. > It is thoughts like those above which make me suspicious of the term > 'black culture'. The term can obviously be misused, and maybe it usually is. On the other hand, accent is a cultural matter and I can usually tell a black person from a white person on the telephone simply by accent. "I didn't hire him not because he was black but because I never hire anyone who speaks English the way American blacks do and by the way I don't like West Indian or African accents either" would not be a defense against a claim of racial discrimination even if accepted as true. > Your point seems to be that discrimination on the basis of culture > will, as a practical matter, entail a collateral difference in the > treatment of color. Not really. It's that no one really cares about discrimination simply on the basis of color. It's not what the laws are about. They are concerned with ethnicity which has a necessary cultural component. > But, it seems to me, that to the extent he is motivated by plain and > simple color, he is motivated by the confusion of history with > biology. How many people are motivated by plain and simple color? > My point is that it is entirely believable that her sense of who she > was, what her culture was, where she belonged, was intact as long as > she remained ignorant of her mother's color. It seems to me that this > indicates that color is not intrinsically related to culture. But if she thought she was white then her mother was probably fairly white in color too, so to me this story doesn't show much about color. What it shows is that people take blood relationships seriously in determining who they really are. That's altogether natural. If you find out that someone's your cousin you'll probably be inclined to do more for him than for any Tom, Dick or Harry. If Jews believe that having a Jewish mother makes you a Jew then you'll find that hard to shrug off even if you think the rule is atavistic superstitious hogwash. I agree it would be possible to have a law against discrimination on the basis of some purely genetic definition of race. Such a law could be applied without reference to discrimination on the basis of culture. I don't think such a law would do much though, since purely genetic definitions don't matter much to people. So the law would relate to something that doesn't play much of a role in conduct. Someone facing a claim under such a law could almost certainly truly say something like "I wasn't discriminating against X because he's genetically a black person. I had independent purely cultural grounds for discriminating against him -- he sounds black on the telephone, and I don't like that, and besides that my culture defines him as a member of a group of people I don't like." -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From owner-telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu Thu Mar 18 17:00:21 1999 Received: from www.ithaca.edu (www.ithaca.edu [147.129.1.10]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with ESMTP id RAA02621 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:00:19 -0500 (EST) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by www.ithaca.edu (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id RAA14075 for telos-forum-outgoing; Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:06:01 -0500 (EST) Received: from panix.com (IDENT:CgBy75/aSd0mSdY4uFvi0e9nmkvAMkyz@panix.com [166.84.1.66]) by www.ithaca.edu (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id RAA14366 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:05:57 -0500 (EST) Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id QAA21124 for telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu; Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:56:57 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903182156.QAA21124@panix.com> Subject: From_telos-forum: 113 - "Liturgy and Modernity" To: telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu (Telos list) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:56:57 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: telos-forum@www.ithaca.edu Status: RO >From Jim Kalb Paul Piccone suggested that untested, semiformed and perhaps questionable ideas are acceptable in this forum. With that in mind, here are a few questions and comments on Pickstock's "Liturgy and Modernity" in issue 113: 1. Pickstock's vision of everlasting hell on earth (pp. 28 ff.) seems to draw a rather clear line between the order of nature and the order of grace. The former can get along completely evacuated of the latter, in the form of a successful evil technological utopia. Is this apparent belief in the radical independence of this world a specifically modern view, like the fact/value distinction? And is the view that there is something self-defeating about evil, in the end even as a purely pragmatic matter, Hegelian or Marxist, or is it just a rejection of Manichaeism? 2. I was interested in the reference to "cyber-intelligences" and to the system at some future point sustaining itself "in a cybernetic fashion", partly because of one of my own hobby-horses. It seems to me that the sustainability of liberalism is tied to the possibility of strong AI (artificial intelligence). If the latter is possible then intelligent human conduct can be fully mechanized, so technology can make up indefinitely for any lapses due to human weakness, cultural incoherence, collapse of traditional loyalties and standards, etc. The only question will be whether the new machines decide to scrap the old (i.e., us) as outmoded and inefficient. If strong AI is impossible, then formal rules are insufficient, human society has an essential element that is forever incalculable and unaccountable, and it seems liberalism must abandon part of its defining goal or destroy itself. 3. How would Pickstock deal with the clash of civilizations, say Catholic and Muslim? Although those who posit transcendent realities believe the clashes are not ultimate, in the here and now they are troublesome. Is there any way to have a _ius gentium_ that is kept in its place? Surely Catholicism at least must have resources for dealing with the issue, since it spent its early and most formative years in an anti-Christian universal public order the legitimacy of which it accepted. Any comments, explanations, references etc. would be welcome. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ============================================================= This discussion list is for readers of the journal "Telos". To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@lists.ithaca.edu, with the following line in the body of your message: unsubscribe telos-forum your_email_address Send questions to the owner of the list at: owner-telos-forum@lists.ithaca.edu ============================================================= From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Mar 19 06:22:30 EST 1999 Article: 13611 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Date: 18 Mar 1999 04:39:43 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 24 Message-ID: <7cqhkv$11i$1@panix.com> References: <7cmuo6$51e$1@grande.baileylink.net> <7cpbv7$i2u@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 921749984 24995 166.84.0.226 (18 Mar 1999 09:39:44 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 18 Mar 1999 09:39:44 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13611 Status: RO In <7cpbv7$i2u@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net> "James Sweeney" writes: >Try this: When you get a piece of information think about how that >compares with everything you have ever learned in your life. Try to >make it fit, and if it doesn't fit then try to actively disprove it. >This is not the same as dismissing out of hand everything that defeats >your doctrine and gathering only evidence in support of your doctrine. That's fine but still sometimes it's possible to make a pretty good judgement that something's nonsense without spending a lot of time on it. If you think, you'll be able to come up with some examples you accept yourself, situations in which you think it's right to address someone as "bonehead" because of a few sentences he wrote. The point of the posting I think was that even something that's nonsense overall is unlikely to be nonsense through and through. If someone thinks it's plausible it's likely to resemble truth on at least some points. So if you are in a world where people accept a mostly nonsensical position the public-spirited thing is to figure out the perspectives and situations in which it is true, and show how those bits of truth lead to greater truths. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From jk@panix.com Fri Mar 19 07:29:22 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA01127; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:29:22 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:29:22 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903191229.HAA01127@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921846258&P=Yes&TL=920029622 X-URL: http://www.InsideTheWeb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921846258&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: O Re: Re: Re: Re: Tradition and the net Friday, 19-Mar-99 07:24:18 166.84.1.66 writes: The basic issue seems to be whether a moral view can work that forbids only those things that directly harm another person, and enjoins respect for everything else. I don't think it can. Man is a social animal. One thing that means is that we carry on our lives through extensive systems of cooperation. Language is one example, science, law and economic activity others. Human life requires that attitudes and conduct that would destroy those systems be judged wrong even if there is no definable victim. Examples include tax evasion, skilled counterfeiting, and theft or destruction of moderate amounts of fungible property belonging to large institutions. The point of the Sexual Morality FAQ is that sexual morality -- non-contractual standards governing relations between the sexes -- is part of a necessary system of cooperation. The FAQ presents arguments on the matter. There are of course people who believe that sexual morality is oppression. There are also people who believe that property is theft, money the root of all evil, and government organized violence. The issue is not whether some particular person will have the power to invent a system of government, or economic exchange, or relations between the sexes, and enforce it on everyone else. I agree that would be tyrannical and would fail. The question is whether it is good for an existing system to be preserved, restored and enhanced when both experience and reason show that seriously weakening it has very bad effects and when some such system has been a common feature of all societies and in societies broadly like our own major features have been similar. I've already replied to your claim that the net dooms maintenance of anything like traditional sexual morality. People have made the same claim with regard to taxation and government generally. I've already responded to it. Social life is extremely flexible, responsive and inventive over time. What needs to be done will be done. So if a strict free market approach is grossly at odds with what is necessary for men and women to join in stable functional unions for the raising of children, and if successful social reproduction requires such things, something else will arise. I've suggested a likely line of development, emphasis on very small scale social order as the public order becomes evacuated of substantive moral content and therefore eventually nonfunctional. There may be other possibilities. Who can predict the future? Jim Kalb From jk@panix.com Fri Mar 19 07:29:51 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA01138; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:29:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:29:51 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903191229.HAA01138@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921749085&P=Yes&TL=921704773 Status: O Re: Anti Feminism Thursday, 18-Mar-99 04:24:45 166.84.1.66 writes: Your way of thinking about things is much too schematic. Life isn't all fantasies. In addition to fantasies of business success and feminist fantasies of what non-feminism must be, there are the very practical problems involved in developing a way of life that lets men, women and children live together in a stable and rewarding way. The antifeminist point is that feminism makes those problems impossible. Jim Kalb From jk@panix.com Fri Mar 19 07:33:33 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA01251; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:33:33 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:33:33 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903191233.HAA01251@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921805113&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: O Re: Re: Tradition and the net Thursday, 18-Mar-99 19:58:33 166.84.1.66 writes: The influence of enduring face-to-face social ties and settled attitudes embedded in them had declined so much already that I don't think the net added much to the tendency. In many ways it helps counteract the tendency, since like Gutenberg it undercuts the established church, which today is left/liberalism. It creates easily-accessible public fora in which other possibilities can be discussed. That undermines the ideological power of ruling elites whose power rests on market and bureaucracy and therefore don't much like traditional arrangements. It is those elites who dominate public discussion through their control of the mass media, the educational system, the academy and so on. Like talk radio, the net creates problems for them. Obviously the net can be only a small part of a society in which traditional arrangements play a dominant role. The tendency of electronic communications is to separate people from each other, to make everything a matter of individual choice, to promote technological rationalization. So the long term issue is the extent to which people can live happily and reproduce themselves and their society successfully if those tendencies are given free reign. I think they lead to insuperable problems, so one way or another limitations will grow up. Society is adaptable, and what needs to be done gets done. Very likely the responses will emphasize very small-scale local social organization. Homeschooling, home business, gated communities, and so on are I think a sign of what is to come. Those who participate in such things are heavy users of the net because it enables them to circumvent established public authorities and procedures. Naturally I reject many of your comments, on inflicting pain on innocents and so on. You don't present an argument, so I won't discuss them much. If you're interested my Sexual Morality FAQ has some relevant discussion. Jim Kalb From christ-and-culture-return-743-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Fri Feb 26 14:49:17 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id OAA02955 for ; Fri, 26 Feb 1999 14:49:16 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 26 Feb 1999 19:49:17 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 13872 invoked by uid 7770); 26 Feb 1999 19:49:27 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 26 Feb 1999 19:49:27 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id OAA17587 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Fri, 26 Feb 1999 14:49:26 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199902261949.OAA17587@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 14:49:26 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "sschaper" at Feb 26, 99 09:43:09 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: More on turning on, tuning in, dropping out Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO sschaper writes: > > So unrestricted commitment to cultural engagement is advance > > acceptance of other people's fundamental views. > > Hardly. It is an advance commitment to 'win their souls for Christ.' Some people may be able to engage in all conversations on terms acceptable to those already participating while steadily maintaining an contrary purpose. It seems to me impossible for a community as a whole, for example the Christian community, to maintain that degree of steadiness and heroism day in day out. So far as I know the early Christians did not produce epic poems, chariot races, theatrical productions and so on in order to give them a Christian slant. Nor did they try to secure positions at the Academy in hopes of taking part in the debates there on professionally equal terms. I'm not even sure there were Christians who became students there. What do you make of Paul's insistence on excommunication in a proper case, proposal that Christians have a separate judicial system to handle their disputes, and comments on unequal yoking and on evil communications corrupting good manners? > > The monastics and for that matter the pillar dwellers of the > > Egyptian desert expressed a sense that Christ counted more than > > anything and thus the vigor of Christianity rather than cultural > > retreat. > > It was heretical and didn't help Christianity at all. Kick out all of monasticism and you kick out a lot of Christianity for a lot of years. This seems unreasonable, although I'm sure many are ready to tell me I'm wrong. It does seem to me that people have very different gifts, and if many love God deeply some will choose solitary contemplation. It also seems to me the value of what they do should not be judged by project management criteria. The "communion of saints" must be able to do something for us. As to pillar dwellers, you may know more about them than I do. I don't see that it necessarily involves a judgement that the created world is evil. It's certainly an extreme measure and extreme measures arouse suspicion. However that may be, the basic thought is that disengagement from B, C, D, and so on may be more to free you to concentrate on A than to avoid other things as categorically evil. And there will be many people who go wrong in any event. If there are some people who go wrong by discounting the world too much in comparison with God it need not show that Christianity is in worse shape or less likely to affect The Culture than it is when there are no such people. > Look at the Fundamentalist Debacle. Christians withdrew from culture > in the early decades of this century due to pietistic errors, and the > entire culture was lost. It seems to me the problem today is not that the world is too little with us. Maybe if they hadn't withdrawn the Evangelicals would have zeroed out all the sooner. It seems to me you start off with what you think is best and you try to come as close to it as you can. If your effort engages your whole life and being it eventually finds persuasive cultural expression. Culture can't be rushed or made to order. And you can't convert others unless you convert yourself and the conversion leads to a visibly better way of life. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet stocks: hype or reality? FT.com. The Financial Times online. Click here to access more than 3,000 worldwide sources http://offers.egroups.com/click/220/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-779-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Sat Feb 27 07:30:43 1999 Received: from mc.findmail.com (mc.findmail.com [209.185.96.153]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id HAA09375 for ; Sat, 27 Feb 1999 07:30:42 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by mc.findmail.com with NNFMP; 27 Feb 1999 12:30:42 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 19471 invoked by uid 7770); 27 Feb 1999 12:30:49 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.findmail.com with SMTP; 27 Feb 1999 12:30:49 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA03976 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Sat, 27 Feb 1999 07:30:49 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199902271230.HAA03976@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 07:30:49 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Paul C Duggan" at Feb 26, 99 09:17:34 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: More on turning on, tuning in, dropping out Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Paul C Duggan writes: >> It does seem to me that people have very different gifts, and if >> many love God deeply some will choose solitary contemplation. > where in the Bible does anyone engage in "solitary contemplation". Jesus went off into the desert for 40 days and nights of prayer and fasting. Moses went into the desert or to a mountaintop and spoke with God. John the Baptist went off into the desert too, and gave up all material comforts although wearing camel's hair and eating locusts and wild honey admittedly doesn't go as far as pillar-sitting. I imagine he spent his time thinking and talking to God although maybe he was doing something else. They all came back but then maybe they could get more done more quickly and thoroughly than those who spend their whole lives as monks, hermits, what have you. It seems to me that going off to speak to God shouldn't be thought of as something done just for the sake of something else. It's not a bad thing to do in itself, and different men have different callings, different strengths and limitations. If the Church really is a community then it's OK for different members to make different contributions. > And at least the monastics have some idea of "community" don't deny > that to them in their defense. Why do they need defense? To be consciously a member of the Church is to have some idea of community. The center and point of the community though is not within the visible community and its functioning can't be fully understood through B-school studies. It's quite true that monastics etc. routinely end up having some sort of demonstrable practical social function. People went out to the desert to get advice from pillar-sitters, and the solitary contemplative Julian of Norwich wrote things people still read. My point is that it's OK if you don't set out to have a demonstrable practical social function, reform other people, etc. > But they are also held up as an ideal. As an ideal I suppose they dramatize the transcendence of God. The last thing we have to worry about in pragmatic democratic consumerist America in 1999 it seems to me is that someone is going to lay too much stress on the transcendence of God. Also they seem demonstrably to be doing something quite radical for the sake of God. Maybe others do something better and more complete but it's less simple and obvious and so could be less suited to serve as a popular ideal. The function of popular ideals after all is not to be followed literally but to dramatize a principle that would otherwise be too little taken into account. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet FileZone: Always FREE! Instantly store & access your valuable PC files on the net, from any Web browser. SIGN UP NOW - http://offers.egroups.com/click/235/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From jk@panix.com Fri Mar 19 20:36:23 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id UAA22262; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:36:23 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:36:23 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903200136.UAA22262@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921893298&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: O Re: more about tradition and the net Friday, 19-Mar-99 20:28:18 166.84.1.66 writes: Not sure of your point on the Hasidim. They're an example of how strict communal authority in moral and religious matters can be maintained even though a Hasid could plunge into a wholly inconsistent way of life by walking a few blocks and maybe visiting a barber. How their example is consistent with the view that the net makes communal discipline in sexual matters impossible escapes me. They certainly don't make up their own little individual moral codes on such things. As to the likely social equilibrium, I think "equilibrium" is misleading since it assumes a constant structure and then looks at the relative weights of this and that to guess where it will all balance. Your comments on global society and what that would have to be, in which you assume homogeneity down to the level of individual lives, take that line of thought a bit further since they assume a greatly simplified structure and ask where *that* would balance. Such a structure very likely *would* (as you suggest) have to be altogether formal and lacking in substantive moral content. On the other hand, I don't see why such a structure would ever exist or if it existed endure. My approach is different, to ask what people need, what they can't very well get by without, at least on the whole and in the long run, and then assume that rather than a balance among existing elements being struck new or revised and strengthened forms will arise so people get what they need. On such an approach the immediate results of sudden changes don't much matter. They're more likely to represent the problem that necessitates new forms than the long-term position. As to sex, in the FAQ I touch on what I think people as a general thing need for tolerable personal and social life. Basically, what are needed are fundamental understandings and presumptions that mean men and women will reliably form durable and functional unions, so they won't end up mistrusting and hating each other and they and their children will have a home they can count on. For that I think you need sex roles and severe restrictions on sex outside marriage. Since those things can play their beneficial role only as fundamental principles of social interaction I have no idea why they should be a matter of private conscience any more than say the rules of property. How will it come about? The Hasidim certainly show one way. There may be others. I could put my argument in Darwinian form: the groups with qualities that offer most of their members a satisfying life, so they will stick with it, and that emphasize things that promote family life -- having children and raising them properly so the group's way of life continues and remains healthy -- are the groups that will eventually be dominant. A fundamental problem with liberalism including its libertarian form is that it deals poorly with family life as with loyalty and binding personal ties generally. Therefore it will disappear. You also comment in effect on the need for the people in Massachusetts to let the people in Madagascar do what they want. I don't see what that has to do with the relation between the people in either place and what's going on locally in their own lives. Even within a single town a Morman could buy his wedding ring from an Orthodox diamond merchant without either supervising the other's morals. That doesn't mean either is free from his own people's system of supervision. Jim Kalb From jk@panix.com Sat Mar 20 09:24:15 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA16666; Sat, 20 Mar 1999 09:24:15 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 09:24:15 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903201424.JAA16666@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=921937959&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: O Re: Re: Re: more about tradition and the net Saturday, 20-Mar-99 08:52:39 166.84.1.66 writes: Hasidic communities have public moral standards. They have written laws and commentaries, and publicly recognized authorities. The power of a Hasidic Rebbe is enormous. Hasidim maintain their separateness -- the boundaries within which their standards have unquestioned public validity -- through a number of devices. They have special dress etc. that dramatically sets them off from other people. Many groups maintain a language different from that of those around them. Like Orthodox Jews generally they have religious standards, such as dietary rules, that make social interaction with outsiders awkward, and others, like the requirements of a minyan, ritual bath, whatever, that require close physical proximity to a community of their fellows. They do not marry outside the community. They have their own education system and do not go outside for education except for strictly technical subjects. They don't have TV. And so on. What they certainly do *not* have is morality as a "function of personal identity." As for social engineering, I never suggested it. The FAQ explicitly refuses to deal with legal matters, which would be involved in any attempt at social engineering, on the grounds that the relations among law, morality and society have lots of complications that are important but not at all unique to sex. An explanation of how something works socially is not the same as a social engineering proposal. It can play other roles. It can be a response to objections from social engineers, public school sex educators say, to some traditional moral institution that they want to abolish. It can also aim to inform people what they are doing as a practical matter in rejecting such an institution. Public understandings of what certain behavior amounts to have an effect on public standards. I don't see why that effect amounts to social engineering. An explanation of how certain things (cigarettes, alcohol, saturated fats) affect health can change how people feel about those things, their views on what should be served and offered for sale, school curricula, what people do in movies, whatever. In time changed public attitudes are likely to lead to changed views on what's acceptable and what's outrageous and eventually there will probably be legal changes of some sort. That doesn't mean the whole thing was an external imposition. And what legal response etc. you think appropriate isn't a specific consequence of how you feel about food -- there are also general considerations about the role of government etc. You talk again about the global community. The obvious issue is the extent to which people will live in that community if it is as you describe. The best model I can think of would be traditional Middle Eastern society, in which cultural diversity made the general public sphere of life morally vacant. As a result, people carried on their lives within inward turning walled-in xenophobic communities and generally met others only in the bazaar, where the rules of the market prevailed, or in their encounters with the state, which did very little governing and generally consisted of a ruling clique maintaining a crude sort of order by force and mostly interested in extracting taxes for themselves. Something like that may indeed be what we end up with. (For some speculations that are somewhat related, you might look at my article "The Amish, David Koresh, and a Newer World Order".) As to the rights of conscience, when the British arrived in India they were faced not only with suttee but with castes of hereditary thieves, who viewed their thievish ways as a religious duty, and Thugee, which involved worship I believe of Durga through murder of passers-by. Was it wrong of them to suppress such things? Jim Kalb From jk@panix.com Sun Mar 21 07:35:37 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA25372; Sun, 21 Mar 1999 07:35:37 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 07:35:37 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903211235.HAA25372@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=922019116&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: RO Re: The challenge of a global society Sunday, 21-Mar-99 07:25:16 166.84.1.66 writes: The ethics of a bazaar have very little to do with respect for the person. They're simply standards that facilitate peaceable pursuit of self-interest. One can wrap them up in idealistic rhetoric of course by calling acceptance of the legitimacy of self-interest "respect for the person." It's a rather empty conception, though, certainly not enough to order much of personal or social life. As to freedom, it won't seem desirable to people except as part of an overall pattern of things that facilitates a good life. Since we are social animals we can't create our own world. We can choose, but we can't choose what there is for us to choose. Even intellectual freedom means nothing after Babel. So the issue as to a particular conception of freedom is not simply whether it minimizes immediate concrete obstructions to the will but whether it's consistent with a world in which there are things available that are worth choosing. The issue as to sexual freedom and morality is whether it's better to have a world in which one can securely choose family life, because family life is supported by an array of accepted standards and expectations, or a world in which one can choose whatever he wants in sexual matters, free from all public pressure, but other people are continuously free to do so as well so trust is absurdly imprudent and long-term stability hard to come by. Which situation better permits realization of what is best in human life? So what to do? Social engineering is not a possibility and not much of the future is predictable. Darwin does I think provide some guidance -- things that make too many messes for those involved don't last, things that allow a satisfying way of life that continues and grows into the next generation do. So I am confident that somehow or other the future will look more traditionalist than libertarian. The best I can do is ease the transition to that future, to promote understanding of the necessity of tradition and of substantive moral order and awareness of what is wrong with attempts to base social order purely on universal formal principles. If people understand what is wrong with something they are less likely to push it to the point of catastrophe and better prepared to deal with the consequences of failure. As to Wiccans, I don't take them seriously any more than I take seriously the Religion of Bob propounded by some guy named Bob. The whole thing is just too invented, too much a matter of self-expression. No doubt their consciences deserve as much respect as the Thugs' consciences, whatever that amount is. If they went off and lived on an island somewhere to take the consequences of living among people who share their views I wouldn't much object. Jim Kalb From christ-and-culture-return-901-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 22 08:39:59 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id IAA24810 for ; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:39:58 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 22 Mar 1999 13:39:56 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 3018 invoked by uid 7770); 22 Mar 1999 13:39:54 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 22 Mar 1999 13:39:54 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id IAA16229 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:39:51 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903221339.IAA16229@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:39:51 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <63f89b2a.36f563f1@aol.com> from "GEVeith@aol.com" at Mar 21, 99 04:26:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: What worldview books need to be published? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > Taking a slightly diffferent spin on an earlier topic, what worldview > issues need to be treated in a book? Here are some issues that seem important to me. Whether there's a book that makes sense or for that matter whether the book has already been written and I'm the only one who doesn't know about it I'll leave to my betters. 1. Strong AI (artificial intelligence). If it is possible then intelligent human conduct can be fully mechanized, so technology can make up indefinitely for any lapses due to human weakness, cultural incoherence, collapse of traditional loyalties and standards, etc. The only question will be whether the new machines decide to scrap the old (i.e., us) as outmoded and inefficient. If it is impossible, then formal rules are insufficient, and human society has an essential element that is forever incalculable and unaccountable. 2. The NWO and tribalism. There seems to be a tendency toward One World, nonracist, nonsexist, nonhomophobic, non-what have you, ordered by world markets, transnational bureaucracies, human rights treaties, etc., etc. There also seems to be a tendency toward dissolution of social bonds leading toward anarchy and primitivism (mindless blood ties intensified by fear and aggression or whatever). How do Christians pick their way through this? Is there a distinctive Idea of a Christian Society? 3. Is there an intelligent summary of considerations regarding Darwinism in its various strengths and forms? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Astrophysics Forum" - All about astrophysics. http://offers.egroups.com/click/243/5 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-117-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 22 15:16:37 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id PAA14303 for ; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 15:16:36 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.1.1.21] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 22 Mar 1999 20:16:36 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 24587 invoked by uid 7770); 22 Mar 1999 13:13:50 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 22 Mar 1999 13:13:50 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id IAA14087 for paleo@egroups.com; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:13:47 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903221313.IAA14087@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:13:47 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Paul Shetler" at Mar 20, 99 04:42:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Paul Shetler writes: > In Italy, groups like the Lega Nord and the Alleanza Nazionale (as > well as the MSI-FT, etc) cannot be delegitimated in the same way; > they are viewed as authentic national forces (whether the nation is > defined as the Italian nation or the Northern nation) Those political > groups have had tremendous success and effectively condition the > political discourse in a way that the National Front has not been > able to. To a large part I believe that that's due to the fact that > their intellectuals and publicists are grounding themselves in a > still deeply felt tradition. Interesting. Much of the American right is also grounded in deeply-felt traditions, but the more it's grounded in actual American traditions (property-based individualism, minimal government, states' rights and local control, isolationism, populist Protestantism, puritanical morality, RKBA, native-born white solidarity) the more it's considered worthy solely of eradication to the point of being viewed as a sort of mental disorder. Why is that? A lack of substantive content in the traditions that made them only a compromise between residual particularism and the fundamental secular universalism of the American regime? Or something less grandiose and abstract, maybe a conflict between old-stock Americans and newer immigrants better able to play the big-government game? And what sense can "conservatism" have when American government, which is essential to American national identity, is the deadly enemy of particularistic traditions, and vice versa? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Loads" - A "truckstop" support group for trucker families. http://offers.egroups.com/click/243/3 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From christ-and-culture-return-906-jk=PANIX.COM@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 22 16:09:56 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id QAA23328 for ; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:09:55 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 22 Mar 1999 21:09:55 -0000 Mailing-List: contact christ-and-culture-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: christ-and-culture@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/christ-and-culture/ Reply-To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-christ-and-culture@egroups.com Received: (qmail 26864 invoked by uid 7770); 22 Mar 1999 21:09:55 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 22 Mar 1999 21:09:55 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id QAA08956 for christ-and-culture@egroups.com; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:09:52 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903222109.QAA08956@panix.com> To: christ-and-culture@egroups.com Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:09:51 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "sschaper@uswest.net" at Mar 22, 99 09:22:19 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [C&C] Re: What worldview books need to be published? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > I thought that Penrose' _The Emperor's New Mind_ laid that [strong > AI] to rest? Great book, but the other side laughed at the arguments. For all I know it's been laid to rest in principle but apparently intelligent and competent people still seem to take it seriously. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Aok-china" - Adopting older kids from China. http://offers.egroups.com/click/243/4 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/christ-and-culture Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-121-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Mar 22 22:10:12 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id WAA26560 for ; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 22:10:12 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.1.1.21] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 23 Mar 1999 03:05:06 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 9950 invoked by uid 7770); 23 Mar 1999 02:45:25 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 23 Mar 1999 02:45:25 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id VAA15340 for paleo@egroups.com; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:45:21 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903230245.VAA15340@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:45:21 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "T.E. Wilder" at Mar 22, 99 02:40:31 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "T.E. Wilder" writes: > The reason is that moral authority in society is held by those who > are ideologically motivated. And the ideology that is in control > calls for the extermination of "actual American traditions". Sure. But the authorities don't drop from the moon. What is it about American life that makes authority as it is? The ideal seems to be centrally managed egalitarian hedonism. Give 'em what they want, as long as it's non-political. If you're specially sensitive morally you can emphasize equality of shares. There is lots of support for that outlook. The democratic impulse that makes ordinary satisfaction of ordinary impulses of ordinary people the summum bonum. Industrialism and the technological approach to things generally. The influence of John Locke, who identified the good with what individuals happen to want, and justice with formal rules designed to emancipate arbitrary wills to the extent possible consistent with avoidance of conflict. Maybe it's a mistake to look for the answer in anything specific to America since the new order is worldwide. Is its ubiquity a sign of American imperialism, or does it just show that America happens to be the most modern country so when others enter the new age it looks like Americanization but really isn't? All respectable opinion agrees that things are just what they should be only not enough so. The obvious question if you don't agree is what basis there is for something different. An act of will to change the course of events? A salvation-bearing class who will arise and change everything? A new ethical philosophy for the ruling class, the modern and western equivalent of Confucianism? Presumably the current situation will not last forever, although some argue the contrary. Will moral vacancy in the public sphere lead to radical tribalism and sectarianism, so that the accepted view of the danger of "hate" to the established order is perfectly correct? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Playsandplaywrights" - Write and analyze plays for production. http://offers.egroups.com/click/248/4 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From jk@panix.com Mon Mar 22 18:07:51 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id SAA24468; Mon, 22 Mar 1999 18:07:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 18:07:51 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903222307.SAA24468@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=922144032&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: RO Re: Re: Re: The challenge of a global society Monday, 22-Mar-99 18:07:12 166.84.1.66 writes: It's hard to carry on a discussion based an libertarian triumphalism that I do not share, for reasons I've suggested. This exchange may be dying a natural death. "Respect for the person" in the liberal and libertarian sense, acceptance of the self-interest of other people, does not have a central position in almost every system of ethics. Most systems I know of judge things by reference to substantive goods rather than the universal right to pursue what you want to pursue. No social system whatever can survive without public moral standards. You want what you call "respect for the person" to be accepted as a public moral standard. I suppose you would be prepared to use force to impose it. If so, I don't understand why you claim to object to public moral standards and their enforcement as such. Man is a social animal. One consequence is that his relations to his fellows depend not just on individual decisions but on more general social factors -- stereotypes as to what sort of relationships are legitimate and natural, common understandings as to obligations in relationships and for that matter life in general, etc. Do you really think friendship, marriage, the relations among relatives etc. are the same in all times and places? Marriage has essential public aspects. That's why it's publicly defined and marked with a public ceremony. I have no idea why you think it can simply be created by two individuals willing it into existence. I also fail to understand of your contempt for Thugee. You don't like ritual murder. So what? If someone thinks it worship pleasing to Kali who are you to say he's wrong? Why should he sacrifice his religion to your culturally-bound belief that it's terrible for someone to die at time T instead of time T+10 or to your view of what the public good requires? Jim Kalb From jk@panix.com Tue Mar 23 08:22:50 1999 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id IAA03989; Tue, 23 Mar 1999 08:22:50 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 08:22:50 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903231322.IAA03989@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To: jk@panix.com Subject: mbs.cgi?acct=mb292481&MyNum=922195328&P=Yes&TL=920029622 Status: O Re: Coercive morality and the global society Tuesday, 23-Mar-99 08:22:08 166.84.1.66 writes: It seems to be your view that moral environment has no effect on conduct, since after all people are always free to choose anything. Thus, public understandings of what a man is, what a woman is, what marriage is, what sex is for, have no effect on long-term relations between men and women. Do rethink that. Or if public moral understandings have no effect on human life, why bother with this conversation? In particular, libertarianism can't hang in the air. Respect for property, individual rights etc. depends on a whole network of shared assumptions and standards, very few of which have much direct to do with prevention of immediate harm to individuals. Read Hayek on tradition, there's some useful stuff in that trilogy he wrote in the '70s. I don't see much to justify libertarian triumphalism. In morals the obvious trend is toward a centrally administered and universally compulsory conception of "tolerance and inclusiveness", enforced by propaganda, thought control and public shaming rituals, the evident function of which is to promote not freedom in any normal sense but the destruction of centers of power that compete with money and bureaucracy. The likely effect of that simplification of the social landscape is to reduce effective freedom -- the freedom to make choices that matter and are part of a life that can reasonably be judged good -- and to make despotism more likely. Vast multicultural empires have invariably been despotic, because in the absence of powerful public standards it is impossible to hold rulers to account. Making direct harm to identifiable individuals the moral standard is not a serious proposal. Even apart from the difficulty of defining "direct harm" (affront to the senses? to the sensibilities? failure to eliminate certain risks? to pay my living expenses? forcing me, a Bulgarian, to live in an anti-Bulgarian environment?) there are obvious examples to the contrary, for example undetected counterfeiting, most bribery, and stealing small amounts of money from large institutions. For that matter, how about voting for political measures one knows to be evil simply to satisfy malice or greed? One man's vote is extremely unlikely to have any direct effect on anyone even if the measure itself would do so. I don't see much difference between voting for bad measures and supporting by my actions the destruction of beneficial moral institutions like traditional sexual morality. Both are instances of participation in collective action where the conduct of the individual participant may not have much immediate effect but cumulative effects are enormous. Jim Kalb From jk Mon Mar 22 18:01:07 1999 Subject: Re: On color and culture To: Rh Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 18:01:07 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2489 Status: RO > One of the things I was taught as a child was a distaste for > discrimination on the basis of color. If you accept radical individualism then ethnicity becomes incomprehensible and can only be understood as utterly irrational discrimination on the basis of things like color that clearly don't matter. > I understand that the subject of your discussion is not segregation > laws, but how well can you analyze the CRL if you ignore its > antecedants? In fact, aren't the Jim Crow laws precisely a pledge to > make future decisions on the basis of "plain and simple color?" The CRL weren't necessary to do away with Jim Crow, the development of constitutional law had already done that. The view the laws took I suppose was that Jim Crow was only one manifestation of established social inequalities that were altogether irrational. People thought that since discrimination made no sense at all it could be quickly and easily abolished without affecting much else. The JC laws turned on "color", but color meant race and not literally color. An albino Negro was subject, a Negro who could pass for white was subject, a deeply suntanned white was not. > But it seems to me that Bradford and other paleos have failed to come > to terms with the persistent problem of color in American history. That may be, I haven't thought it through and don't know enough about what various people have said at various times. One point that strikes me is that people think of discrimination as indiscriminate, an absolute yes-or-no sort of thing. That's part of the presumption that it's utterly irrational. They when they try to enforce the CRL there are problems and they talk of tokenism, subtle barriers, institutional racism, built-in headwinds, what have you. The CRL say you can't take ethnicity etc. into account *at all*. That's what's unreasonable about them, that and the circumstance that ethnicity is such a complex of things, some of which are clearly relevant to decisions to associate. > Is this effort reasonable as a response to America's history or > simply another 'shortcut to paradise'? I think it was based on an overly individualistic and mechanistic understanding of social life and an overly rationalistic understanding of what goes into decisions to associate. So I don't think it was reasonable -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From paleo-return-129-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Mar 24 16:58:10 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id QAA11030 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:58:08 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.1.1.21] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 24 Mar 1999 21:58:06 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 27969 invoked by uid 7770); 24 Mar 1999 12:40:00 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 24 Mar 1999 12:40:00 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA26679 for paleo@egroups.com; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:40:02 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903241240.HAA26679@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:40:02 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "T.E. Wilder" at Mar 23, 99 10:03:41 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "T.E. Wilder" writes: > Calvinist culture -- which is what American originally had for the > most part -- bases social values on belief systems, and it places > emphasis on the conscience of the individual, i.e. his integrity in > assenting to and following the belief system. Is this already a problem, in that it demands making a comprehensive understanding of things explicit and demonstrable and causing it to prevail through a discipline? The demand can't be satisfied in the case of actual good and justice because we don't fully possess such things but the dream of pragmatically creating heaven on earth survives. In an attempt to achieve it the good is degraded to satisfaction of impulse, justice to equality of satisfactions, and the necessary discipline to some combination of therapy and bureaucratic regulation. > the more libertarian inclined people want a society that arises > spontaneously from the self-seeking activities of individual social > atoms (in contradiction to Christian ideas about the nature of man > and of social order). Others seem to talk in very vague terms of > tradition. Ever since the guillotine ended royal absolutism, Roman > Catholocism has not had an historically constructed (as opposed to > something invented by theoreticians) social order If social order can't be constructed it must somehow arise through acceptance of a wisdom greater than our own. Liberty and tradition stand for acceptance of a wisdom greater than any that can be articulated and fully possessed, the composite wisdom implicit in all aspects of social life that grows out of a people's dealings with each other in the present (liberty) and over time (tradition). So it seems to me libertarianism and traditionalism are at least fragments of what is needed. They point in the right direction. In a technological age libertarianism is often badly theorized, as a utility machine, but we're not forced to think of the principle of liberty that way. > So the conservatives can't produce a generally compelling normative > vision for ethics and society, and secondly, they are bound to the > historically real. On the other hand loyalty, personal ties, adherence to what is settled, religious acceptance that the good can't be reduced to what we want and know about are all natural human inclinations. Fabricated visions and rejection of what is and has been eventually grow tiresome. So conservatism has some intrinsic advantages. Rather than fabricating another vision it seems the role of conservatives is to restore health, a state in which the world overall looks after itself although there may be principles adherence to which is important. So the issue in this regard is how to dissolve fantasies, encourage the natural, restore contact with reality, and make health rather than the Bionic Man or GI Joe the normative ideal. All rather vague, but we're talking about general orientations so maybe that's inevitable. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "LaughsOnline" - Somewhat daily laughs, motivation, and inspirational posts. http://offers.egroups.com/click/248/3 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-131-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Wed Mar 24 17:00:18 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id RAA11381 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 17:00:15 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.1.1.21] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 24 Mar 1999 22:00:12 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 29471 invoked by uid 7770); 24 Mar 1999 12:42:51 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 24 Mar 1999 12:42:51 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id HAA26810 for paleo@egroups.com; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:42:54 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903241242.HAA26810@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:42:54 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <36F7820F.6CA34719@msmisp.com> from "Carl Jahnes" at Mar 23, 99 06:59:12 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO cjahnes@msmisp.com (Carl Jahnes) writes: > Isn't it that Americans as well as all moderns crave material goods > and 'equality' at the expense of liberty? The meaning of "liberty" is uncertain unless it is known what goods one is free to pursue. Liberty to take part in self-government has fallen out of favor. A certain sort of liberty is still very important, though, the liberty to follow impulse, whatever it happens to be, within a system that maximizes equal satisfaction. Freedom of self-indulgence is now more important than material goods as such, I think, although material goods are of course an important part of self-indulgence. We're in Plato's democratic and not his oligarchic state. The current conception of liberty resembles at least somewhat the traditional liberty to do what one chooses with his own as long as he does not infringe on others' equal liberty to do the same. Is the current conception is the natural generalization and fruition of the traditional one? Maybe a better view is that it arises from an attempt to make principles that have a legitimate but limited use absolute. > Did you read Molnar on "The Emerging Atlantic Culture" (I think that > title's right...if not, at least its similar)? He says that American > so-called culture is simply decadent European culture Haven't read it. I understood him to hold a "Great Satan" theory of America, in which Americans are the only true egalitarians and everyone else has to go along because America is the top country. > Doesn't the left so fear the right's prescriptions of 'salvation' and > the 'salvation bearing class' because we've seen political saviors > before, and they accept the 'breaking of a few eggs' to make an > omelette? Something of that. The Left thinks of things technologically, so that if you say "the social order reflects the common religious understanding" they understand it as a demand for thought control machinery to enforce a religious system designed by the National Directorate of Religion. On the other hand, most of the Right thinks of things technologically too. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Too much effort to find the stock info you want each day? StockMaster lets you enter a company name and quickly shows you a daily quote, chart, and news all on one page. Free! http://stockmaster.com/?a=f7 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From paleo-return-137-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Thu Mar 25 10:35:46 1999 Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id KAA03590 for ; Thu, 25 Mar 1999 10:35:43 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.1.1.21] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 25 Mar 1999 15:35:42 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 18899 invoked by uid 7770); 25 Mar 1999 14:12:05 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 25 Mar 1999 14:12:05 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id JAA21958 for paleo@egroups.com; Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:12:15 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903251412.JAA21958@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:12:14 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "T.E. Wilder" at Mar 24, 99 10:15:04 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Re: counterrevolutionary postmodernism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO "T.E. Wilder" writes: > If something has been gained, worthy of being preserved, why can't > more be gained in the future? What do conservatives have to say about > that? Not much, as far as I can see. The point I think is that at each stage what is gained isn't likely to be gained by an overall plan or gratuitous decision, or to be fully understood for a long time. Also, it is likely to be less important overall than what is to be retained. So the public agency responsible for establishing explicit formal rules and backing them up by force should be concerned much more with preserving existing goods and when needed encouraging restoration of past and therefore known ones than creating new goods. In other words, the state and thus politics should be conservative. Also, conservatism sees politics as ministerial and not sovereign. One consequence is that it does not view existing goods and the social arrangements in which they exist as designed and to be redesigned. Another is that it does not believe the state should try to maintain a rigid status quo. It couldn't do that without comprehensive control of social life which would be utopian and thus anticonservative. Simone Weil says somewhere that we shouldn't make virtuous resolutions and act on them, we should do good acts only when we can't do anything else. However, by attending to things under their true aspect, looking at them as God does, such situations will increase and we will become more at home in them. Politics is somewhat like that, only more so, since a society is less coherent than an individual, with less of a unified active principle, so virtuous resolutions that represent a grasp of the situation combined with a good will and so can actually be virtuous and effective are far less likely. Under such circumstances maintenance of existing good habits, a.k.a. resisting temptation, and direction of attention toward goods that transcend the social are the best policies. The latter by the way seems to require some sort of established religion, at least one like the informal one finally knocked in the head by the Supreme Court in the early '60s. > Therefore, by default, the left owns the future. Conservatism is recognition that the future can't be owned. What we have is the past, and the aspect under which we live in the present. The principles of conservatism are loyalty and faith. Those are also human principles upon which all social order depends. The future therefore will be conservative somehow or other. > Christianity, for example, has a view of progress, of bringing in the > Kingdom of God, which makes is non-conservative. Conservatism is opposed to Leftism but not its opposite. It doesn't posit a well-defined goal and design means for getting there. It doesn't have to think it has everything settled forever. So it's consistent with a notion of a future Kingdom that comes not by the will of Man but by obedience and acceptance. For that matter it's consistent with radical change as when hedonistic utopianism is the established principle of government and public morality, and conservatives therefore become countercultural. > Rather, "kingdom arises against kingdom", that is God in the midst of > history divides the Kingdom of Man against itself, keeping it from > every uniting on goals and reaching them. So it seems that as citizens of the legal order of this world Christians should reject utopianism of every sort, including theocratic utopianism that would make the Kingdom of God a human project. So far as I can tell, principled rejection of utopianism as such means conservatism, respect for experience and for what exists as the form that good now takes for us. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why are most stock sites so slow and annoying to use? StockMaster.com is fast, easy, powerful, and free! Use company names, not ticker symbols. Track your portfolio. Visit: http://stockmaster.com/?a=f6 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Mar 25 11:28:39 EST 1999 Article: 13618 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Imperial Successions Date: 24 Mar 1999 18:40:21 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 24 Message-ID: <7dbt55$f9g$1@panix.com> References: <922315147snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 922318817 7509 166.84.0.226 (24 Mar 1999 23:40:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 24 Mar 1999 23:40:17 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13618 In <922315147snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes: >This is a question for Louis Epstein and other monarchists who >read this group. While we're at it, here's a question that came out of a family discussion during an immensely long drive through Quebec last summer: The French crown, as we understand the matter, can't go to a female. If some cataclysm killed all human males other than those _in utero_, and all males not _in utero_ of all species more closely related to _homo sapiens_ than the housecat, and there was then a restoration in France, could our cat Jumper potentially become King of France? What specifically would stop it? Is there some law of necessity that would override the usual rules in such a case? Also, Jumper was neutered before reaching sexual maturity and so will have no issue. If the answer to the first question is "yes," after the death of the King would the crown then have to go to the male cat most closely related to Jumper through the male line, or is there some way it could revert to a human heir? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Mar 25 11:28:41 EST 1999 Article: 13619 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Balkans Date: 25 Mar 1999 09:17:12 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 7 Message-ID: <7ddgh8$lqa$1@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 922371423 11293 166.84.0.226 (25 Mar 1999 14:17:03 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 25 Mar 1999 14:17:03 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13619 To keep in touch with rightwing opposition to this latest undertaking, see www.antiwar.com -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Mar 25 17:59:06 EST 1999 Article: 13622 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Serbian bombing again Date: 25 Mar 1999 17:57:52 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 31 Message-ID: <7def1g$q64$1@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 922402660 29958 166.84.0.226 (25 Mar 1999 22:57:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 25 Mar 1999 22:57:40 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13622 Just a note to any American readers who don't like Clinton's latest. You can get in touch with members of Congress through http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/. Here's an email I sent to my senators and congressman -- nothing wonderful about it, but it might be something to start with: Dear I strongly urge you to do all in your power to stop the unprovoked United States aggression against Yugoslavia. Whatever particular explanations may be put forward are plainly insufficient in view of the recent attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. The stories are different, the bombing the same, the evident fundamental motives imperial. Why should the United States become a worldwide empire? How suited is our country to ruling other peoples against their wills, and how likely is it that we will be able to bomb the Balkans into good behavior? Our policy is especially reckless with respect to Russia. If the United States had been having serious internal problems 15 years ago, what would our attitude have been to extension of the Warsaw Pact to Brazil and Canada followed by Russian military intervention on behalf of a successionist movement in Mexico? Sincerely, [Name, address, telephone] -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Mar 26 08:50:47 EST 1999 Article: 13625 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Imperial Successions Date: 25 Mar 1999 21:45:45 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 15 Message-ID: <7descp$h0f$1@panix.com> References: <922315147snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <7dbt55$f9g$1@panix.com> <922402633snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.nfs100.access.net X-Trace: news.panix.com 922416332 8169 166.84.0.226 (26 Mar 1999 02:45:32 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 26 Mar 1999 02:45:32 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: news.panix.com alt.revolution.counter:13625 In <922402633snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes: >Human males _in utero_ would override Jumper's claim, as the >posthumous John (Jean) I overrode those of his uncles. And if the males _in utero_ died as well, so that the future of the human race depended on the Royalist Sperm Bank, the idiosyncratic charter of which requires it to turn away patrons other than donors until visited by the King of France? (Sorry to pursue this, but I'm answerable to others for getting an answer.) -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) From paleo-return-148-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Sun Mar 28 12:59:45 1999 Received: from findmail.com (m6.egroups.com [207.138.41.152]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/PanixM1.3) with SMTP id MAA23987 for ; Sun, 28 Mar 1999 12:59:44 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 26398 invoked by uid 505); 28 Mar 1999 17:59:43 -0000 Mailing-List: contact paleo-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: paleo@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/paleo/ Reply-To: paleo@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-paleo@egroups.com Received: (qmail 32741 invoked by uid 7770); 28 Mar 1999 17:57:15 -0000 Received: from panix.com (166.84.1.66) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 28 Mar 1999 17:57:14 -0000 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.8.8/PanixU1.4) id MAA18479 for paleo@egroups.com; Sun, 28 Mar 1999 12:57:45 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199903281757.MAA18479@panix.com> To: paleo@egroups.com (Paleoconservative discussion list) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 12:57:45 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: [Paleo] Antiwar activism and theory Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Theory has its place even in time of war. When paleos take part in antiwar actions, especially in cooperation with leftists and such, they are most likely to advance their cause if they are clear why their views are the ones least likely to lead to war and tyranny. Some thoughts: I understand the paleo view to be acceptance of objective universal order, together with rejection of all attempts to treat that order as something men fully possess. The moral order is transcendent; that means that although it is somewhat knowable it is not fully so. Such a view seems to me ordinary good sense. Nonetheless, it has definite consequences. It means paleos are suspicious of attempts to rationalize society. They accept the authority of tradition, since things that cannot be fully analyzed rationally must be known through symbol and experience, and they are open to that of revelation, since if the transcendent is the final principle of things what it is or does can't be limited. Paleos emphasize loyalty to their own people and ways, because that is how social beings participate in a universal order that can't be fully known or instituted, and also respect for other peoples as bearers of other manifestations of order. Respect need not mean equal respect; no actual people is either perfect or altogether evil, but the objectivity of moral order means some come closer than others. Paleos oppose views that deny either universal objective moral order or the ways in which it transcends and eludes us. Specifically, they reject: 1. Theocracy, which treats order as a divine creation that is fully known. Everyone seems to agree theocracy is oppressive. 2. Radical multiculturalism and Naziism, which treat order as a human construction, and therefore deny that there is a single universal order that includes everyone. Some obfuscate that conclusion with a combination of impenetrable jargon and mysticism, some accept it and treat outsiders as alien raw material to be used by The People as they choose. The former approach is unlikely to endure the shocks and strains of political life, while the consequences of the latter are notorious. 3. Liberalism and the traditional Left generally, which also treat social order as a human construction but lay it down that it is to be the same for everyone. Since social order is constructed and subject to human mastery, they say, it is susceptible to indefinite improvement through conscious reconstruction, and such reconstruction therefore becomes the highest moral obligation. The practical consequences of the insistence that social order be the same for everyone and that it be consciously and continuously reconstructed are obvious. Since the paleo view allows different peoples to live together in mutual respect, and since that view follows from two principles, denial of either of which makes that desirable consequence impossible in principle, all antiwar, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialist people should immediately become paleos. Q.E.D. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. (St. Augustine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/paleo Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com
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