Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From jk Thu Jul 29 09:18:29 1999
Subject: Re: Anti-Enlightenment
To: tw
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:18:29 -0400 (EDT)
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> Can you recommend any titles that look critically at the ideas of the
> Enlightenment? Also, what writings of de Maistre do you consider
> essential?
This kind of question makes me realize how unscholarly I am. Anyway,
here's my list:
Burke's _Reflections_ are basic.
Then there are those who -- as the Enlightenment recommended -- started
with individual experience and reason rather than tradition and
authority but found they led in quite different directions from those
associated with the Enlightenment. For example, J.H. Newman (_Grammar
of Assent_, in which he talks a lot about Locke) and in this country
Irving Babbitt (his book on Rousseau, maybe -- does Rousseau count as
part of the Enlightenment?) and P.E. More.
Does Pascal count as a pre-critic of the Enlightenment? He lived at
the beginning of the line of thought that led to the full-fledged
Enlightenment and he thought it didn't work. So his _Pensees_ I
suppose are a title to read.
Leo Strauss uses the ancients to call the moderns, including the
Enlightenment, into question. And Nietzsche is an heir of the
Enlightenment who calls everything into question, including the
Enlightenment. It seems to me Nietzsche steals a lot of his stuff from
Pascal and others whom he abuses. I've read different things by them
at different times and am not sure what specific titles to recommend.
Sade no doubt rounds out one's understanding of the Enlightenment by
showing how it unravels internally. I'm not sure I'd really recommend
reading him to anyone though.
The people at _Telos_, with whom I have a lot of sympathy in many
respects, keep talking about _The Dialectic of Enlightenment_ by
(Adorno and Horkheimer?). From what they say it sounds useful and I'm
ordering a copy.
I suppose postmodernists attack the Enlightenment when they attack
foundationalism, the ideal of disinterested reason etc. I've never
been attracted to them enough to find out whether their criticisms add
anything to what you can find in say Pascal. Maybe a soft pomoish book
like Kuhn on scientific revolutions would be worth looking at.
A problem with criticizing the Enlightenment is that it is made up of a
lot of thinkers who say different things so you have to decide what
line of development or constellation of views it is that you want to
complain about. I can easily see how someone might think my list of
recommendations wanders all over the lot and is often of questionable
relevance. I suppose the list is based on my own tendency to think of
"the Enlightenment" as representing the view that resolute attention to
public experience and universal reason are enough to bring about
security, comfort, and adequate understanding of the world. So for me
a book that shows problems with that view, anything by Dostoyevsky say,
is a book critical of "the Enlightenment."
Alas all I've read of de Maistre is Jack Lively's anthology of
selections. I've never read a complete book of his although I've just
acquired a couple.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Tue Aug 3 13:02:19 1999
Subject: Re: [Paleo] Re: The death of England
To: paleo@egroups.com
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:02:19 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Graham Weeks" at Aug 3, 99 07:16:41 am
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Sean Gabb and Graham Weeks write:
> >All we can do now is to make sure - as the few genuine dissidents of
> >the Soviet Empire tried to do and variously succeeded in doing -
> >that the new order of things will never hold undisputed sway over
> >the English mind, and that eventually it may be replaced.
> English nationalism must rise in the face of special treatment for
> the three other countries in the Union. To do this properly we must
> leave the EU and become a sovreign state again.
All this seems to presume the continuing existence of a reasonably
coherent English nation occupying England that is capable of common
action and having a collective mind. Is that realistic? In effect,
it's a demand for ethnic hegemony, which on the view now entrenched is
monstrously evil. For what it's worth, last time I was in England TV
seemed as determinedly multicultural as in America. With the EU it
seems matters will only get more so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From: Jim Kalb
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In-Reply-To: from "Graham Weeks" at Aug 3, 99 07:16:41 am
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Sean Gabb and Graham Weeks write:
> >All we can do now is to make sure - as the few genuine dissidents of
> >the Soviet Empire tried to do and variously succeeded in doing -
> >that the new order of things will never hold undisputed sway over
> >the English mind, and that eventually it may be replaced.
> English nationalism must rise in the face of special treatment for
> the three other countries in the Union. To do this properly we must
> leave the EU and become a sovreign state again.
All this seems to presume the continuing existence of a reasonably
coherent English nation occupying England that is capable of common
action and having a collective mind. Is that realistic? In effect,
it's a demand for ethnic hegemony, which on the view now entrenched is
monstrously evil. For what it's worth, last time I was in England TV
seemed as determinedly multicultural as in America. With the EU it
seems matters will only get more so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From jk Thu Aug 5 07:40:08 1999
Subject: Re: [Paleo] Re: The death of England
To: paleo@egroups.com
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 07:40:08 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Graham Weeks" at Aug 4, 99 06:41:51 am
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> I think English nationalism will grow despite liberal opposition, but
> it will be challenged by accusations of racism. The answer is that we
> are a product of racial mixing, more so than the other countries in
> our Union. We are already labelled xenophobic for opposing the EU by
> ignorant accusers who refuse to distinguish Europeans from the EU.
Is that a good answer? The mixing seems limited, Celts, various
Scandinavians (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Normans), whoever the
aborigines were, and it took place a long time ago. Also, if it is the
essence of the English to be a mixed race with a mongrel language and a
hybrid civilation, why not continue and accentuate the process, so that
Afro-Caribbeans become the new Danes and the Koran the new Aeneid? The
process could then be repeated with the Indians and Chinese.
On sensitivity to xenophobia there was the WWII vet who was arrested in
Liverpool for racism because he put up some anti-EU slogans. The basic
point I think is that "xenophobia" includes all cases of being less
welcoming to foreign persons and things than English. The survival of
the English people or culture is therefore as such xenophobic.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Fri Aug 6 05:53:13 1999
Subject: Re: Here is OUR Cosmonaut
To: la
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 05:53:13 -0400 (EDT)
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> a link to Thursday's NY Times article on the Supreme Court of New
> Jersey deciding the Boy Scouts can't exclude an avowed homosexual.
7-0! One feature of the quotes and in fact the opininons in all such
cases is the mindless self-satisfaction of the judges. They just can't
imagine that an opposing view can have any substance. That in fact is
the ground of the opinions. Opposition is just mindless prejudice.
That's one reason it seems to me that a basic problem has been the
failure of the intellectual Right to articulate and publicize a
principled opposition to the Left. The Right doesn't know what to say
about matters of fundamental principle. "Democracy, prosperity and
America are good" is all very well for some purposes but not for
analysis.
It's so bizarre. Millions of university professors, intellectual
obsession with politics, unparallelled communications and the result is
a public life that has become utterly mindless.
> Our country may not be explicitly atheistic, as the USSR was; but we
> have our own forms of official rebellion against God. And I feel a
> certainty that a country that does things like this deserves to be
> destroyed and will be destroyed.
The school prayer decisions meant that politics must exclude God. The
principle of social justice, of the hope the Kennedys symbolize that
politics can be used in adventurous ways to improve our national and
individual lives, is that is that politics should determine all of
life. There's a conclusion lurking there somewhere.
It's interesting. Major catastrophe seems so impossible if one slides
into a mainstream point of view. Life is so comfortable, except for a
few who have been shamefully left out, and America has been so
successful. Also, if there is no transcendence then rationality is
simply conformity to dominant tendencies, so any serious thought that
dominant tendencies may be leading to disaster is not only unwelcome
but insane.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199908051140.HAA16593@panix.com>
To: paleo@egroups.com
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 07:40:08 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Graham Weeks" at Aug 4, 99 06:41:51 am
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> I think English nationalism will grow despite liberal opposition, but
> it will be challenged by accusations of racism. The answer is that we
> are a product of racial mixing, more so than the other countries in
> our Union. We are already labelled xenophobic for opposing the EU by
> ignorant accusers who refuse to distinguish Europeans from the EU.
Is that a good answer? The mixing seems limited, Celts, various
Scandinavians (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Normans), whoever the
aborigines were, and it took place a long time ago. Also, if it is the
essence of the English to be a mixed race with a mongrel language and a
hybrid civilation, why not continue and accentuate the process, so that
Afro-Caribbeans become the new Danes and the Koran the new Aeneid? The
process could then be repeated with the Indians and Chinese.
On sensitivity to xenophobia there was the WWII vet who was arrested in
Liverpool for racism because he put up some anti-EU slogans. The basic
point I think is that "xenophobia" includes all cases of being less
welcoming to foreign persons and things than English. The survival of
the English people or culture is therefore as such xenophobic.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From upstream-list-request@cycad.com Sat Aug 7 09:15:22 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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Subject: Re: [Upstream] Give War a Chance
To: upstream-list@cycad.com
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 09:11:16 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <19990807113819.92278.qmail@hotmail.com> from "David Goldman" at Aug 7, 99 06:38:49 am
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> Given that war is a natural extension of man the outcome will be what
> has always been the case when nature is subverted. It will fail.
> The reason is that defying nature takes enormous amounts of energy
> which cannot be long maintained. A case in point is Communist Russia
> which imposed its will on satellite soviet states to supress their
> nationalist inclinations. Once the overwhelmed Soviet Union
> collapsed these nations reasserted themselves. Does anyone here think
> that "multicultural" America will last for too much longer?
It's not an altogether easy question though. Governments do exist and
manage to suppress local wars. Some governments are more extensive
than others, some manage to maintain control over culturally and
racially diverse populations for long periods, and it's not clear
whether there's a natural limit to the process. There have been
empires that seemed universal, such as the Roman Empire and China.
Those empires weren't really universal of course, each was surrounded
by barbarians and had heard at least rumors of other civilizations. So
maybe one question about human social order is whether it has to have
an outside as well as an inside, whether a truly universal order is
impossible. Something to speculate about.
Also, it seems that when a universal empire becomes corrupt, when the
ruling class loses moral cohesion, it breaks up into several pieces
(e.g., the Hellenistic world, the lower Roman Empire with its multiple
Emperors, China at times). Apparently foreign threats are needed to
make up for the loss of cohesiveness. So far as I can tell the current
movement toward international order is *starting off* corrupt, that is
lacking in any strong principle of honor, self-sacrifice, disinterested
devotion etc. So maybe that will limit it.
It's hard to know what to make of the long-term prospects of
nationalism. One issue is the effect of electronic communications, pop
culture, mass prosperity and self-involvement, immigration, the
antiracist ideal etc.
Even if ethnicity doesn't become weak and confused as a result of all
those things, nationalism is based on a tie between man and land. I
would think that tie would weaken when men live in cities in an
artificial environment that can be duplicated anywhere in the world,
when there is instant cheap communication everywhere, when
transportation makes distance much less important, etc.
Possibly future ethnic allegiances will lose their territorial
connection. If so states would lose their ethnic character. That need
not mean world government of course. The traditional Middle Eastern
dynastic empire had no ethnic character but it wasn't universal either.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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Subject: Re: [Upstream] Give War a Chance
To: ahimoe@soltec.net
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 07:06:17 -0400 (EDT)
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In-Reply-To: from "Albert Himoe" at Aug 6, 99 08:16:47 pm
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> An article by Edward Luttwak argues that international "peacekeeping"
> prolongs local wars by suppressing their natural outcome.
The logical conclusion would be that international peacekeeping in the
end means world government capable of deciding the things that up to
now have been decided by war, and enforcing the decision. There are
enough people in policymaking who favor the latter and few enough
willing to give up the former, so I suppose that's the direction we'll
be moving.
I wonder how far the movement will go? What will determine how it will
come out?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From jk Fri Jul 30 16:52:29 1999
Subject: Re: Anti-Enlightenment
To: tw
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 16:52:29 -0400 (EDT)
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> Thanks for all those suggestions! How about this: I'm concerned that
> the standard story that students will get in their textbooks is one
> of a Church concerned with abstruse metaphyisics, happily supplanted
> by the Scientific Revolution with its emphasis on empirical
> observation. I'm afraid it will look like all the practical good in
> the world came after the Church began to be eclipsed. Anything on
> that general topic? (I'm familiar with Stanley Jaki's work.)
No specific title to recommend. There are a number of good historians
of science though and like most historians they tend to say everything
really in substance had already happened previously. The ones I've
read emphasize the achievements of medieval science and technology and
the continuity with what came after. So I think any standard work
should be useful.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Fri Aug 6 14:36:44 1999
Subject: Re: Here is OUR Cosmonaut
To: la
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 14:36:44 -0400 (EDT)
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> Even the United States Supreme court went for this type of thing when
> it overturned the Colorado anti-homosexual rights referendum. The
> majority decision said the only reason for the referendum was, and I
> quote, "animus" against homosexuals.
In that case they established a new principle the way they did in Roe
v. Wade, by getting the stupidest member of the court (Blackmun or
Kennedy) to write some drivel coming to the right answer, which then
became something the more fastidious members of the court could base
opinions on because after all they could appeal to _stare decisis_. In
the Connecticut contraception case with its invocation of "penumbras,
formed by emanations" from constitutional provisions it was Justice
Douglas, who was not stupid but was shameless for other reasons.
> And notice, I think, Handler's specious statement that the Boy Scout
> position is that homosexuals are inherently immoral.
Another common ploy, not just in the case of homosexuality. You will
have noticed that those who favor immigration restrictions are
routinely described in the mainstream objective profession press as
anti-immigrant. To turn the general point around, feminists are
"women."
> That such leftwing contemptuous lying scum occupy high positions in
> an American court is really something.
What's the problem? Moral greatness is achieved by reconstructing
morality which means imposing new classifications where you don't like
the old and getting people to go along with them. It's all rhetoric,
all the way down, and when "truth" is social convention it's
meaningless to talk about "lies" if they are backed by social
authority.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Sat Aug 7 13:17:48 1999
Subject: Re: [Upstream] Give War a Chance
To: dg
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 13:17:48 -0400 (EDT)
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> First of all maintaining control over other people must be justified.
> Our move into Serbia was justified because of the "ethnic cleansing"
> taking place there. Then potentially vast amounts of resources must
> be expended in order to conquer and then control these people. The
> more numerous and hostile such people are the higher will be this
> cost. Clearly there is a limit in terms of resources and will. The
> cost of pushing around tiny Serbia is being defrayed by all of
> Europe.
Justification is easy -- "human rights." It's an expansive concept and
it trumps sovereignty. Any society not adminstratively subordinate to
whatever bureaucracy it is that determines authoritatively what they
are will easily be shown to be out of compliance.
Cost I agree is an issue. Economic compulsion backed by bombing can do
a lot though. The key is to comvince people that resistance is
useless.
> > So maybe one question about human social order is whether it has to
> > have an outside as well as an inside, whether a truly universal
> > order is impossible. Something to speculate about.
> I don't know what you mean by a truly universal order. Are the
> people in this order of the same ethnicity, religion, etc?
Actually what I had in mind was world government, whether it's possible
or whether a threat from outside or at least contrast with the outside
is necessary for political unity.
> The Japanese are nationalistic and have all these things. They
> refuse to allow immigrants into their country.
The Japanese are an interesting case. I've wondered whether their
system, their relation between individual and social order, will
survive abundance, rock videos and so on. Will it be like the
one-horse shay?
> However, you are forgetting those nations that do not have the
> capability to achieve these things like those nations in Africa, and
> for the large part in Latin America and South East Asia.
Perhaps a barrier to world unification in one huge social democracy,
especially if there are substantial innate differences in average
abilities etc. among races. It's hard to know how to put all the
pieces together though. It seems the strongest position will be held
by those who both advance economically and maintain ethnic cohesion.
So maybe strictly orthodox Jews have a great future in front of them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Aug 10 16:42:39 EDT 1999
Article: 13987 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 10 Aug 1999 16:40:46 -0400
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731591054@3web.com (T.Asquith) writes:
> I don't know if the Holocaust museum is as much a symbol of the
> established religion in the States, as it is more of a symptom of the
> mass marketing of a concept (a sign plus ultra sign).
"Mass marketing" doesn't seem to capture it. It's not just _hoi
polloi_ who are impressed by the Holocaust. It's the maximum sign,
beyond which there is no other. As such it becomes a sacred ultimate.
> I don't know though that any Holocaust exhibit could be argued as a
> "relevation of ultimate reality", considering that it demonstrates
> something which is quite difficult to comprehend for the modern man
That's necessarily true of revelations of ultimate reality. I'm not
arguing the Holocaust is that, by the way, only that it's treated as
such.
> the pointless, in most eyes, mechanistic processing of thousands upon
> thousands of Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists, handicapped
> people, pacifists and dissenters, etc.).
I don't see what your problem. Torturing God to death seems a stupid
enormity, but that doesn't prevent the Crucifixion from being taken as
a revelation of ultimate reality. It's now been decided there is no
God, so the people you mention get tortured to death instead, and
that's the established religion.
> To be frank, I don't think that there is just equality present
> embodied as the signified in the Holocaust. There is also represents
> such notions as industrial/mechanical efficiency, rationalism,
> bureaucracy/technocracy, ideology, objectification, prejudice,
> tyranny, charity, loyalty, martyrdom, sacrifice, faith and so on.
The religion is equality. The Holocaust isn't taken to mean that
rationalism or bureaucracy are bad, it's in effect taken to mean the
opposite. Hate is bad, but hate includes anything on which social
order might be based other than rationalized hedonism -- religious or
ethnic ties, gender roles, any authoritative transcendent morality, all
these things have to go because they lead to Auschwitz. The Holocaust
has nothing much to do with sacrifice or faith, by the way, because the
suffering had nothing to do with such things.
> If this shorthand does occur, there is a risk that many of the
> possible lessons available from this unfortunate chapter of human
> history would be lost.
If something is treated as a revelation of ultimate reality it's not
treated as a chapter of human history giving rise to many possible
lessons. You don't construe it, it construes you.
> If this is true, I would suggest that it need not be "egalitarian
> hedonism" (or even utilitarianism of some sort)--but hedonism,
> period--for, as Christopher Lasch seems to suggest, the culture of
> narcissism knows no class, race nor bounds.
To even begin to have a political theory you have to have some sort of
morality. As the most empty of concepts, egalitarianism is the
appropriate morality for hedonism. "No class, race nor bounds"
confirms the point.
> she does not want people to be self-indulgent--she merely wants to
> challenge norms as a means of furthering her commodity, herself
Her interests lead her to promote self-indulgence by challenging the
norms that give rise to other possibilities. Her interests are
therefore consistent with those of a system that relies on the
incapacity of the people for effective independent action.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From upstream-list-request@cycad.com Sat Aug 14 08:34:18 1999
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To: thumber@earthlink.net
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In-Reply-To: <37B3584E.35B3@earthlink.net> from "thumber" at Aug 12, 99 11:27:11 pm
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thumber writes:
> "Indeed, it is fair to say that homosexual sex is quite unlike
> heterosexual sex in the sheer extent of its perversions."
> If by "perversion" you mean "non-procreative sex act", then what you
> have said is certainly true - tautological, in fact. If you mean "any
> act deviating from the statistical norm", ditto. Do I misinterpret
> the tone of your post if I infer that you consider ANY homosexual act
> a "perversion" with a meaning more like "something that disgusts me"?
The question is addressed to Gavan, and I don't know his views, but I
thought I'd comment on what seems a suggestion that "perversion" is an
empty term of abuse.
The usual meaning of the word I think is something like "sex act that
is grossly at odds with the normal functioning of sex in human life,
and therefore bad." The word is intended to express an objective
evaluation so it doesn't simply refer to statistical norms or to merely
personal disgust.
People differ on what is a perversion, just as they differ on what is
good, just, fair, reasonable, etc. The Pope I suppose might say that a
sex act that is not in a certain sense open to procreation is
perverted. Most people except those categorically opposed to the
notion of the "normal" would find *some* sex acts perverted.
To me it seems clear that we can't talk sensibly about human life
without shared notions of how things should work, and sex is central
enough so that "how it should work" can't be taken in a purely
technological sense. Sex has to do with some of our strongest feelings
and impulses, absolutely fundamental relations like man/woman/child,
even the basic constitution of our bodies.
Our way of making sense of it must somehow put all those things
together in a way that makes for stable and productive social life. So
it seems to me what's needed is a conception of how things should be
that's shared, so it's not just a personal matter, and is not limited
to statistics and mechanics. If we have a notion of the normal and
right though we will also have a notion of the abnormal and wrong, or
the perverted.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
---
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Subject: Re: [PL] M.Daly in Nation
To: upstream-list@cycad.com (upstream)
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In-Reply-To: <37B585CF.D79A5FDE@anthro.umontreal.ca> from "Ken Jacobs" at Aug 14, 99 11:06:11 am
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> It is but a small step from arguing that African-Americans suffer
> from "adverse testing environments" to arguing that African-Americans
> ought to be educated separately [and I imagine that male and female
> students would be separated as well in the African-American "safe
> space"].
> What comes next? Separate educations with attention to their special
> needs for Asians, Native Americans, Jews? For those who can be
> separated by increasingly sophisticated biomedical and other
> neurological methods into different groups with different highly
> predictable "potential learning curves" by the time they reach school
> age? (A growing site with links to literature in this area can be
> found at:
It seems hard to give _a priori_ answers to questions like "who should
be grouped with whom" in education. What and how and how much people
learn depends on a thousand things.
To my mind it would be best to have something like a free market system
in which schools run on the principles they choose and accept whom they
want, and parents are free to send their children wherever they choose
that accepts them. Then if special schools for learning-disabled Asian
twins seemed worth having to enough teachers, administrators and
parents they would exist and otherwise not.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
---
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In-Reply-To: <37B5D1B1.FFF48D6F@anthro.umontreal.ca> from "Ken Jacobs" at Aug 14, 99 04:29:54 pm
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Ken Jacobs writes:
> First, who is to decide that "if special schools for
> learning-disabled Asian twins seem worth having to enough teachers,
> administrators and parents?"
In the case of private schools that's no problem. People pool their
resources and talents and efforts and if they can make a go of it good,
otherwise tough luck. So for those schools part of the answer would I
suppose be loosening of antidiscrimination laws and no doubt some other
restrictions.
When public funding enters the picture it's harder to emulate a market
I agree since those who are paying should have some say as to what they
are paying for. I suppose emulation of a market could be an ideal
taken into account in considering how to divide up spending authority.
Vouchers are one proposal, no doubt lots of others are possible.
> Third, it is not at all clear that all parents share the same
> emotional and "intellectual" urge to put their children's interests
> and needs first.
Many of those in charge of education do not put children's interests
and needs first in any event. Parents seem more likely to do so than
others.
> Fourth, if control is entirely devolved to the local school board,
> some schools may choose to teach that all Euro-Americans, or
> Hispanics or.... are evil, or that evolution is fiction
Again, why assume that centralized professional bureaucracies
systematically make better choices about such things than parents?
Right now the schools are full of indoctrination much of which I think
is intellectually misleading and socially destructive. At least if it
were decentralized more people would have a say about it, it would vary
from place to place, and it would be judged more by common sense.
> What happens to the students from these systems who hit the real
> world and discover they failed to learn the sightest about the
> diversity of the world's belief systems (be they scientifically or
> spritually based)?
What happens today when students hit the world and find the schools
haven't given them a realistic picture of how things are? PC is real,
and it leads to a lot of pretense.
Also, there are all sorts of risks. Parents I think are more likely to
be concerned with children's concrete prospects and experience than
professional educational administrators so trusting parents probably
minimizes the most serious ones. It seems to me for example more
important for children to learn something solid they can rely on than
to learn the multiplicity of the things that people might possibly rely
on. Parents tend to emphasize the former. A universal professional
bureaucracy is more likely to emphasize the latter, since it likes
universality and since if children leave school *without* anything
definite they can rely on then professional bureaucracies become more
important.
> how to get to that point from where we now stand is not clear. To try
> and effect such a change would be a "social experiment" the likes of
> which the statists have never attempted.
If there's a guiding concept of what's needed a thousand expedients
come to mind and their effects cumulate. We're mostly talking about
loosening central controls and letting people find their own way, by
the way, so the advantage over "social experiments" is that it's less
important for there to be someone in particular who can figure
everything out.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
---
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Aug 16 04:17:18 EDT 1999
Article: 13992 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 15 Aug 1999 14:14:34 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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731591054@3web.com (T.Asquith) writes:
> It is not the "maximum sign", as you have alleged; the maximum sign
> has been lost. It is only sign qua sign.
I don't see your point. Le Pen was fined $200,000 in France and I
don't know how much in Germany -- I think they were going to toss him
in the slammer -- for calling the gas chambers a detail of history.
That shows international agreement that the Holocaust is a very big
symbol indeed. Even to deny its status as such is a serious crime.
What symbol is greater? You don't get fined 200 grand for soaking a
cross in a jar of urine.
> To wit, you brought up the example of the Holocaust Memorial Museum
> in Washington D.C. It is the mark of the hyperreal; it's another
> Disneyland. Where else can a total stranger get issued an ID card on
> admission, matching the age and sex of a real Holocaust victim (as if
> that is not an insult to the victim's memory)?
Sounds like that embarrassingly vulgar Catholic stuff, relics of the
saints, the stations of the cross, lithographs of the sacred heart of
Jesus, 3-D images of the Man of Sorrows, electric altar candles, etc.
(BTW, I should confess that I've never been to the Holocaust Museum and
have no intention of ever going.)
> it reduces the memory to the life of a quasi-cartoon character
Like plaster saints.
> You get the "pleasure" (no disrespect intended) of seeing the
> Einsatzgruppen at work -- with the shooting, the stabbing, the
> burying.
Then there are the crucifixes over the altar, the revolting images of
martyrdoms, not to mention bones of the saints in gilded and jewelled
reliquaries.
> Why did Adorno say "that to write poetry after the Holocaust is
> barbaric"?
Because he viewed the Holocaust as an ultimate event, a revelation of
reality that transforms everything. None of the evils of history can
compare with it.
> It has not been decided that there is no God -- ask that of a
> Anglican priest, Orthodox Jewish rabbi or a devout Muslim abba.
Lots of Anglican priests have decided there's no God, although they may
still find uses for God-talk. The others stay in communion with them
so it seems they agree that Anglicanism as such doesn't require God.
The Orthodox rabbis and Muslim abbas who think otherwise are pre-modern
and don't count. The former get a pass because of the Holocaust and
because they have influential relatives. There aren't that many of
them anyway. The latter we blow up when they annoy us.
My point of course is that the religion of the Holocaust is a post-
theistic religion.
> How bourgeois!
Sure. The religion of the Holocaust is a religion for comfortable safe
middleclass people.
> There was suffering during the Holocaust, mon ami. But there was
> also the supreme expression of the human spirit (man as social animal
> triumphs over his mere natural needs; as Rousseau knew too well, only
> at the natural level are men equal, but at the social level
> inequalities abound).
The religion has to do with passive helpless suffering, things that
just happened to people for reasons utterly beyond their control. It's
the Six Million that's important. Doesn't it show something that the
number is such an important symbol? If individual responses were what
mattered we'd be concerned with some far more than others.
> The type of hedonism one sees in each respective segment of society
> is quite different or inegalitarian.
When I talk about "hedonism" what I have in mind is the abstract point
that what is desirable and what is desired are the same. The Good
reduces without remainder to actual desires coordinated by
technological and egalitarian considerations. The transcendent is
abolished so its place is taken by the negative transcendent of pure
death and suffering embodied in the Holocaust.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Aug 16 04:17:19 EDT 1999
Article: 13996 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 15 Aug 1999 17:43:34 -0400
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In <934750955snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>One's impression (though perhaps they carefully cultivate it) is that
>the US rich actually have a frenzied culture of work with very little
>real leisure; what would be leisure for the rest of us is for them a
>pose, or part of the networking process. Of course they don't, mostly,
>do genuinely productive work either.
Competitive hedonism is a form of conspicuous consumption. It doesn't
have much to do with actual pleasure. People pretend to know all about
wine, or fine cooking, or whatever. It's a power statement.
Competitive vacation discussions are especially enjoyable if you're
fond of jerks.
It's hard to know what to say about "genuinely productive work". Most
of what investment bankers do is match willingness to advance
purchasing power and take risks on particular terms with desire for
those things. Assuming clients and customers on the whole run their
affairs competently that's probably productive work. Finding uses of
funds that will pay off is I think productive. Given a very
complicated legal system high priced lawyers are worth what they're
paid on big-dollar transactions.
The objection to the rationalized free market is not I think that it's
inefficient, that on the whole it pays people for things not worth
doing from the standpoint of increasing production of things people
will pay for.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Aug 16 15:52:45 EDT 1999
Article: 13999 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 16 Aug 1999 06:42:27 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 27
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In <37B7E12E.8CA3F62C@zap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>But retrospectively the drive for more efficiently turned in many
>instances out to be no more than a cloak for such activities as
>asset-stripping and generating bubbles by increasing the volatility in
>deregulated markets.
"Asset-stripping" means selling assets where people are willing to pay
most for them. I don't see what's unproductive about it, if
"productive" means maximizing overall economic output. Usually people
are willing to pay more where there are bigger profits, and "profit"
means excess of economic value of output over input, and so shows an
increase in overall wealth.
As for speculative bubbles, they happen but it's not easy for someone
to decide to make them happen, so I don't understand the "cloak"
language. The issue I suppose is whether deregulated markets misprice
things more than regulated markets. I don't see that they do.
Again the specific point at issue is whether rich people in America, or
unregulated markets, are productive. I don't see why not, if
"productive" refers to increase in the economic value of output.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Aug 17 10:38:28 EDT 1999
Article: 14005 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 17 Aug 1999 07:30:06 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <934840145snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>If the speculative chain is long enough, there is no necessary
>relation between the profit that people at the beginning of the chain
>hope to make from their deal in the asset, and the output that the
>people at the end of the chain hope to produce by using the asset.
Sure. People can be unreasonable and do dumb things. That applies to
everything they do though, not just transferring assets from those
who'll pay less for them to those who'll pay more for them or dividing
up risks in accordance with self-assessment of ability to deal with
them and judgements of the relation of risk to possible profit. It
still seems to me facilitating those things is on the whole productive
economically speaking, just as it seems to me growing wheat is
productive even though sometimes there's a hailstorm and it's all
destroyed, sometimes it's made into Hostess Twinkies and people get
sick eating them, sometimes it gives people the energy they need to do
bad things etc.
>Dealing profit is not necessarily the same as operating profit. To
>assume that one necessarily implies the other is to assume that
>everyone has perfect information and that there are no suckers, i.e.
>to assume an absurdity.
Why is it necessary to assume necessity? Bad info and dumb choices
reduce productivity. I don't see why investment bankers and the like
reduce info and make choices worse any more than other people who
competitively offer advice for a fee. Getting rid of them wouldn't
make people smarter and better informed. And if dumb choices regarding
investment, planning for the future etc. are expensive then smart top
managers are very valuable.
Perhaps the issue is whether making a variety of transactions possible
is economically destructive. I suppose it could make it harder to get
general agreement on a steady line of conduct, make it harder for
ordinary managers to evaluate their own business situation and so make
it more likely they'd do something irrational, faddish, short-sighted
etc. Ditto for ordinary people -- too many things are changing, there
are too many choices, it's hard to plan and easy to be taken advantage
of by those who understand better what's going on.
How does one evaluate such an issue though? Modern economic life is
complex and artificial in any event. Is it better to let people do
what they want and evolve ways of dealing with it? After all,
effective regulation is difficult and would be subject to manipulation
as well. Or are there some simply categorical rules that would improve
things? Limits on cross-border transactions seem a candidate to me,
there may be others.
>> > The issue I suppose is whether deregulated markets misprice things
>> > more than regulated markets. I don't see that they do.
>That perhaps depends whether the price of everything is the same as
>the value of everything.
The comment can have several meanings. With respect to economic value
the question seems to be whether what people pay for things correctly
reflects likely risk and return in accordance with all available
information. I'm not sure how to regulate markets in a way that
systematically improves the correspondence. Conceivably disclosure
requirements and some consumer protective rules could help.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Aug 18 08:50:20 EDT 1999
Article: 14008 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 18 Aug 1999 08:07:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <934927511snz@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf391@hormel.bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>increase in complexity is described as distortion if it follows from
>regulation, but not if it is the result of laisser-faire and the
>growth of secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and
>heaven-knows-how-manythary layers of transaction. It's not clear to me
>why.
Complexity makes things more efficient when it's worth the cost. The
problem is how to know when that is the case. The usual view is that
if men with their own money at risk who could choose less complicated
transactions choose more -- rent something rather than buy it, insure
some risks rather than take them all themselves, eat a restaurant meal
rather than growing their own food -- it's probably worth it, or at
least on the whole second-guessing isn't likely to make things better.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Aug 18 08:50:21 EDT 1999
Article: 14009 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 18 Aug 1999 08:19:04 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <37BA7C0E.550515C4@zap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>Giving stock options to (rational) executives for example, will in no
>way enhance their performance because they will simply hedge this part
>of their income in the open marked to sued their desired risk
>profiles.
The assumption is that men who devote most of their waking hours to
working with others to promote the success of an organization won't act
in accordance with strict economic rationality.
When corporate insiders sell stock it has to be disclosed, and if
several of them do it it's considered serious bad news for the stock.
That wouldn't be so if people thought corporate insiders were pure
rational actors with regard to their own stock ownership. They would
be buying and selling all the time.
Also -- I doubt that you could do a proper market hedge of a stock
option plan -- can you buy a 5-year stock option for example?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Mon Aug 16 16:12:03 1999
Subject: Re: Traditionalism and the American Order
To: jt
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:12:03 -0400 (EDT)
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Hello!
Thanks for your comments.
Your timing was good because I'm trying to write something about
liberalism that identifies what it is that causes its collapse into
what we have now. The attempt has led me back to the Founding and
discussions as to its significance.
> As to the Revolution, a strong case can be made that it was no
> liberal revolution at all, but rather an attempt to maintain the
> status quo of constitutional government inherited from the British.
I agree it can be interpreted variously. Which aspects proved dominant
though, not just 220 years later but in its near aftermath? I think
they were more the ones that were universalistic, and that tended to
identify liberty with every man's right to do whatever he happened to
feel like doing.
If the Revolution was about maintaining the status quo, how come it
hasn't been remembered that way? When America got its philosopher, it
turned out to be Ralph Waldo Emerson.
> Liberty, as it was understood by the Founders, was surely the right
> to self-government. I would argue that this right is itself
> established in the natural law, in the moral order created by God,
> especially evinced in the primacy of the family.
I agree with all this. I think the basic problem with liberalism is
that it puts liberty rather than the common good first. Liberty must
be understood as part of a more inclusive system of goods. When it's
made superior to the common good, as it is in liberalism, it becomes
morally neutral, the right of every man to do whatever he happens to
feel like doing, and when that becomes the ultimate goal of politics
you get what we have now.
As to the Founders: it seems to me their scheme of government left the
common good, apart from material prosperity and national security, too
inarticulate and unable to assert itself. Maybe they thought it wasn't
necessary, because everyone was a Christian or something reasonably
close to it anyway, and since they were Protestants they didn't like
the idea of authoritative religious institutions, but they were
mistaken.
The mistake may have been unintentional but it doesn't look accidental.
The part of their thought that dominated what they actually did was
this-worldly liberalism, and that's the type of thinking that has
triumphed in our national history. Our interpretation of them ought to
reflect that.
> We conservatives believe in liberty - self-government, and in
> equality - before the law.
OK. To my mind though the important point that's missing today is that
liberty and equality make sense only in relation to a larger
understanding of the good.
> The important difficulty of the conservative position is how we frame
> the battle. I believe it is a mistake to frame the battle in terms
> of tradition vs. autonomy.
It seems to me the ultimate issue is between the good as transcendent,
as something authoritative that we can not fully know or grasp, or the
good as satisfaction of desire. The former is the basis of
traditionalism, it's how we come to know the transcendent good and find
ways to make it concrete. The latter is what you end up with if
autonomy is taken straight.
> Rather, I believe conservatives are better served by defining the
> conservative position as the balance between Leviathan and Chaos.
Liberals are perfectly happy with that definition of the battle. "Human
rights" are intended to limit Leviathan and in turn are to be limited by
the need to avoid Chaos.
> We believe the Church is authoritative in interpreting scripture, but
> not infallible. We believe that the scripture is both infallible and
> authoritative.
The problem is how concretely to identify the voice of the Church and
the true meaning of scripture and make the identification believable
and stable. It seems to me the Roman Catholics have a better answer to
that than the Presbyterians. Unless you have a good answer it seems to
me you're likely to end up in effect with private judgement as the
ultimate standard, which means liberalism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Wed Aug 18 15:07:07 1999
Subject: Re: How to reply to the Clintonites' excuse that "everybody does it."
To: la
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 15:07:07 -0400 (EDT)
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Good response.
It seems that support for Clinton is required by metaphysical
necessity. At this point he *is* liberalism. The liberal order has
become a pure construction of impulse, desire and technology and it is
now incarnate in a man who is the same. To object to Clinton is to
object to liberalism itself.
I thought it was a very intelligent observation from Taylor Branch that
the forces opposing Clinton are the same as those that opposed the
civil rights laws.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Aug 19 18:09:41 EDT 1999
Article: 14014 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 19 Aug 1999 08:04:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <7pgrso$ilk$1@panix.com>
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In <37BBE6C3.8CA094B1@zap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>The underlying speculative argument however, is indeed that real
>loyalties of executives in a commercial cooperate structure where
>human services are bought and sold in the market, are not (and can not
>be) to any particular cooperation (no matter how much incentives it
>tries to create) but rather to the cooperate structure as a whole.
This raises an interesting issue, the extent to which the rational
economic outlook will eventually undercut large-scale formal structures
to which it gives rise like world markets and corporate or government
bureaucracies. After all, markets depend on trust, you can't always
guard against everything, and if everyone is literally in it solely for
himself bureaucracies don't work well.
Such considerations seem to support the view that in the end modern
conditions will lead to a sort of neo-Levantine world of inward turning
ethno-religious castes. Those will be the only structures able to
retain the moral cohesion needed to make productive cooperation
possible.
I'm not sure how effective loyalties solely to the cooperative
structure as a whole would be. They're not enough to make communism
possible and I'm not sure they'd be enough to support capitalism. If
they're weak then inertia may keep things going a little while but not
for long on the world scale that applies now.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Aug 20 12:46:23 EDT 1999
Article: 14019 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 20 Aug 1999 12:43:58 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 30
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In <37BD400A.875DDD2F@zap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>The emergence of new period of dark ages is probably the most gloomy
>outcome (are you thinking of Macintyre?), but an alternative might be
>to build new stable power-balances between geo-political entities that
>will be large enough to counter the forces of the international
>integrated markets. A total breakdown of industry would at this point
>probably lead to a catastrophical reduction of production, so a very
>strong force for finding an alternative might develop.
I wasn't really suggesting dark ages. I don't like traditional
Levantine society as much as a public order of the European type but it
doesn't necessarily mean something like the period 500 - 800 in Western
Europe. I suppose it would probably mean hard times for the sciences
but I don't see why there would have to be technological retrogression.
I'm not sure what your geo-political entities would look like. To me
modern communications and transportation means that it would be hard
for them to maintain cohesion over against integrated international
structures unless they have a very strong internal principle of unity
and the ability to reject outside influences. Ethno-religious unity
involving on a strong notion of religious purity could work, I'm not
sure what else would. But if you have strong boundaries based on
ethnicity and rules of religious purity (Orthodox Jews, Gypsies, Amish)
then you don't need territorial unity.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From paleo-return-408-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Fri Aug 20 17:12:25 1999
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Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 15:50:59 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199908191803.LAA22782@mailhost.sqi.com> from "arthur hu" at Aug 19, 99 11:00:20 am
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> It might mean they've figured out a way do preferences without
> admitting it.
They mention a couple ways they're doing it, "outreach centers" and an
apparent practice of admitting the top 10% of every graduating class.
The latter's a neat idea -- in most white high schools the top 10%
would get into State anyway and will mostly go someplace else while in
black high schools getting into the flagship state campus is a great
opportunity. As for outreach centers, I suppose admissions would find
a way to give favorable treatment to those they refer.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Aug 23 14:26:46 EDT 1999
Article: 14024 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: Democracy v. Republic
Date: 23 Aug 1999 07:09:13 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 55
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In <37BE7DAF.3E4F0E4F@zap.a2000.nl> vtnet writes:
>the inevitability of a rapid decline in both industrial-grade
>technologies and production as new problems emerge that cannot be
>solved -- the Russians will be happy to tell you all about that.
Retrogression due to decreased ability to solve new problems does seem
a possibility to the extent science depends on a moral order understood
as universal that will not necessarily last forever.
>So blocks should probably have a predominantly moral rather than
>ethnic basis, and the problem is how to make them sufficiently stable.
>(The difficult question.)
The only sufficiently stable moral basis I know of is religion. I
agree that ethnicity probably does best as a supplement to the moral
basis. The problem when it is put first is that ethnicity as such
doesn't tell you what to do. So if people try to rely on it too much
they can get negative self-definition (definition of what I am is by
reference to what I am not) and exaggerated theories of ethnic purity.
>But I thing your multiculturalism is at least as worse as 'ethnic
>territorialism'
Is that because you think of it as primarily ethnic? It's not. Also
it's not a proposal, it's a (quite speculative) prediction based on the
thought that ethno-religious groups like strictly-orthodox Jews and
Amish have a huge advantage in the world now that looks like it will be
enduring. Those groups are ethnic but they put religion first in the
way they define themselves.
>even so your notions seem primarily significant for the American
>situation where the Christian-based multi-ethnic society that the
>founders seem to have envisaged -- is now regressing into a
>multicultural plutocracy.
Why expect Europe to end up any different, with borders opened by the
EU, immigrants, refugees, huge numbers of people close by in Asia and
Africa who want to get in.
>But if people have nothing in common except the territory that they
>live on (which I understand is what you purpose), then how do you
>purpose to justify the law to those who are at the bottom of the
>barrel -- for surely you will admit that even in your multicultural
>society differences in virtues and fortunes (and so opportunities and
>all the rest) will exist?
Government in traditional middle-eastern societies was not long on
justification. I suppose they could tell those at the bottom that they
suppressed brigandage etc.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Thu Aug 26 07:35:22 1999
Subject: Re: Feminism
To: jo
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 07:35:22 -0400 (EDT)
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Thanks for your note. Feminism won't last forever because it's not
human nature, but it's very strong just now and doing a lot of damage.
It's hard to dispute because it's so much in line with so many other
things that are going on. One should try though. I agree that the
basic problem is religious, the abolition of all transcendent principle
that defines the modern world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Thu Sep 2 04:43:04 1999
Subject: Re: [Upstream] New trick to keep AA
To: upstream-list@cycad.com
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 04:43:04 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <37CDEE93.AE9351B1@cycad.com> from "Gavan Tredoux" at Sep 1, 99 11:27:15 pm
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> This is the crux:
>
> "A 1200 SAT score from a student in Beverly Hills
> means something totally different than a 1200 from
> a student in a school in South Central Los Angeles,"
> says James Blackburn, director of admissions and
> records at California State University-Fullerton
>
> Does it indeed? If it does, then it should have significantly different
> predictive value. Does anyone have data to confirm or refute this
> claim (for SES)?
"Totally different" is no doubt too strong, but I thought Bayes'
theorem implied that the SCLA score was likely to overpredict
performance. On that line of thought it would be appropriate to
penalize strivers in the admissions process, for example by subtracting
a certain number of points from their SAT scores. To say someone is a
striver is to say his SAT is anomalous -- that is, to say it is less
reliable than most.
> one thing Strivers hasn't been able to escape is the race issue.
> Mr. Carnevale acknowledges that in terms of increasing minority
> representation in colleges, Strivers works best when race is one
> of the factors.
>
> "You can't get away from it," he says. "Race is still relevant."
>
> In other words, no matter how many factors like home background,
> school, etc. are taken into account, race still has independent
> explanatory power. Most interesting.
Yes, especially when things like neigborhood are taken into account
which are proxies for race.
Jim Kalb
From jk Fri Sep 3 08:02:17 1999
Subject: Re: antiracism essay
To: la
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 08:02:17 -0400 (EDT)
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> Is it really correct to say that ethnicity is based on the
> transcendent and that antiracism rests on the rejection of the
> transcendent? I can see that other qualities, such as man-ness or
> woman-ness or child-ness, or police-ness, or teacher-ness, or
> family-ness, or polite-ness, or good-ness, or lion-ness, or
> bird-ness, involve a transcendent essence or stereotype. An
> individual man partakes in essential man-ness, which is part of what
> makes him what he is, beyond his individual, chosen attributes. But
> can we say that a white person partakes in the same manner in an
> essential and transcendent quality of white-ness? Yes, there are
> general racial characteristics that all members of a race share. But
> is the white-ness of the white race the same as the chair- ness of
> chairs? Is the Chinese-ness of a Chinese the same as the family-ness
> of a family? Is an ethnic or racial group a transcendent essence?
> This is not to disagree with the assertion that the attack on
> universals will also result in an attack on ethnicity. But is
> ethnicity itself a universal?
Ethnicity is a universal. A universal simply a property that can apply
to possible as well as actual objects. As such, it does not reduce to
experience and is therefore at least minimally transcendent.
There are different types of transcendence. There are natural
distinctions like man/woman, there are also social distinctions like
prince/pauper. It seems ethnicity is more a social distinction
although the racial element gives it biological and therefore natural
overtones. However, man is a social animal who by nature creates
social distinctions that articulate and make possible social life and
therefore transcend him individually. Such distinctions are natural in
a sense. Certainly we cannot deny their reality. In part, that was
the point of my essay on stereotypes.
I don't think I say ethnicity is based on the transcendent although I
might have. I say that if you reject the transcendent you'll reject
ethnicity. If you reject man-ness or good-ness, then you'll reject
Frenchness, which is also a universal but one which can be more easily
dispensed with. Especially you'll reject Frenchness because it's a
universal that might apply to *you* and therefore limit you.
I do think ethnicity, Irishness for example, is at least as
transcendent as policeness or teacherness. That is to say, it is at
least as fundamental to what one is, at least as prior to the
particular choices one makes, at least as much a basic category of
experience. It's probably harder to capture in a short definition, but
whether there's an essence that can be concisely stated is I think a
different matter. Irishness is not as transcendent as most of the
other things you mention. The difference between a man and a woman is
more fundamental than that between an Irishman and an Italian, for
example.
I don't deal with whether acceptance of the transcendent means
acceptance of the significance of ethnicity. I think it probably does
here and now. There aren't that many reasons here and now to reject
the reality and significance of ethnicity, and rejection of the
transcendent is the most obvious one. It is conceivable that someone
could ignore ethnicity because the transcendent is very important to
him and ethnicity isn't transcendent enough to take seriously. Maybe
in the Kingdom ethnicity won't matter. They don't have marriage, so
why should they have ethnicity? For all I know St. Francis never
noticed ethnicity, Chesterton says he apparently never quite understood
what money is. It's one of the basic principles of our human life here
and now, though, so someone living that life can not without absurdity
or bad faith avoid recognizing it.
> Kalb says antiracism makes society impossible and will ultimately be
> rejected. The hidden flaw in this argument is something he points
> out earlier in his essay but then apparently forgets about: that
> antiracism is only directed against whites. The antiracists want
> ethnicity for nonwhites, no ethnicity for whites.
Possibly I should say that as a practical matter here and now it is
only directed at whites. I also point out that there is a principled
explanation for antiracist suppression of white ethnicity and
enhancement of nonwhite. Abolition of all ethnicity is I think the
ultimate goal, but you start by attacking ethnic hierarchy, which means
weakening dominant ethnicities and encouraging others. I'm inclined
toward a grand philosophical interpretation of antiracism, which makes
the antiwhite aspects somewhat accidental. If you don't like hierarchy
you start by chopping the king's head off. That doesn't mean that the
most fundamental thing about the French Revolution was antimonarchism
or personal dislike for Louis Capet or whatever they called the king.
> the natural resurgence of ethnicity that Kalb foresees as the
> solution to antiracism will only take place after white ethnicity has
> been decisively destroyed.
After white ethnic dominance has been destroyed, maybe. It's hard to
know just how much will be destroyed in a catastophe. Antiracism is
fundamentally a ruling class view. When whites can no longer identify
with the ruling class they will give it up. Presumably that will be
before whites disappear as such.
> The ethnicity that will eventually return in order to restore some
> kind of sustainable social order will be a new, race-mixed, nonwhite
> ethnicity.
I think ethnicity requires ethnic differences. One knows what he is in
part by contrast to what he is not. So there will be a limit to race
mixing. Also, I think the present order will collapse long before the
destruction of historical ethnic groups.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Sep 4 13:03:50 EDT 1999
Article: 14054 of alt.revolution.counter
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Subject: Re: Involution vs. Evolution
Date: 4 Sep 1999 08:19:14 -0400
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In <37CE8767.B16D596A@virginia.edu> Babak writes:
>I'm not sure if the progressive, linear view of history is a premise
>of evolutionism or if this belief runs parallel to evolutionism. We
>can however question this understanding of time. We can only assume
>this chronological understanding as true. Indeed, we have countless
>examples of non-Western worldviews that see history in a cyclical or
>degenerative pattern.
The progressive, linear view is not the only one you find in the West.
The Christian view brackets history between two perfect states, Eden
and the Kingdom, and includes a Fall and a Redemption, both brought
about by a non-historical person acting within history. There is also
a tendency to distinguish sacred and secular history. The two aren't
absolutely separate, since Christ was after all incarnate, but the
realm of Christ is nonetheless not now the same as that of Caesar.
Secular history need not be progressive -- there's a tendency to think
things are getting worse -- and can be cyclical.
What's happened in modern thought I think is that Eden and sacred
history have been abolished, and sacred characteristics attributed to
secular history. Evolutionism is one aspect of that. There is nothing
but some self-contained natural process that begins with chaos and
develops through its own mechanism into some equivalent of God.
>Julius Evola reverses the evolutionist paradigm with cyclical
>understandings of history - involution: the creation of lesser
>organisms from the degeration of the higher. Pure spirit degenerating
>into terrestrial man and animals. The creation of the universe by
>God. Instead of seeing God's creation, in the universe, we can
>perhaps understand the universe and God's degeneration, a
>manifestation of weakness and not a display of benevolent might.
Sounds like gnosticism. To me it doesn't make sense of the world as we
know it as well as Christianity does, which gives positive value to the
world we know through the senses while not attempting to turn that
world into an absolute.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Wed Jul 21 08:14:04 1999
Subject: Re: Antiracism article
To: la
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 08:14:04 -0400 (EDT)
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> You analyze antiracism as not just a perversity of modern liberals,
> but as an almost ineluctable outcome of modernity as embodied in the
> United States.
Exactly so. I suppose I'd be inclined to leave out the "almost" and
the "as embodied ... " I'm not sure whether I have a general weakness
for grand theories of conceptual historical necessity, but it does seem
to me that the tendency of modernity is to make the world more logical
abstractly speaking. Also more insane -- that's what I'm trying to get
at with my comments on the disappearance of moderation.
From jk Thu Aug 26 08:10:27 1999
Subject: Re: Gingrich talk
To: la
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 08:10:27 -0400 (EDT)
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Thanks for the Gingrich notes. They seem to the point to me from what
I know of the man although I haven't followed him closely.
"Conservative opportunity society" means freedom comes first and it
should be given an interpretation that is both economic and
universalistic. It's an idealization of oligarchical man, with
everyone in the world becoming an oligarch. It's one of the most
revolting utopias ever proposed.
From jk Sun Sep 5 05:42:41 1999
Subject: Re: antiracism essay
To: la
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 05:42:41 -0400 (EDT)
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> Is the Tao or Objective Value of a thing--the inherent quality that
> brings forth a certain response in us--the same as the transcendent
> or universal of a thing? I guess it is, since the inherent
> lovableness of a child, to use your definition of a universal, is "a
> property that can apply to possible as well as actual objects. As
> such, it does not reduce to experience ... "
I would be inclined to say so, which I suppose means I reject the
fact/value distinction.
The universal of a thing is what make it the sort of thing it is. To
say what the facts are ("that's a small red ball") is to say what the
applicable universals are. The fact/value distinction would then say
that the applicable universals do not force one valuation rather than
another.
That seems wrong. Good and evil aren't add-ons. The connection
between a correct description of something (a statement of the
applicable universals) and its objective value must I think be
intrinsic. So I'd say that the Objective Value of a thing is an aspect
of its universal.
> conservatives, neoconservatives, and Christians, who generally say
> they believe in the transcendent, reject ethnicity and race. It is
> not "transcendent enough" for them. For the same reason, they also
> tend to reject culture generally. The only transcendents they
> believe in are highly abstract, like democracy, equality, etc.
As you note, to reject ethnicity and race is to reject culture
generally, and the attitude of post-MLK conservatives and Christians to
culture is evidence for that. I suppose the state of the humanities in
the nonracist nonsexist inclusive academy, the unwillingness to study
e.g. literature as something of intrinsic value, is further evidence.
The claim that such things are not transcendent enough is I think
almost always fraudulent. Aristotle says somewhere that one who lives
apart from society [and therefore without reference to social
stereotypes like ethnicity and race] would be a god [in Christian
terms, God's fool] or a beast. God's fools like Saint Francis aren't
that common.
I think the most common reason for rejecting the transcendent close to
home, like ethnicity, is the urge to reject the transcendent generally.
Wholly formal transcendents like equality are a way station.
Cons, neocons and Xians aren't beasts exactly. I suppose that shows
their views are incoherent or hypocritical, just as the liberals say.
Or maybe the modern world has added a third possibility to Aristotle's
two -- a machine -- and they are aspiring machines. The conservative
opportunity society is a world of machines.
> This is the first time I've seen anyone on the right suggest that
> antiracism is not a double standard, that there is a coherence to it.
The right doesn't take antiracism seriously enough. They want to say
it's just crazy. If that's true how come it's so gloriously successful
everywhere, and how come everyone just knows he can't say anything
against it because it's so absolutely fundamental to social morality?
> I don't know about that. I suspect if it does collapse it will be
> too late to restore any kind of recognizable white Western society
> continuous with the past.
There will be recognizable continuities I think but not continuity.
Certainly that will be true if we end up with a neo-Levantine society
rather than a public civic order.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Mon Sep 6 06:51:38 1999
Subject: Re: [Paleo] Re: Karl Popper
To: paleo@egroups.com
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 06:51:38 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <19990905220330.5697.qmail@hotmail.com> from "gray rider" at Sep 5, 99 10:03:29 pm
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> Christianity is, essentially, egalitarian (perhaps I should say,
> universalist).
Secularized Christianity is a this-worldly egalitarian and universalist
outlook. That's not true of transcendental (classical) Christianity.
The latter gives a way of making sense of egalitarian and universalist
intuitions without destroying a lot of other things by attempting to
legislate them.
Jim Kalb
From jk Wed Sep 8 07:20:09 1999
Subject: Re: anti white race or anti all races?
To: la
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 07:20:09 -0400 (EDT)
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> First, you feel that the antiracist campaign is (at least ultimately)
> directed at all races, not just whites. Second, you believe that
> even if the antiracist campaign is _at present_ directed against
> whites, because whites are at present the dominant group, after white
> dominance has ended all ethnicities would be equally disallowed under
> the antiracist regime, so there would be no reason for the
> antiracists to single out whites. Third, you believe that, even
> though the antiracists are sincere in opposing all ethnicity and are
> not just antiwhite, their ideology, because it violates basic human
> needs, will crash long before it succeeds in dispossesing the white
> race. Thus, either way you look at it, whether antiracism is
> directed at all races or whether antiracism must collapse of its own
> weight, the problem I envision--of an ongoing campaign to demonize
> whites even after they've lost power--will not occur.
Interesting issue that I've never thought about directly.
It's complicated. That antiracism is fundamentally directed at all
races -- at ethnicity as such -- may not be enough since even views
that are fundamentally universalistic and impersonal may have demon
figures especially in their vulgar forms. On the other hand, there are
a lot of whites to make demons of long term, and the well-being of the
system depends on their willing cooperation. I suppose they could all
be replaced with Chinese, but then everyone would hate the Chinese.
The Indonesians are fond of killing them, and others could learn to
like it too. Also, the Chinese seem to have too much self-respect to
make antiracism basic. The sort of antiracism that is interchangeable
with hatred of whites is the outlook of social parasites and the world
can't be run by parasites.
The purpose of creating a demon is to bring about unity through the
threat of one whom all view as an evil outsider. How long will the
image of the evil white racist serve to create unity among Chinese,
Africans, East Indians, etc.? Ethnic hatreds tend to be strong,
enduring and local. Will it be possible to get the Hutus and Tutsis to
stop murdering each other by telling them that the white man is their
real enemy? If it works for a little while, will it work decade after
decade? Also, evil white man => evil Jew. Think of the attitude of
black radicals. So specifically antiwhite forms of antiracism are
likely to see effective proponents turn into opponents at some point.
Neoconservatism may be only the beginning.
I suppose what I'm doing so far is questioning the adequacy of
antiwhite racism as a governing principle for the whole world. It
really does seem to me that something more principled would work better
in such a complicated setting. Federalist 10 lives!
Also, the interests and trends of thought I've identified as supporting
antiracism seem to me quite strong and they have no intrinsic
connection with antiwhite views. If you want an easily manageable
aggregation of interchangeable units graded only technologically then
Islam or Japanese ethnic feeling will be as objectionable as white
solidarity. That I suppose is basically what you call the second
reason.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From upstream-list-request@cycad.com Thu Sep 2 04:46:11 1999
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> This is the crux:
>
> "A 1200 SAT score from a student in Beverly Hills
> means something totally different than a 1200 from
> a student in a school in South Central Los Angeles,"
> says James Blackburn, director of admissions and
> records at California State University-Fullerton
>
> Does it indeed? If it does, then it should have significantly different
> predictive value. Does anyone have data to confirm or refute this
> claim (for SES)?
"Totally different" is no doubt too strong, but I thought Bayes'
theorem implied that the SCLA score was likely to overpredict
performance. On that line of thought it would be appropriate to
penalize strivers in the admissions process, for example by subtracting
a certain number of points from their SAT scores. To say someone is a
striver is to say his SAT is anomalous -- that is, to say it is less
reliable than most.
> one thing Strivers hasn't been able to escape is the race issue.
> Mr. Carnevale acknowledges that in terms of increasing minority
> representation in colleges, Strivers works best when race is one
> of the factors.
>
> "You can't get away from it," he says. "Race is still relevant."
>
> In other words, no matter how many factors like home background,
> school, etc. are taken into account, race still has independent
> explanatory power. Most interesting.
Yes, especially when things like neigborhood are taken into account
which are proxies for race.
Jim Kalb
---
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> Christianity is, essentially, egalitarian (perhaps I should say,
> universalist).
Secularized Christianity is a this-worldly egalitarian and universalist
outlook. That's not true of transcendental (classical) Christianity.
The latter gives a way of making sense of egalitarian and universalist
intuitions without destroying a lot of other things by attempting to
legislate them.
Jim Kalb
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From jk Thu Sep 9 07:14:24 1999
Subject: Re: a special, non-radio inquiry
To: sch
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 07:14:24 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BEF318.98161020@ha18s096.d.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 30, 99 06:50:37 pm
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> ARE THERE ANY PASSAGES FROM LITERATURE THAT YOU'VE ENCOUNTERED IN
> YOUR LIFETIME OF READING THAT SEEMED TO YOU ESPECIALLY EVOCATIVE OF
> THIS ALMOST-INEFFABLE REALM OF FELT MEANINGS, ESPECIALLY SUCCESSFUL
> IN CONVEYING TO THE READER THE NATURE OF THE "FELT EXPERIENCE" OF
> SOME MEANINGFUL EMOTIONAL-IMAGISTIC-IDEATIONAL SPACE THAT THE AUTHOR
> WAS ATTEMPTING TO EVOKE? If you would email to me any such passages,
> or information about any such passages, that you think are especially
> powerful in evoking/conveying/conjuring/communicating/delineating
> such felt experience of meaning, I would greatly appreciate it.
Some random thoughts, whether relevant or not I don't know:
1. The Bible, especially when read aloud in church, sometimes has an
almost hallucinatory effect on me, as if I were actually there. I'm
terrified of going to Good Friday services, for example, because they
involve congregational reading of the 22nd Psalm.
2. Hegel's _Phenomenology of the Spirit_ deals with the evolution of
felt reality and does it very well considering the near impossibility
of the task.
3. Emerson is good at vivid presentations of inward states most of us
would find difficult to describe, what it's like for things to be real
or not real, to touch us or not touch us. Read his essay on Experience
for example.
4. On your friend who visited Israel -- Kipling's _The Finest Story
Ever Told_ is good on the presence and reality of the past.
5. In a way, you're just asking what the best literature is. Or maybe
the best religious literature, the writings that touch us most
fundamentally?
From jk Sat Sep 11 22:38:21 1999
Subject: Re: emerson
To: schm
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 22:38:21 -0400 (EDT)
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> I'm not always sure whether he's telling us about the human condition
> as much as he thinks, or is telling us about his own particular
> structure (e.g. when discussing his [limited] grief about his dead
> son). It's useful, and I appreciate your bringing it to my
> attention.
Glad it's helpful. A couple of points:
1. Emerson thought the most personal was also the most universal. Say
what's true of you and it'll be true of everyone. His essay
Self-Reliance goes into that.
2. One way of looking at it is to say he's describing the soul of man
in Lockean society. To say everything is contractual is to say nothing
has an essential connection with anything else.
It's nice to read him though because he writes so wonderfully well.
Also because he's not afraid of saying shocking things.
Jim
From jk Mon Sep 13 21:40:20 1999
Subject: Re: various comments
To: Ka
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 21:40:20 -0400 (EDT)
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Hello!
> what is the difference between the classical notion of a Republic and
> the modern idea and practice of the Republic? Do you have any
> suggestions on readings which may be helpful?
I'm not sure what the modern idea of the Republic is. The word isn't
much used except in contrast to monarchy, and so doesn't convey much in
modern political life.
I think of the classical notion as a matter of constitutional
government, of a settled distribution of power among the various
institutions composing the government and among the classes of which
the political community is composed.
That's plainly at odds with democracy, in which at least ostensibly
there are no classes and power is in the hands of the majority. In
America an attempt is made to distribute power, for example between the
state and the individual and between the political branches and the
judiciary, but I don't think that achieves the same goal because
individual rights are simply what the judiciary says they are, and
there aren't any standards governing the power of the judiciary and
they don't represent anyone except by subterfuge. Since they don't
have an independent power base they in effect represent the same ruling
class that controls everything else. The courts don't recognize and
enforce rights that bother Bill Clinton, Bill Gates or the New York
Times.
I'm not sure what reading to recommend on the subject. I've just been
reading Plato's Laws, in which he contrasts a form like democracy or
oligarchy, in which a particular class rules, with a mixed constitution
in which the laws can rule because power is distributed among various
classes. Aristotle praises the mixed polity as well. On basic issues
the classics are always worth reading.
It seems to me the problem, by the way, is a religious one.
Constitutional government is possible only in a moral order superior to
all government, but current government rejects the transcendent and so
in the end recognizes no authority higher than itself. It makes a big
fuss about how it's limited in various ways but the greater the fuss
the less the substance.
> 2) Do you identify with the Traditionalist school of comparative
> religion, as exemplified by F. Schuon, R. Guenon, J. Evola and
> company? If not, in brief where do you part company with their ideas
> as a whole?
Not really. Comparative religion is all very interesting but at bottom
it's not something a man can live by and that's what politics has to be
based on. In honesty though I haven't read them as much as I should.
What I've read -- mostly Schuon -- seems very intelligent and
illuminating but not of fundamental importance. "Of fundamental
importance" is of course a very high standard but it's the standard
that applies in religion.
> 3) I noticed that you have published in Scorpion. I assume that you
> have some sympathy with the ideas of the European New Right. I find
> it curious that a similar strain of CR type thought has not taken
> root here in the US. Outside of Telos is there any other credible E.
> N. R. flavored journals or institutions?
Don't know of any. Chronicles has some connections with the ENR. I
don't think there's enough interest in ideas on the American right. Or
in America generally.
> The one thing that struck me was how spiritually arid and arrogant
> her books were, and I noticed that I was left feeling spiritually
> empty when contemplating her ideas.
I mostly noticed how bad she was as a novelist. What you say is true
as well.
> I was disgusted and dismayed to note that he lumps Carl Schmitt,
> Alain De Benoist, Michael Walker, and V. Pareto as Fascists.
It's outrageous. The New York Times goes on and on about how bad the
Swiss and whoever were because they weren't antinazi enough and then
boast about their connection to Walter Duranty in the full-page brag
sheet they published about the Pulitzer prizes. Actually it gets
worse. Any deviation at all, doubts about feminism or affirmative
action or whatver, means you favor hate, and everyone knows hate is
what leads to the Jasper and Matthew Shepard killings and for that
matter Auschwitz. It's so mindless.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From paleo-return-506-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Sep 20 11:49:35 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199909201245.IAA14500@panix.com>
To: paleo@egroups.com
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 08:45:10 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: from "Scottpost@aol.com" at Sep 18, 99 05:03:20 pm
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Scottpost@aol.com writes:
> But the nationalism localism dichotomy is clearly a seeming
> contradiction, or at least a wrinkle. I guess the fact that so many
> local nationalisms (Scots, etc) are thriving in the context of
> "Europe" is the same kind of thing. Also, Europeans who don't want
> to be bossed around by the United States might find the idea of
> "Europe" interesting as a cushion against US hegemony, the world
> market, etc. I think the real dichotomy is between people who feel
> that they are losing self-determination in the current context,
> versus those who don't care, don't mind, or in fact are enjoying a
> cultural hegemony they've never had before.
"Self-determination" can be puzzling because the "self" is complex. We
identify with a lot of different things. If Great Britain becomes less
important as a political unit I suppose it might help the
self-determination of a man living in York to the extent he identifies
himself as a Yorkshireman or European but not to the extent he
identifies with Britain.
It seems the overall goal of the Left has been to make people identify
themselves from one perspective as radically individual and from
another as simply human. Intermediate levels of identity -- race,
class, gender, family, etc. -- are to abolished as "hate" and anyway
irrational. The institutional goal is a single universal society
ordered solely by world markets and transnational bureaucracies,
preferably the latter. On this view left-wing multiculturalism is
tactical -- lesbian chicana identity is encouraged because giving it
influence equal to white male heterosexual identity helps destroy the
usability of race, class, gender etc. as social ordering principles and
so promotes the universal rational state.
The basic dichotomy is still be between Left and Right -- between those
who favor the proposed universal rational order and those who like
something more complex that they think better fits human nature. So on
this view nationalism is leftist to the extent it destroys more
parochial distinctions, rightist to the extent it defends the
particular against say mass immigration or GATT. Similarly,
regionalism might promote particularism or it might be a sort of
geographical multiculturalism the effect of which is to break down the
nation-states that are the main obstacle to the NWO. Depending on his
view of the tactical situation a rightist or leftist might take either
position on such things.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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From paleo-return-510-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Sep 20 17:10:58 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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In-Reply-To: from "T.E. Wilder" at Sep 20, 99 11:27:19 am
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T.E. Wilder writes:
> It seems to me that libertarianism and socialism operate with similar
> reductionist strategies, forming two sides of the same coin.
Agreed. The first likes the universal rational market and the second
the universal rational bureaucracy as the means for organizing the use
of available resources for fulfillment of desire that constitutes the
point of social life and indeed human life generally. The first
emphasizes efficiency and overall rationality (the same thing, really),
the second equality and rationality in individual cases.
There are of course paleolibertarians whose emphasis on minimal
government presumably has a different source. There may also for all I
know be offbeat socialists.
> I don't myself care for the term "intermediate level" because it
> suggests a schematism with the individual and humanity as the poles
> and everything else a gradation within the scheme, which accepts the
> polarity that is the essence of the libertarian/socialist paradigm.
OK. In order to find as much common ground as possible with random
interlocutors one falls into the habit of using the basic leftist
schema.
> For example, I would put in "peoples" (which are the true nations,
> not the states) beside family and gender and leave out the rest.
I'm happy to use "peoples" instead of race, which seems to be mostly a
biological concept used to debunk the notion of ethnicity. I agree
that class has lower ontological status than the ones you mention but
it's not nothing. I don't think these things can be definitively
listed. Platoon H, if that's how platoons are designated, might become
a grouping not simply reducible to its members.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From paleo-return-511-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Sep 20 17:11:16 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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In-Reply-To: from "michael smith" at Sep 20, 99 08:55:12 am
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> Globalization strikes at units and loyalties which stand in its way
> to greater power (nation, family, religion) and encourages those
> which clear the way for it (race, sex, sexual preference,
> "ethnicity").
I think the latter part is an illusion. The opposition to white male
heterosexual identity shows that the things you mention are not favored
as such. It seems to me they are favored only to the extent they
subvert established hegemonies -- that is, get rid of ethnicity,
gender, etc. as principles of social order.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From paleo-return-512-jk=panix.com@returns.egroups.com Mon Sep 20 23:28:46 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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> If we're going to get anywhere, then the idea of justification must
> be attacked.
This is puzzling. I agree that the idea everything can be derived from
luminously clear general premises, so that (for example) loyalty to the
moral traditions of a people is unnecessary, must be attacked. That
line of thought is a justification of particularist loyalties though.
It accepts the idea of justification.
In short I don't think simple irrationalism is going to get us
anywhere.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Sep 22 16:09:07 EDT 1999
Article: 14068 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
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Subject: Re: The military is the 4th branch of government
Date: 20 Sep 1999 08:46:45 -0400
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Napoleon Bonaparte writes:
> I am interested to hear comments on what everyone thinks is the
> proper role in society for the military. So please leave comments if
> you have any.
Depends on the society. For America today I suppose I would favor a
small professional force and larger reserves for defense and to
maintain a principle of honor. A large standing force like we have now
seems a bad idea. If we have one someone will find a use for it,
establish an empire or something. Also, a militarized society today
means a society in which centralized bureaucratic administration plays
a needlessly large role.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From upstream-list-request@cycad.com Mon Sep 27 04:39:53 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199909270835.EAA12211@panix.com>
Subject: Re: [Upstream] An exchange re Buchanan
To: jacobsk@anthro.umontreal.ca
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 04:35:47 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: issues@concentric.net, upstream-list@cycad.com
In-Reply-To: <37EEA476.C3949460@anthro.umontreal.ca> from "Ken Jacobs" at Sep 26, 99 06:55:50 pm
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> Is not the following [reproduced email] a gross breach of commonly
> accepted Netiquette?
I know people make a fuss about posting private email from a newsgroup
participant to the whole newsgroup, but I don't recall complaints about
posting email from a public figure to a member of the public to a
mailing list. The situations seem quite different to me.
---
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199909271538.LAA29767@panix.com>
Subject: Re: [Upstream] An exchange re Buchanan
To: jacobsk@anthro.umontreal.ca
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 11:38:25 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: issues@concentric.net, upstream-list@cycad.com
In-Reply-To: <37EF701D.2432F47A@anthro.umontreal.ca> from "Ken Jacobs" at Sep 27, 99 09:24:50 am
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> I can only speak from experience. On most of the 20-some lists I
> peruse regularly, posting a private message is summary grounds for
> being "unsubscribed." It matters not whether the other party is a
> "public figure." Private communications are sent with the expectation
> that they will remain private. It is but a small step from sending
> messages from "s/he, who is is a public figure" to the sending of
> "inadmissable in court" transcripts of overheard conversations
> involving a "public figure." As one article in the Sunday NYT has it,
> we were wrong to worry overmuch about Big Brother. Our faults and
> foibles already are out there for all to see, because we do a lousy
> job of regulating ourselves.
My experience is to the contrary. Disclosing private mail and
conversations often raises ethical issues but the kind of per se rule
you assert makes no sense to me and I don't think it is generally
accepted. Sometimes it's OK to disclose private conversations.
Sometimes it's even obligatory. And I thought public figures,
politicians and such, generally assume that what they tell people gets
out unless there's some special reason why the other person should keep
silence.
As to disclosing private email from a public figure to an email list
where the public figure has no connection to the list, it seems to me
no one on the list apart from the discloser is likely to be in a
position to determine that the situation require discretion. In the
specific case I can't see any reason why Lynn Samuels would have wanted
to maintain confidentiality. There might be some such reason of
course, but since it would be pure speculation on our part I can't see
making an issue of it.
The reference to Big Brother is an odd one. Random disclosures by
private persons I would think usually work against Big Brother.
---
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From upstream-list-request@cycad.com Mon Sep 27 14:50:26 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
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Subject: Re: Jim Kalb on: [Upstream] An exchange re Buchanan
To: jacobsk@anthro.umontreal.ca
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 14:47:06 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: issues@concentric.net, upstream-list@cycad.com
In-Reply-To: <37EFA7E1.7E9A5C6D@anthro.umontreal.ca> from "Ken Jacobs" at Sep 27, 99 01:23:07 pm
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> What is the meaning of "private/personal" communication when it
> thence may be sent along to hundreds/thousands of others who were not
> the intended recipients?
How private is private? How public public? To whom can something be
disclosed and under what circumstances? There are infinite gradations,
and I don't see the point of a flat rule "if it's email addressed to a
single person it can't be disclosed."
If I were a public person, a radio talk show host for example, and I
got an email note from someone I didn't know and responded to it I
would view that as somewhat in the nature of communicating with my
public. Unless the content or context made the message a personal one
I wouldn't be shocked if the recipient passed it on to an on-line forum
like this one. If the message was an explication of a position I had
taken on the air I'd be especially unshocked.
Suppose Prof. A said to his class "I ran into Eminent Theoretician B in
a bar and he told me he agreed with Weird Thinker C because blah blah
..." Has Prof. A acted unethically? Is it worse if it was email
instead of a barroom conversation. If it's the Upstream list rather
than a class? If it's Lynn Samuels and Pat Buchanan instead of Eminent
Theoretician B and Weird Thinker C? Why?
---
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From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Fri Oct 8 18:06:14 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910082203.SAA17570@panix.com>
Subject: Re: AIDs observations
To: tmcwhorter@earthlink.net (Tom McWhorter)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 18:03:33 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: class-69@Dartmouth.EDU, marthashop@email.msn.com,
jeanmac@cfw.com, jhammock@dttus.com
In-Reply-To: <37FE3C54.2A828605@earthlink.net> from "Tom McWhorter" at Oct 8, 99 02:47:48 pm
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[I haven't been reading most of these messages but ignorance never
stopped me from plunging in.]
Tom McWhorter writes:
> Based on what I know, the Macedonians/Greeks were never very family-
> oriented except as a way of insuring their bloodline. They had
> little, if any, compunction about multiple families (or at least
> multiple women) in multiple places.
They emphasized political life but I'm not sure what's meant by saying
they weren't very family-oriented. The family life described in Greek
literature is recognizable to us as normal family life with all the
feelings, loyalties etc. of our own family life, only more so. Home
and family were important to Odysseus. Aristotle made the household
the basis of society and spoke of husband and wife as natural friends.
Adultery was a crime on a par with murder and it caused the Trojan War.
There were things that could trump family loyalties -- e.g.
Agammemnon's sacrifice of Iphegenia -- but that didn't mean the latter
were weak. The House of Atreus had its problems but tepid family
feeling wasn't one of them.
I'm also puzzled by the reference to multiple women. Priam had many
wives but the Greeks were monogamous. They had stories idealizing the
couple growing old together in loyalty and love.
> If my reading of Plato and others is indicative, they viewed
> homosexuality as the purest form of love and viewed women as just a
> means of propagation.
Plato never approved of homosexual intercourse. In the Laws, in which
he sets forth how he thinks things should be organized if the communist
system discussed in the Republic is impossible, he treats homosexual
intercourse as a daring innovation against nature. He explicitly
disapproves of all sexual intercourse outside marriage and discusses
how to prevent it or at least make it rarer. And as suggested
depictions of relations between men and women in Greek literature don't
at all suggest the attitude you put forward.
> Likewise, though they valued family in terms of bloodlines, the
> Romans never had much morality regarding marital fidelity. Even
> before the empire, they apparently practiced "If you can't be with
> the one you love (and maybe even if you could be), love the one
> you're with."
I don't see why you say that about the Romans. They considered
marriage fundamental. Look at their funerary sculptures. The rich and
powerful often acted badly as at all times but that didn't mean they
weren't violating standards. If they hadn't been Augustus wouldn't
have tried to restore traditional sexual morality.
> To say that Roman lack of family values led to their downfall is like
> saying that the War in Vietnam was caused by the well-known sexual
> adventures of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
Jefferson's sexual adventures aren't so well-known, although it appears
that someone in his male line had at least one sexual adventure. I
agree however that the connection between sexual immorality and the
fall of the Roman Empire isn't obvious, at least to me. It does seem
to me that sexual immorality and republican government are
inconsistent. Licentiousness fits despotism better.
> I know less about the Spanish/Italian/Christian empire as you call
> it. Most of what I know relates to slaughter and torture in the name
> of God. There were a few other goodies like the expulsion of Jews
> from Spain, and the crusades where the Christians taught the Moslems
> the meaning of "Jihad".
This is pretty much equivalent to name calling. Ya faddah's got a
mustache. Ya muddah takes in laundry. There, I can do it too.
> How did introspection lead to America? I thought it was all about
> resistance to the dictates of a God-appointed tyrant.
It had more to do with resistance to the dictates of Parliament,
although the Declaration of Independence was cast in terms of
opposition to the King, I suppose because the colonists' legal position
was that their tie to Britain was through the King and not through a
Parliament that did not represent them. Divine right monarchy was not
the theory in Britain, certainly not in 1776.
> Our society is extraordinarily successful by almost any objective
> measure, economic, military, creativity, artistic, music, health,
> learning etc.
Musically and artistically? Odd. I of course agree that we live in a
time of extraordinary technological achievements.
> America is the first empire based primarily on voluntary acceptance
> of a culture rather than military domination.
The Hellenistic world is the closest equivalent I can think of.
Everyone wanted to imitate the Greeks. I do think thought that it
matters that we dominate the world militarily.
> The scary thing from my perspective is the resurgence of religeous
> intolerance.
How about other forms of intolerance? In modern times they've been far
more the problem. Scores of millions have been murdered by
antireligious ideologues who claim to be appalled by the 10 - 20
thousand killed by the Spanish Inquisition over the course of several
centuries.
The point is that any social order is based on fundamental assumptions
as to what the world is like, what man is, what good and bad are, etc.
Your point may be that the social order is likely to be more tolerant
if it's thought that such things are human choices or conventions. To
me it seems the contrary. If man makes morality then might makes
right.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
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From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Sun Oct 10 16:42:40 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910102040.QAA17349@panix.com>
Subject: Re: AIDs observations
To: class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 16:40:58 -0400 (EDT)
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Tom McWhorter writes:
> Again the issue of timing. Priam and Aggamemnon were a few hundred
> years before Alexander.
I agree timing is important. Strict monogamy would be more
characteristic of a republican or at least constitutional society,
loose sexual morals of an imperial and despotic one. My tastes run
more to the former.
Consider the implications of the absence of monogamy -- radical
inequality among men, since the rich and powerful get the women,
accentuation of inequalities between men and women, a domestic scene in
which settled duties and loyalties are replaced by self-seeking
wilfulness and scheming. These things do I think have political
implications.
> The Romans valued the family almost to an extreme, but mostly in
> terms of a dynastic concept.
Read the Aeneid. The continuity and position of the family over time
-- your "dynastic concept" -- was of course important to Aeneas,
although the gods had to nag him on the point, but his immediate
personal loyalties to particular members of his family were extremely
strong. He carried his father out of burning Troy on his shoulders and
ran around like a madman and almost got himself killed when he lost his
wife. I do think Greek and Roman funeral statuary are a clue to
attitudes.
I don't think it matters that Priam, Agamemnon and Aeneas were hundreds
of years before. We're not talking about history, we're talking about
literary depictions. I agree the Greek depictions preceded the age of
Alexander and the Roman one I mentioned was written at a time of
attempts to return to traditional morality that proved unsuccessful. I
also admit corrupt despotisms can last a long time.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
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From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Sun Oct 10 22:09:26 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910110205.WAA12057@panix.com>
Subject: Re: Intimidation
To: tmcwhorter@earthlink.net (Tom McWhorter)
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 22:05:22 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: bjltwl@sunlink.net, GunnardJ@carp.vno.osf.lt,
class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3800FE51.CEB24A11@earthlink.net> from "Tom McWhorter" at Oct 10, 99 05:00:01 pm
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Tom McWhorter writes:
> Salman Rushdi wrote "The Satanic Verses" which was viewed as
> sacreligeous. The Iranian religeous government ordered the faithful
> everywhere to kill Salman Rushdi in the name of God.
This may be a nit, but it wasn't an order from the Iranian government.
Someone asked Khomeini as an authority on Islamic law -- not as a
government official -- to issue a ruling (a "fatwa") on whether Rushdie
could be killed as an apostate. He issued one, in the affirmative.
The Iranian govt did back up the fatwa with a reward for a while.
On the overall point, in modern times those killed on account of
political ideology have vastly outnumbered those killed on account of
religion. Our own government embraced as an ally a regime that
murdered very large numbers of religious believers simply as believers,
because the regime thought religion retrograde.
> The Brooklyn Museum exhibited art that allegedly was offensive to the
> Virgin Mary. The Mayor of New York threatened to cease funding the
> museum. The Mayor was widely (though not universally) acclaimed for
> his action.
And some town exhibited a creche that allegedly was favorable to the
Virgin Mary and her relatives, and a court ordered town officials to
get rid of it.
> A teenager (whom I know) was expelled from a non-religeous private
> school on superficial charges after she professed to be "Wican".
And an eminent New England liberal arts college (which we all know)
gave a student a six-term suspension on superficial charges ("vexatious
verbal interchange") after he professed to be "conservative". Those
interested can read Jeffrey Hart's account at
http://www.dartreview.com/history/index.html
The point is that whatever people think is basic they'll try somehow to
enforce, sometimes brutally. I don't see why it will make people more
tolerant to say that what is basic is not religious but nonreligious.
On the latter view they have no one to answer to other than themselves.
That seems likely to make them *less* tolerant of the views of others.
> I meant that the repeated warnings about AIDs was apparently meant to
> frighten people into a set of morals rather than to save them from a
> disease.
The purpose of most AIDS education I know of is to promote acceptance
of the view that sexual activity and in particular homosexuality are
morally neutral technical issues. It's fine to do it, let's be open
and accepting about it, but use a condom.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
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From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Tue Oct 12 05:35:28 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910120931.FAA15586@panix.com>
Subject: Re: The purpose of AIDS education?
To: teda@eos.com (Ted Adams)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 05:31:37 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3802F36A.CFBBDF18@eos.com> from "Ted Adams" at Oct 12, 99 01:38:02 am
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Ted Adams writes:
> > Jim Kalb wrote
> >
> > The purpose of most AIDS education I know of is to promote
> > acceptance of the view that sexual activity and in particular
> > homosexuality are morally neutral technical issues. It's fine to
> > do it, let's be open and accepting about it, but use a condom.
>
> Jim's solution to AIDS appears to be to condemn the behaviors that
> lead to AIDS.
I must be able to say a lot in a few words, because the above is all
I've said on the subject.
Your language ("solution," "condemn the behaviors") suggests a sort of
technological approach. Define what you don't like, apply negative
reinforcement to inhibit it, and bingo! you've got the problem knocked.
That's obviously the wrong way or at least a grossly incomplete way to
think about human life and it's not what I would suggest at all. The
whole problem-solving way of thought breaks down when it comes to
something as pervasive and powerful as sex that's has more to do with
fundamental social orientations than schemes of reward and punishment.
I'll admit to some sympathy with T. McWhortle's comment on 17th c.
antimasturbation propaganda, which seems to have promoted the practice
by making it more prominent as a possibility. How people come to do
something is a complicated business. Social disapproval -- the feeling
that something is just something one doesn't do -- plays an important
role. So does does treating the rights and wrongs of something as
purely a technical matter. In the case of sex there is the strength of
the impulses and the variety of forms they can take. There is also the
overall understanding of what sex is and its place in life, which I
think is the most important point. People act in accordance with what
they think their world is like. If their world is one in which sex is
technique they'll act one way. If they think sex has a basic
connection to fundamental human relations and personal integrity
they'll act another. Stimulus/response is not the whole of life.
> Few societies overtly endorse promiscuity and yet illicit sex is
> present in all of them (and yes, I will concede that the level of
> illicit sex varies. My point is that it is omnipresent and that's
> where social diseases come from.)
Why should extirpation be the standard? Proponents of condom education
aren't required to claim it will eliminate unsafe sex, only that it
will reduce it. Why should fans of traditional morality be required to
guarantee perfection? An important point about AIDS, by the way, is
that it's rather hard to get. Moderate amounts of heterosexual fooling
around do not an epidemic make.
> But while saying, "Bad, bad, bad" to would be risk takers may make
> you feel better, it isn't likely to get people to modify their
> behavior.
As I said, stimulus/response isn't everything. Pretending it is may
make some people feel better because it creates the illusion that life
is manageable and they can do with it what they want if they're clever
enough. Basically, it means that life doesn't touch you. It isn't
likely to be effective in maintaining a tolerable social world though.
There's no avoiding the need for moral principle.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
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From news.panix.com!panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 15 20:39:46 EDT 1999
Article: 14093 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: Military coup in Pakistan
Date: 15 Oct 1999 20:39:15 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <7u2ndt$7iu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
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In <7u2ndt$7iu$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Napoleon Bonaparte writes:
>Counterrevolutionaries, is this not what we need in America? How much
>longer will we have to be ruled by our present
>egalitarian-totalitarian government? Where is the U.S. military?
Why expect the military to do anything beneficial? What do they know
about politics?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Tue Oct 19 05:10:57 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910190903.FAA28266@panix.com>
Subject: Re: Hard to believe
To: bjltwl@sunlink.net (The LightHouse)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 05:03:21 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: RICHARDSLK@aol.com, class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
In-Reply-To: <380BF37F.E70CBD62@sunlink.net> from "The LightHouse" at Oct 19, 99 00:28:47 am
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> > People are tortured, shot, & killed every day for their beliefs -
> > and this guy won't express his beliefs for FEAR OF BEING THOT
> > NAIVE?!!! Help me - WHAT am I missing here??!!
An interesting question. Why do people take so seriously things that
to an outsider seem not so serious? Why can't people just be
themselves? Are they all idiots?
One thought: if you're an academic you buy into academic ideals.
Coming to conclusions, making assertions, presenting arguments are what
you live by and you accept that whether you should be taken seriously
is determined by a professional outlook. So you take the collective
reactions of your colleagues very seriously. If you're not attuned to
that you won't be successful becoming an academic.
Academic ideals in America in 1999 are at odds with serious religious
commitment. There are lots of reasons for that. For one, the ideals
reflect the modern effort to understand the world in ways that advance
human control for human ends, and serious religious commitment is at
odds with that whole project. "It happened because God wanted it to
happen, and we should trust God" might be true, and it might be good
advice, but it doesn't go down well in scholarly circles today.
If that's right then serious personal religious commitment risks the
respect based on shared professional standards that's a big part of
what motivates academics. Trying to keep the two sides of life
separate is understandable. It's the kind of thing that turns into a
habit. Concealment is part of that response even if you and others
find anything less than forthrightness hard to understand.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
To unsubscribe send email to majordomo@dartmouth.edu
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From jk Mon Oct 18 17:45:00 1999
Subject: Re: Military coup in Pakistan
To: bo
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 17:45:00 -0400 (EDT)
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> I would like to know your thoughts on the coup in Pakistan and on
> military coups in general. It seems to me that this is what
> counterrevolutionaries should be looking for. What other hope do we
> have? Of course, I do not want coups on a regular basis; but the
> current egalitarian situation is long overdue for a major overhaul.
> Is a military government that bad? Can't we have a military
> government without having a police state at the same time? Given the
> current situation, I don't think changing a few laws or consitutional
> amendments here and there will do any good. At this point in time,
> can't all counterrevolutionaries agree that we need an entirely new
> government? And how else can we obtain that government?
I have no special thoughts on the coup in Pakistan because I haven't
been following the situation. My wife says the guy who got bounced was
a bad guy and that may be so. Also it obviously makes a difference
that the army has had a political role there for a long time.
In general, I don't see why the US army is the cure for what ails us.
In some countries there might be something special about the army that
makes it the bearer of some CR point of view and gives them credibility
with the public as a force that can legitimately act extralegally for
the public good but so far as I can tell that's not true here.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Tue Oct 19 05:03:21 1999
Subject: Re: Hard to believe
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 05:03:21 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
In-Reply-To: <380BF37F.E70CBD62@sunlink.net> from "The LightHouse" at Oct 19, 99 00:28:47 am
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> > People are tortured, shot, & killed every day for their beliefs -
> > and this guy won't express his beliefs for FEAR OF BEING THOT
> > NAIVE?!!! Help me - WHAT am I missing here??!!
An interesting question. Why do people take so seriously things that
to an outsider seem not so serious? Why can't people just be
themselves? Are they all idiots?
One thought: if you're an academic you buy into academic ideals.
Coming to conclusions, making assertions, presenting arguments are what
you live by and you accept that whether you should be taken seriously
is determined by a professional outlook. So you take the collective
reactions of your colleagues very seriously. If you're not attuned to
that you won't be successful becoming an academic.
Academic ideals in America in 1999 are at odds with serious religious
commitment. There are lots of reasons for that. For one, the ideals
reflect the modern effort to understand the world in ways that advance
human control for human ends, and serious religious commitment is at
odds with that whole project. "It happened because God wanted it to
happen, and we should trust God" might be true, and it might be good
advice, but it doesn't go down well in scholarly circles today.
If that's right then serious personal religious commitment risks the
respect based on shared professional standards that's a big part of
what motivates academics. Trying to keep the two sides of life
separate is understandable. It's the kind of thing that turns into a
habit. Concealment is part of that response even if you and others
find anything less than forthrightness hard to understand.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Wed Oct 20 05:08:07 1999
Subject: Re: Hard to believe
To: RI
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 05:08:07 -0400 (EDT)
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> How did I get to be 54 & not know that people who are professors at
> colleges and universities are all sheep?
It's a problem. Highly trained professionals who spend all their time
dealing with their colleagues naturally end up doing their job a lot
like their colleagues do it. That's what professors are, only their
job is thinking about issues, presenting arguments, coming to
conclusions. So the way they go about those things and therefore the
kinds of things they come up with is likely to be pretty uniform.
Intellectual life should not be in the hands of academics.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Wed Oct 20 14:36:55 1999
Subject: Re: the phrase "protecting our children"
To: la
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 14:36:55 -0400 (EDT)
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It's an odd point of usage. Unless you're a strict individualist "our
children" makes some sense. As you've pointed out, though, leftist
usage now determines connotation. If you say "the explanation of X is
simple bigotry" you're just being confusing unless you're blaming X on
white heterosexual males.
Most of those who say "our children" would be repelled by a patriarchal
and racist reference to "our fathers" or a sexist reference to "our
wives and daughters." So I can understand thinking that using the
phrase "our children" as something to be taken for granted supports bad
things. The "our" seems to be understood collectively whereas in "our
wives and daughters" it's understood distributively. "Our fathers" I
suppose is a mixture.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Sun Oct 24 05:34:45 1999
Subject: Re: transcendence
To: la
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 05:34:45 -0400 (EDT)
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> The Republicans never made the larger case, that the president by his
> very behavior had disqualified himself from the Presidency, because
> the Presidency is inherently an office that involves respect, honor,
> and symbolism. The Presidency has a transcendent function that
> cannot be reduced to legalities.
A good example. People made comments, stressing the Oval Office
connection for example, that showed they felt the issue but it was hard
for them to articulate it effectively esp. in connection with a legal
proceeding.
One point -- this is an example of social or relative transcendence not
of the absolute transcendence of the just over the pleasant or God over
the world. It seems to me you need the latter to preserve the former.
I think of fascism and nazism as attempts to keep the former without
the latter. Protestant extemists, anabaptists or whoever, try to have
the latter without the former.
> The above is a good illustration of the inability of Plato's
> Oligarchic Man (the Republicans) to stop the decadence of
> Democratic/Tyrannical Man because Oligarchic Man has no higher truth,
> he only has a utilitarian truth: you have to obey the law in order
> for individuals and society to function well.
It seems to show the utter disappearance of the timocratic principle
which until now had been present at least vestigially.
In Plato's progression from best to worse the transcendent becomes
steadily less transcendent and then disappears altogether. For
tyrannic man there is only impulse with no order at all except that
imposed by impulse itself, that of obsession. For democratic man the
ideal of a balance among pleasures somewhat transcends the pleasures
themselves. For oligarchic man money provides a transcendent objective
measure with respect to the other things of the world. For timocratic
man the transcendent objective measure becomes more substantive instead
of being purely abstract and lacking in a nature of its own like money.
And for aristocratic or kingly or republican man (whatever you call
him) the transcendent objective measure because self-sufficient and the
source of all things and so no longer dependent on social recognition
or definition.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Sun Oct 24 05:51:35 1999
Subject: Re: Jim Kalb: antiracism
To: la
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 05:51:35 -0400 (EDT)
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To drop a name, Aristotle says that the occasion of a revolution is
usually something trivial but the causes always go deep. It seems to
me that the civil rights movement etc. were occasions and not
explanations for the transformation we've seen.
Also, there was a "white Australia" policy until the early 70s, wasn't
there? To me the question seems to be what the understandings were
that made Hitler, Bull Connor, Colonel Blimp, MLK etc. such powerful
symbols and why opposition become conceptually impossible.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Mon Oct 25 20:19:45 1999
Subject: Re: appreciations
To: ao
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 20:19:45 -0400 (EDT)
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Thanks so much for your note. It takes a lot of work to lay out ideas
that aren't already part of the usual discussion, and I'm glad when I
hear the effort benefits someone other than myself.
> Thanks to you I've now read Confucius and friends and many of the
> Icelandic sagas (there's that recent five-volume set (by Leif
> Eiriksson Press, maybe?) which I love).
Didn't know of the 5 volume set. I mostly read penguins. All the
ancient Chinese writers are worth reading. Chuangtse makes fun of
Confucius but obviously admires him. Even the Legalists, Han Fe Tzu or
whoever, are eye-openers.
> Further yet, you've articulated ideas which I was wrestling with in
> junior high as I struggled to climb up out of the mire of liberalism
Most of what I write is an attempt to free myself of something.
> One thing which interests me has been your religious development; in
> the early nineties you described your religious beliefs as vague and
> denied allegiance to a church, whereas later you mention being
> involved with an ECUSA parish, and describe yourself as a
> non-Catholic sliding towards Catholicism. (Apologies if my
> reconstructed history is off.)
>
> If you don't mind my asking, where are you now, and how did you get
> there?
You *do* keep track of things, don't you? Your history is accurate
enough.
I'm still a member of an ECUSA parish, kept there mostly by personal
connections and admiration for some of the people there. Otherwise I
suppose I'd be exploring the Roman church.
What prompted the turn toward something more definite than where I was
in the early '90s was a combination of something in my personal life --
an experience rather like getting run over by roadmaking machinery for
6 months -- and philosophical developments, thoughts about what was
needed to make sense of words like "good" and "true."
Man is a social animal, language and objectivity concepts are social,
in order for the concepts to be valid and authoritative there has to be
a valid and authoritative society, which requires one with an essential
connection to something that transcends all human society. Also,
"good" seems necessarily connected with purpose and purpose requires a
person whose purpose it is.
So the effect is you need a concretely identifiable church oriented
toward a personal deity, and for the personal deity to be concretely
present in the world and so useable it seems you need the doctines of
Creation and Incarnation. Some sort of high doctrine of the Eucharist
helps too. Without all that stuff the world falls apart. Since the
world seems in fact to be a cosmos, we couldn't know it or talk about
it if it weren't, all that stuff must be true. Or such is the line of
thought.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Tue Oct 26 17:17:28 1999
Subject: Re: appreciations
To: mc
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 17:17:28 -0400 (EDT)
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> But does this mean that people before the Incarnation couldn't really
> figure out what's going on? Could they have anticipated the
> Incarnation by this reasoning in reverse? It seems to me that much
> of the _philosophical_ consequence of the Incarnation in this
> epistemological setting is already yours as soon as you grant a God
> who can act within the world (form a people, set commandments, and so
> on): a God who can love Jacob and hate Esau, who though being
> sovereign over all creation yet has a personal name.
It seems to me the need for the Incarnation to maintain God's concrete
presence in the world and therefore his reality for us becomes greater
as civilization develops from the less differentiated cosmological
civilization of say Sumer to the universal secular legal order of Rome
and for that matter the modern world. Without Christ, the Church and
the mass God evaporates as civilization develops.
Also -- God can love Jacob and hate Esau only if in addition to being
all else that he is he is somehow a particular person doing particular
things in the world. To have a name and hate A and love B is to be
just that. In other words there must be an incarnation of some sort.
So the philosophical question is what sort of incarnation is needed for
adequacy and stability. It seems to me incarnation in the form of a
particular man who lived, died and rose again works better than in the
form of sporadic intervention combined with a written code of law as in
Judaism and Islam.
> A friend of mine, who is leaving Wittenburg for Rome upon the signing
> of the Joint Declaration on Justification between the RCs and the LWF
> the eve of All Saints, has offered reasoning broadly similar to yours
> in favour of the necessity of an authoritative, concretely
> identifiable church
> (http://pages.hotbot.com/books/krehbiel/Why.html).
Will have to take a look.
> Oh, and now that I've finally gotten around to writing to you, I can
> ask a question that's been on my mind forever. Someone whose post
> you were responding to once had an incomprehensible acronym at the
> end of it: you offered your own, and mentioned that you'd explain
> yours if he would his.
>
> Do tell. :-)
I have a vague recollection of some such situation but alas don't
remember the acronym.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Wed Oct 27 13:46:11 1999
Subject: Klan rally
To: letters@nypost.com
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 13:46:11 -0400 (EDT)
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To the Editor of the Post:
I thought your coverage of events at the Klan rally ("Hatemonger Takes
it in the Face," "Counter-Punch Punishes Klan," "Pleased as Punch over
KKKlobber") was an outrageous glorification of the kind of left-wing
political violence that has claimed 100,000,000 lives in this century.
With 6,000 on one side, 17 on the other, and a major newspaper
supporting violence by the 6,000, I will draw my own conclusions where
the dangers lie.
How is it possible for you not to see what you are doing?
Sincerely,
James Kalb
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon Oct 18 05:39:41 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: outrun theology
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <28329992@donner.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at
Oct 17, 99 09:05:10 pm
Status: RO
> I think you can live a Christian life, a life above reproach, and die
> with full confidence of your salvation without ever navigating a
> single sticky theological question.
> I think Jesus made it this way on purpose, so that even a child could
> be a Christian, especially a child whose faith hadn't yet been
> corrupted out of its childlikeness.
People do in fact think about things though and it's hard to avoid
doing so. We live in the world, and other people make objections,
raise questions and so on. And when issues come up they have to be
dealt with. It seems wrong to make a principle of staying ignorant and
stupid. We can't help but develop an idea of what the world's like,
how it all fits together, what's important and what's less so.
Doesn't it seem obvious that it matters how the various Christological
issues come out, whether Christ is fully God and fully man and so on?
Such things show God's relation to the created world, which among other
things has very important ethical implications. A child hasn't thought
much about the matter but there will always be some men who can't avoid
doing so and it's important how the issues come out because we act on
our understandings of things.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon Oct 18 17:39:17 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: outrun theology
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <28340064@donner.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at
Oct 18, 99 07:09:07 am
Status: RO
> Until we get this right, and it's not as easy as it may seem, I would
> say we don't really have much business nit-picking the finer points
> of understanding. Unless we absolutely cannot act without a given
> understanding clarified for us, I would say that such an
> understanding was less than essential.
Acting in the world can include thinking though. Part of what makes
the social world what it is and so part of what causes things to happen
is what people think about things. Healthy social life therefore
requires healthy theology. For that reason even dumb issues should be
dealt with once they've become issues. Part of what guides the actions
of the Church is the members' understanding what God, Christ, Creation
etc. are. So theorizing is no less practical Christian work than say
draining malarial swamps. (I'm assuming your theological views don't
view draining malarial swamps as speciesist and ecocidal.)
I agree you can pursue theology in all sorts of bad ways, say as an
attempt to master God or make it all something that doesn't touch you
personally. You can do everything in a bad way though. There are
people who fast and pray and feed the hungry in an evil way.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon Oct 18 20:23:50 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Clarification
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at Oct 18, 99 10:41:58 pm
Status: RO
Francesca writes:
> > requires healthy theology. For that reason even dumb issues should
> > be dealt with once they've become issues.
>
> Are you using 'dumb' in the American vernacular sense of the term,
> stoopid, or literally, in which case you mean it metaphorically,
> silent issues?
Interesting question. More interesting than what I said. I meant
"stoopid," but I suppose silent -- I would say "implicit" -- issues
should be dealt with as well if they're behind what people do.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Tue Oct 19 03:58:50 1999
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Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 03:57:59 -0400
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: outrun theology
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <28381191@donner.Dartmouth.EDU> from "Gregory D. Wadlinger" at
Oct 18, 99 09:40:19 pm
Status: RO
> In this forum issues matter, yet the childlikeness of faith that
> Christ commends falls by the way.
Thinking about what's involved in an immediate grasp of something, and
trying to put it all in a form that can be argued, does seem to get in
the way of the immediate grasp. Wholehearted devotion and analysis
don't go together easily. So I agree there's a problem. It's a
problem not everyone can always avoid.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From owner-class-69@Dartmouth.EDU Fri Oct 29 08:18:48 1999
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From: Jim Kalb
Message-Id: <199910291216.IAA01766@panix.com>
Subject: Re: As the political debate begins
To: tmcwhorter@earthlink.net (Tom McWhorter)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 08:16:57 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: class-69@Dartmouth.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3818C824.A378A8C1@earthlink.net> from "Tom McWhorter" at Oct 28, 99 06:03:16 pm
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Status: RO
> I would like to invite all to critique. Chop away! How should this
> group interact? Why have so few participated?
Comments:
1. I like people to say what they think directly. I also like your
Darwinian analogy for tossing out arguments and see if they survive.
Not everyone is happy with that kind of thing though.
2. There's something about the medium that promotes bad feelings.
There's very little personal contact. You can't see the guy you're
talking to, just some quickly chosen words that you object to probably
on all sorts of levels, so it's hard to avoid sticking in digs,
constructing a caricature of who you're arguing with, etc. Same's true
on the other side.
3. Judging by the letters columns in newspapers etc. people in America
in 1999 don't have serious discussions, they aren't used to considering
objections to their views, and they have a lot of hot buttons that they
expect other people to share.
4. It pays to look over what you write before sending it and take out
as much of the inflammatory language and personal digs as you can bear
to give up. If you want to be provocative people will get annoyed
enough at the substance.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
To unsubscribe send email to majordomo@dartmouth.edu
with unsubscribe class-69 as the body of the message.
From jk Tue Sep 28 07:50:41 1999
Subject: Re: all is artificial
To: la
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 07:50:41 -0400 (EDT)
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Status: RO
> Omnisexual One-World Government. Sounds appealing, doesn't it?
Interesting you posted this just before the European Court of Human
Rights decision on homosexuals in the military.
No-one makes an issue of Talbott's views because principles that lead
to limitless radicalism are already established as "mainstream".
Liberalism has a bad conscience with respect to the radical left. That
means that democracy must recognize the truth in tyranny. Plato says
the principle of democracy is treating desires equally and maintaining
a sort of balance among them. To treat desires equally, though, you
have to let each be what it really is -- lust must be pure unrestrained
lust, rage pure unrestrained rage, etc. Otherwise the democratic
pretensions are a hypocritical sham, a violation of human rights.
The Divine Marquis lives!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Thu Oct 7 06:33:12 1999
Subject: Re: Gaze at the gorgeous guts of computers and sliced cows
To: la
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 06:33:12 -0400 (EDT)
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Status: RO
> If you've ever seen the iMac, you will see it is the computer
> equivalent of the current "Sensation" exhibit. Displaying computer
> parts through a transparent outer skin, or displaying internal body
> parts of humans and animals. (What could be more expressive of our
> culture than a computer company that uses as its logo a half eaten
> piece of food?)
>
> iMAC CLEARS UP ITS ACT
> Yesterday Steve Jobs announced interesting new iMacs with DVD,
> Firewire and other fabulous features. These stylish new systems are
> also more see-through than ever. Gaze at the gorgeous guts and take a
> look inside with Mac OS Guide William Bailey.
"Gorgeous guts" is certainly a revolting phrase. Have journalists
always fancied themselves stylists, or is that just what they teach
them in school now?
I suppose what's going on is a fascination with mechanism and what lies
behind the presentation, which is what is thought real. That no doubt
makes sense in the case of an iMac. In the case of human beings it
denies the soul and things that depend on it like the good, beautiful
and true.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "If the treasonous
(hence alien), childish, mentally ill felon in the White House gets nuclear
weapons to play with, why can't the rest of us who happen to be aliens,
children, mentally ill or felons possess assault rifles?"
From jk Sat Oct 16 08:07:31 1999
Subject: Re: It happens
To: la
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 08:07:31 -0400 (EDT)
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Status: RO
> ``It's nothing I haven't tried a couple of times before, except this
> time, I won,'' Bromell said.
>
> Since producers felt strongly that the word was important for
> artistic truthfulness, CBS chose to support them, spokesman Chris
> Ender said.
>
> ``Clearly this is not something happening on a weekly basis,'' he
> said. ``This is an isolated incident. It's not a sign or a signal
> that CBS is loosening its standards.''
How long has it been that large institutions have had designated
spokesmen? Dartmouth College now has a whole building (a large frame
house) for its PR team.
It does seem to take a special sort of person to do the job. "It's
just this once, and only for special high-minded reasons." That not
what Bromell seems to think.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
From jk Mon Oct 18 05:41:58 1999
Subject: Re: note on the previous
To: la
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 05:41:58 -0400 (EDT)
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Status: RO
> The previous e-mail provides comical support to your thesis that,
> even though all the group identities (other than the white) seem to
> be increasing rather than decreasing, which puts into question
> whether the dominant antiracist ideology is what it claims be,
> nevertheless larger homogenizing forces are at work dissolving those
> group identities as well.
Actually I think that other group identities are being washed out as
well except emblematically, like the "Tommy" on a Tommy Hilfiger shirt
or the greens and blues in Byzantium.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Whilst we are
waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes." (Emerson)
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.