Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Sep 25 20:16:43 EDT 1995
Article: 5882 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 25 Sep 1995 20:16:37 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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hermann@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu (MILTON JOHN KLEIM, JR.) writes:
>"Democracy...the supposed foundation of the perfected People's state,
>is...only a mask behind which the...international plutocracy conceals
>itself" [ ... ] Plato's descriptions of democracy foreshadow America's
>present wallowing in a peculiar form of that socio-political scheme.
Plato thought democracy conflicted with the interests of the rich and
ended when a demagogue, putting himself forward as the defender of the
people against the machinations of the rich, established a tyranny. I
think he would have considered the regime that succeeded Weimar a
tyranny, established (as the rhetoric of the quote suggests) in the
usual manner.
>While Machiavelli dealt with a single individual, a "prince," in modern
>times the "prince" has been superseded by a virtual living _entity_,
>with enormous, terrific power, power undreamt by rulers of
>Machiavelli's day.
It would help to say more about the nature of the entity. You give more
bits and pieces later, but maybe not enough to make your view on this
point clear to most people.
>The choice is between the malevolent Tyranny of Money, and the
>aforementioned ends it seeks, or a benevolent authoritarian regime
>that will restore justice, true progress, and true prosperity to this
>once-great Nation.
It sounds like all power is to be in the hands of someone who claims to
be the protector of the people against the rich. That's the classic
recipe for tyranny. The problem is what the tyrant will do when in
power. Plato was pessimistic on the point, I suppose because of the
spiritual level of the society in which the tyrant rises to power and
the means he will employ to beat out the opposition.
>The leaders are those men and women of courage and honor who dare speak
>out against "popular opinion" at the expense of personal prestige and
>opportunity and in the face of the State's "iron heel."
Why are people like that going to be the ones who are going to win among
a corrupted people in a situation of political and moral chaos?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Sep 29 09:09:32 EDT 1995
Article: 5928 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 29 Sep 1995 09:08:47 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <458713049wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>> Applied democratic theory fails because
>> it is based upon false premises: that all humans are equal, which they are not;
>> that all humans are rational, which they are not; that all humans are wise,
>> which they are not; and that all humans are virtuous, which they are not.
>All systems of government must
>either assume that the people in the arbitrarily selected ruling group are rational,
>wise, and virtuous, when they are not, or suppose that their right to rule is unaffected
>by such considerations.
Not all systems of government operate by selecting a ruling group and
defining whatever that group chooses to do as good. I think the
objection is that in practice democracy tends to do that more than
other forms or ideals of government.
The issue partly depends on what democracy is and what it is being
compared to. If "democracy" means "a government in which the ultimate
principle is the current will of the majority" (my guess is that that's
what Mr. Kleim has in mind) and it's being compared to a government in
which the common understanding on which the legitimacy of the
government rests is something like protecting property rights,
maximizing utility, doing God's will, or protecting and promoting the
complex of things that the community recognizes as good as determined
over time by some process in which different parts of the community
participate in different manners, it seems you can't dispose of the
issue by saying "well, those other governments give powers to
non-majorities so they can't be as good as a democracy because why
should the people in the non-majorities be more wise and virtuous than
the majority".
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 1 05:45:50 EDT 1995
Article: 5936 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 30 Sep 1995 12:08:39 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Or more abstractly, let us simply say that applied democratic theory (a
>series of authority arguments) breaks down when practiced (because
>government in practice is the application of power principles). Or even
>more simply, theory is not practice, so that the truth or untruth of
>theory has nothing to do with the breakdown of theory "in practice"
>unless the theory is about a practice (rather than the authority for
>the practice).
I got rather lost in this, so maybe I should start by clarifying the
thought that lay behind my comment.
One might be a "democrat" because he accepts either of two
propositions: (1) the goal of government is giving the people whatever
they happen to want, so the best government is that government that
gives the people the power to choose and get whatever they want most
directly and surely, or (2) the goal of government, which is not
identical with giving anybody what he happens to want, is best promoted
or safeguarded by giving certain powers to the people. I think the
latter proposition is right and the former is wrong. The latter,
however, doesn't make democracy the measure of all things and it would
be very surprising if it supported democracy in all cases. Therefore,
in 1995 America it is understood to be an antidemocratic principle.
It seems to me that the principle people accept as underwriting the
legitimacy of their government is important and has a pervasive effect
on events. Your comment that government in practice is the application
of power principles may suggest that you disagree and believe that the
ultimate political issue is indeed who whom. On the other hand, it may
not because I don't understand what you said.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 1 12:46:06 EDT 1995
Article: 5944 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 1 Oct 1995 07:41:39 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>My point is that the operation of government is the operation of
>government, and that a system's representations of itself to itself and
>to the public are literature -- a thing entirely apart from the
>practical business of governing.
I don't see how to separate what people understand they are doing from
what they are doing. Self-deception and hypocrisy of course exist, but
why take them as models of what it is to understand oneself as doing
something?
>Are the theoretical self representations of those governments key to
>understanding them? Yes, but totally unsuitable for your own
>classifications; you don't adopt their terms and contexts and reach an
>independent analysis (remember the atrocity of "Democratic People's
>Republics" -- and who accepted them as such, besides Bertolt Brecht?).
Why should the guiding ideal of a government be totally unsuitable to
classifying it? It's an essential feature and we classify things in
accordance with essential features. As to DPRs, you suggest that their
theoretical self-representation was merely hypocrisy, rising to the
level of self-deception in the case of a few people who fancied
themselves realists but whose real talent was for making things up. I
won't dispute the point, but only repeat that it's perverse to take such
instances as a model of theoretical self-representation.
>So, with regard to Kleim's discovery of a disparity between theory and
>practice among democrats, let me be the first to note the difference
>between landscape painting and horticulture.
You can't at all understand what horticulturalists are doing without
reference to esthetic ideals, and you can rationally classify them by
reference to such ideals.
>BTW, are there really democratic theory and theorists in the same way
>that there are Marxists and Marxism?
Are there really writers of prose in the same way there are poets?
There are far more of them, so many that the activity tends to be taken
for granted and overlooked. To the extent something becomes
sufficiently distinct to be noticeable it's called something else since
acceptance of and even devotion to democracy is presupposed. Liberal
theorists like John Rawls for example are democratic theorists. As
theoreticians they tend to put the fundamental democratic outlook in as
general terms as possible, so that it becomes something like "everyone
should get his own way as much and as equally as possible", rather than
tying it to particular arrangements for governing like rule by majority
vote. Part of the reason for doing so is that on close examination the
equation of rule by majority vote and rule by the people runs into
problems (e.g., Arrow's theorem). Other theorists worry about ways to
promote individual equality, institutionalize participatory or strong
democracy, and so on. Committed democrats one and all.
Incidentally, these more theoretical treatments of democracy bring out
the point of Mr. Kleim's comment more clearly than the traditional man-
in-the-street view that democracy is mostly a matter of rule by majority
vote. What these treatments are based on is denial of the distinction
between what people want and what is good, a denial equivalent to the
view that what everyone wants is good.
>Read almost any state constitution. The 1948 NJ constitution recognizes
>only two polities: the state itself and an atomized, mass society of
>millions. No counties, no cities.
Sounds democratic. No breaks at all in the transmission of power.
>And the legislative part of this is to be conducted by a miniscule
>number of men, relative to the population "represented."
Luckily we have pollsters.
>With regard to your point, I think that the population legitimizes
>democracy vis a vis its (assumed) purpose of delivering power to the
>people
That's the traditional legitimation. As experience shows, though,
attempts to deliver power as directly as possible to the people by
giving unlimited power to a single set of elected officials who read the
polls doesn't produce a government that people like. The response so
far has been to return to basic principles and say "what we're really
after is not government by voting majority but enabling everyone equally
to do what he happens to feel like doing to the maximum extent
possible". That response leads to the welfare/civil rights state, and
if you went back to grammar school you'd find them saying a lot more
about equality and individual rights than about popular sovereignty, a
conception that now suggests militias and the like.
Now it turns out people complain about the civil rights/welfare state
too. The fact people aren't happy doesn't mean no one tried to please
them, it just shows that life is difficult, especially when you start
with a view (that the good and the desired are identical) that is
insupportable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Oct 2 06:54:44 EDT 1995
Article: 5954 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 1 Oct 1995 17:52:03 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 28
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rafael cardenas writes:
>The argument for democracy, to repeat, does not rest on any supposed
>superior virtue of the demos or the democrats, but on the principle
>that 'quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur'.
No system of government can rest on the principle that the approval of
each person must be obtained for everything that touches him.
Therefore democracy like other systems requires a particular conception
of the good; it can't be neutral, leaving the matter up to each man.
The conception democracy seems to choose is that the good is the same
as the desired, counting the desires of each person equally and
aggregating them arithmetically. (If I'm wrong on that point I'm not
sure why majority rule is considered as in itself a moral issue rather
than for example a useful device for some other purpose.) On such a
conception the demos by definition has superior virtue because what it
wills is the greatest good.
Democracy as a political theory can't be compared with oligarchy or
monarchy, since it typically holds that it is morally wrong in itself
for someone other than the demos to rule, a claim usually not made by
oligarchs or monarchists who typically justify their systems on the
ground that they promote some end other than giving power to the
particular people they give power to.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Oct 3 16:15:13 EDT 1995
Article: 5968 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: "American Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 2 Oct 1995 08:38:37 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>The Saudis published a notice on their national day last week that
>beautifully interpreted their government to the world -- and I lost the
>clipping, which I would like to have posted here. I lived in Riyadh for
>five years.
Can you give us a hint what it said?
>I wonder if (1) you yourself are labeling them democrats (2) if they
>refer to themselves as democrats per se (3) if they mean anything like
>the same thing by democrat (those self-describing democrats) (4) if a
>review of their materials wouldn't show them to have all sorts of
>monumental cross purposes and incompatibilities.
Any man who theorizes about politics reconstructs the meaning of
political terms somewhat, does some relabeling, accuses A of confusion,
B of self-deception and C of illegitimate rhetoric, and so on. All I
claim is that a good theory makes sense of and validates within limits
most of what most people say about their goals and ideals when they are
speaking soberly and carefully. Sweeping cynicism is erroneous; in
order to coordinate and make sense of their own actions, and coordinate
them with those of others, men need a great deal of honesty.
My own theory of democracy is the one I see in Plato's _Republic_, that
it's what you find when the good is held to be the same as the desired.
Since all desires are equally desires it follows they are all equally
good, and since they are all equally good they should all be equally
free and unhindered. Therefore democrats take equality and freedom as
their ultimate moral principles and decide disputes in accordance with
the greater weight of desires, normally by majority vote. Naturally,
conflicts arise within such a view (e.g., among freedom, equality and
majority rule) and those in basic sympathy with it conceptualize it
variously.
>Perhaps there are "naive" (Romantic, emotional) democrats, as well. If
>so, then I will stick to my point that there are not democratic
>theorists in the way that there are Marxist theorists.
Mainstream liberal academic political philosophers are democratic
theorists who are no less scientific than the Marxists. At least I
classify them as such. If by "democrat" you mean "person who believes
in majority rule as the ultimate political principle" you may be right.
>(Palindrome of the week: No dirt: I'm Dimitri, Don!)
Close!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Oct 4 17:27:54 EDT 1995
Article: 5979 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Effect of OJ Verdict?
Date: 4 Oct 1995 06:59:49 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References:
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In Thomas Woods writes:
> What do you folks think will happen? It is possible that whites
>may at last grow disillusioned with the elites who have dismissed as
>crackpots anyone who has suggested that multiracial societies might be
>unworkable.
You can try to explain the verdict away, maybe on the grounds that it's
really a verdict on the LAPD or that what it shows is that anyone with
$10 million to spend on lawyers can kill whoever he wants and get off.
It took more than 3 hours to spring Klaus von Buelow and the Menendez
boys, though. It's the briefness of the deliberations that to me seems
most bothersome.
I think it will have some effect on how people think. People have been
too absorbed in the trial to shrug it off altogether. The effect will
be unconscious for most people and visible only at the margins, but it
will be there. Those effects matter, since our current situtation is
hardly stable. PC and the rest of it are signs of a market top.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From jk Fri Sep 22 05:52:04 1995
Subject: Re: atheism
To: leo-strauss@freelance.com
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 05:52:04 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <35c.512.124@freelance.com> from "ssorens@acad.udallas.edu" at Sep 21, 95 10:19:33 pm
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Steve Sorensen writes:
> The Enlightenment is not simply the use of reason to understand the world.
> It is the popularization of philosophy on the basis of the assumption a
> truly rational society is possible because the differences in intellectual
> capacity can be overcome by new methodologies.
In the background of some of the discussion seems to be the view that
while a truly rational society is not a possibility a truly rational
man is, and in fact such men exist. The truly rational men live by the
independent powers of their own thought and therefore can dispense at
least for themselves with false beliefs of the many such as theism and
revelation.
Is my understanding correct? Do the participants in the discussion or
some of them believe that they in fact live by the independent powers
of their own thought? That would seem a large claim, which is OK but
it is useful to know what claims lie behind what is said. If not, it
seems that the participants are willing to take some things on faith
but it is unclear to me what the justification of doing so would be for
them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From jk Sat Sep 23 00:01:32 1995
Subject: Re: atheism
To: leo-strauss@freelance.com
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 00:01:32 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <35c.518.124@freelance.com> from "PEHME@delphi.com" at Sep 22, 95 07:30:50 pm
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Kalev Pehme writes:
> Thus, we cannot expect to be able to set
> up a so-called "rational society" in the way that I believe Mr. Kalb means. In
> other words, we cannot expect to have any kind of collective life where
> everyone is a philosopher.
It appears from this that if everyone were a philosopher then a
rational society could be established. Nonetheless,
> error, ignorance, difficulty, obscurity, and so on are an
> essential part of thinking human life. But I am reminded that Socrates defines
> his wisdom as knowledge of his ignorance. To the extent that an human being
> knows his ignorance is the extent that he will dispense with "false
> beliefs"--false certitude--etc..
Is what is left over after all but knowledge is dispensed with
sufficient to establish a rational society, or a society of any sort?
Is it even sufficient to enable an individual philosopher to carry on
his life, or do actual philosophers have to trust in something other
than knowledge?
> As for the problem of faith, I have repeatedly noted here and elsewhere that
> faith is a form of ignorance by its very definition.
>
> Socrates, as a philosopher, is a faithless man.
If it is sufficient for Socrates as a philosopher to recognize his
ignorance as ignorance, I would have thought it would be sufficient for
him to recognize his faith as faith.
Does the last quoted sentence mean "because he is a philosopher,
Socrates is faithless" or does it mean "Socrates is a philosopher only
to the extent he is faithless"? If the latter, is Socrates necessarily
a philosopher only to an extent, or could someone be wholly a
philosopher trusting only in demonstrable truths?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From jk Fri Sep 29 18:10:51 1995
Subject: Re: god, plato and aristotle
To: aristotle@freelance.com
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 1995 18:10:51 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <35c.97.84@freelance.com> from "ssorens@acad.udallas.edu" at Sep 29, 95 10:59:43 am
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> If you want to find a true opposition to the modern project of conquering
> nature for the relief of man's estate you must look to the classical
> political philosophers and not savage tribes or even civilized despotisms.
There have certainly been antitechnological writers in China.
Chuangtse, for example, tells the story of the old man who replied to a
suggestion that he construct a well-sweep rather than use a pitcher for
irrigation:
I have heard from my teacher that those who have cunning
implements are cunning in their dealings, and those who are
cunning in their dealings have cunning in their hearts, and those
who have cunning in their hearts cannot be pure and incorrupt, and
those who are not pure and incorrupt in their hearts are restless
in spirit. Those who are restless in spirit are not fit vehicles
for Tao. It is not that I do not know of these things, I should
be ashamed to use them.
There have also been antidespotic writers, for example Confucius and
Mencius.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From jk Sat Sep 30 06:55:05 1995
Subject: Re: recent post to dr. ball
To: aristotle@freelance.com
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 06:55:05 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <35c.101.84@freelance.com> from "ssorens@acad.udallas.edu" at Sep 30, 95 00:21:03 am
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> > There have certainly been antitechnological writers in China.
> I must also say that conquering nature for the relief of man's estate is a
> peculiarly western phenomena which has however been imposed on the rest of
> the world.
Had that project advanced farther or defined itself better in classical
Greece than in contemporaneous China? If not, one wouldn't expect
opposition to be better developed. The Warring States period was
notable for technological advances, as well as for attempts by
Legalists and Mohists opposed by Confucianists and Taoists to
technologize social relations. Chuangtse as in the passage quoted is I
think quite explicit in opposing the conquest of nature for the relief
of man's estate.
> Opposition to that project requires more than simple opposition
> to complicated machines. Perhaps I should add that such opposition
> requires cunning.
It sounds as though technology is to be overcome by some sort of super
social-cum-ideological technology that conquers human nature for the
relief of man's estate.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 8 06:50:57 EDT 1995
Article: 6004 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: local (was American) "Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 8 Oct 1995 06:42:06 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <457b22$1t1@ixnews7.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>>The Conservative government of 1970--74
>>'reformed' Scottish local government by abolishing _county_ councils
>When you begin tampering with local institutions, you have simply
>crossed the line into Vichy-style activist conservatism, willing to
>violate man and society in the name of a different kind of modernism.
Was it simply a case of replacing one administratively-devised
arrangement with another? If so, it would be hard to view it as a case
of violating man and society in the name of modernism. (I don't know
what the situation was in Scotland and so may be completely off the
mark.) It's difficult for government to come to express man and society
by being designed by the central authorities to fit smoothly into their
scheme of things, which I think tends to be the case in top-down
devolution.
Here in NYC the ostensibly devolutionary parts of the government
apparatus, for example the local school boards, which were set up about
25 years ago, mostly function as a way to give hacks something to have
and activists something to do. After all, those were the people who
pressed for them. The real power remained at the top and people know
that, so the boards are of interest mostly to people who have something
very specific in mind. Also, the boards don't correspond to anything
like natural or historic communitities, which makes it harder for them
to have a people that they can speak for assuming that's the function
someone wants them to play.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Oct 10 07:26:59 EDT 1995
Article: 6013 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: local (was American) "Democracy": Paradigm v. Praxis
Date: 10 Oct 1995 07:26:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <45dl8o$odp@panix.com>
References: <44nen2$634@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> <44i9nt$co@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <44jq27$jkf@panix.com> <44l1te$huk@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> <44lupj$jct@panix.com> <183070153wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <457b22$1t1@ixnews7.ix.netcom.com> <4589tu$4ea@panix.com> <45co55$jc0@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <45co55$jc0@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>The lack of respect for (a) Your predecessor's arrangements (b)
>The people's accustomed way of doing business (c) Historical geography
>is profoundly modernist.
That may have been the case. My only impression of British local
government is vague recollections of complaints about domination of
local councils by the loony left. That suggested they might not really
constitute people's accustomed way of doing business but rather be
something like NYC's local school boards. I will of course defer to
those who know more about the issue than I do.
>Here in
>Trenton (pop. under 100,000) there is a school system with only one
>high school. But we have a NYC-size school board, with no member
>earning less than $100,000 and one member, the head, scoring millions
>of dollars in contract buy-out money when he was shown to be utterly
>incompetent. The test scores here are 20-points below those of Newark,
>a system so bad the state seized control of it.
My recollection is that the New Jersey courts were among the first to
attack local funding of education as insufficiently egalitarian. It's
a progressive court system, the one that gave us William Brennan. I
think it's a mistake to establish a political authority for spending
money unless the same authority also has to raise the money. That sort
of issue isn't taken seriously in what passes for serious scholarly
discussion of constitutional law in America, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Oct 11 16:36:41 EDT 1995
Article: 6023 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Further neocon evolution (non-Darwinian)
Date: 11 Oct 1995 16:27:50 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <45h9c6$9e3@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In connection with the "paleo vs. neo" discussions that come up once in
a while, I think it's worth mentioning when neos show public sympathy
and intellectual respect for right-wing positions that aren't at all
respectable or even comprehensible from the standpoint of what passes
for mainstream thought. So it was notable a couple of years ago (Fall
1993) when _The Public Interest_ published Jeffrey Snyder's "A Nation
of Cowards", a stirring denunciation of gun control and defense of 2nd
Amendment rights. The current (October 1995) issue of _The New
Criterion_ has done something similar, publishing an extremely
skeptical essay on the theory of evolution by Phillip E. Johnson, the
author of _Darwin on Trial_ and _Reason in the Balance: The Case
Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education_, who I think is a
professor of law at Berkeley.
I should say that I don't have much of a view on Darwinian evolution,
either in itself or its various extensions to cosmology, epistemology,
theory of mind or whatever. I just haven't thought about it very much.
Standing back from the particular issue, though, I view this sort of
thing as more blows against the empire and therefore a good thing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Oct 12 14:55:34 EDT 1995
Article: 6027 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: More Post OJ response
Date: 12 Oct 1995 05:44:06 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <45io16$kdt@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Another straw in the wind, perhaps. Scott McConnell is a regular
political columnist for the _NY Post_ and a white man. The paper
published a longish (by tabloid standards) piece yesterday in which he
spoke of a renewal of interest in territorially-based black nationalism
(a.k.a. partition) as very possibly a good thing. "[N]owhere else in
the world where ethnic groups are mired in conflict do proposed
solutions revolve around affirmative action and sensitivity training,"
he points out. He then rehearses the history of proposals for
territorial separation of the "two nations", concluding with a demand
in Farrakhan's newspaper for a separate black state or territory, and
asks "Is this demand really so much more outlandish than many of the
measures (speech codes, compulsory busing of schoolchildren,
restrictions on the use of standardized tests, just to begin the list)
that America has employed in efforts to bring about an integrated
society?"
It will be interesting to see if there's any response to the piece. I
would have thought this sort of speculation would be forbidden,
certainly when carried on by white men in the mainstream media, but
post-OJ things are becoming a little unglued.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Oct 13 06:43:57 EDT 1995
Article: 6041 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: More Post OJ response
Date: 13 Oct 1995 06:31:52 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <45lf6o$qle@panix.com>
References: <45io16$kdt@panix.com> <45k103$6e@tzlink.j51.com> <45kn7v$a9f@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <45kn7v$a9f@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Any member of any "race" already belongs to a real community: the local
>community.
"Race" is misleading I think because it suggests that what is at issue
is biological identity rather than historical, cultural, and possibly
religious identity. "Ethnicity" is probably a better word because it
seems more to emphasize the latter. Jews for example are not a race in
the modern biological sense but nonetheless have an enduring sense of
themselves as a community that so far as I can tell is no less real to
them than affiliations based on common place of residence.
Moving more to substance, your point seems to be that physical
propinquity is the natural principle of affiliation for human beings,
so that our natural loyalties are to the people we live close to and
not to any material extent to other people with whom we have some
connection other than place of residence. That seems wrong to me. A
community is a moral entity that normally develops historically.
Physical considerations like location (or for that matter "race" as
that word is understood today) may be relevant but are not in principle
decisive. There are for example people (desert nomads, migratory
Gypsies) for whom location *can't* be decisive.
In Europe populations have been reasonably stable and rule by *alien*
aliens (nomads from the steppes, for example) a rarity since the end of
the early Middle Ages. As a result localities could develop into very
important historic communities. That has had many good consequences,
for example permitting politics to be based more on territorial
nationalism and its correlate civic consciousness than on tribalism and
the dynastic principle. The Middle East has not been so lucky. That
is why the traditional Middle Eastern city was not at all a community
but rather a conglomeration of gated quarters in which the different
peoples inhabiting it carried on their lives, interacting mainly in the
marketplace.
There does seem to me an issue whether the society of the future will
be more European or Middle Eastern in form. I'm inclined to expect the
latter. Quite apart from prosperity and easy transportation leading to
lots of immigration, modern communications means that distance
separates much less than formerly. It follows that propinquity can not
function nearly so well as a principle of affiliation as in the past.
If that's so, then other (tribal, religious, ethnic) forms of
affiliation are likely to play a larger role in human life.
Straws in the wind: radical libertarian and successionist sentiment,
indicating a decline in civic consciousness and rejection of
territorial nationalism. Ethnic consciousness and emphasis on
"difference" in intellectual circles. Incipient conversion of American
cities to congeries of walled and gated quarters (see the article in
the 9/3/05 _New York Times_).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A relic, Odin--I'm a mini, docile Ra!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 15 22:08:47 EDT 1995
Article: 6048 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Destruction of the left
Date: 14 Oct 1995 13:49:39 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 8
Message-ID: <45ot7j$ik1@panix.com>
References: <45o37q$oj1@insanity.foxnet.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <45o37q$oj1@insanity.foxnet.net> Andrew Dziubinski writes:
>What were the factors that lead to the decline of the left?
Its victory.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 15 22:08:48 EDT 1995
Article: 6050 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Destruction of the left
Date: 14 Oct 1995 22:28:37 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <45prkl$cq4@panix.com>
References: <45o37q$oj1@insanity.foxnet.net> <45ot7j$ik1@panix.com> <45pa2e$38c@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <45pa2e$38c@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>a
>victory that will soon engulf dog training, wet nursing, and gardening,
Everything is political. I glanced at a rather scholarly gardening
publication my wife gets recently, I think from the New York Botanical
Garden or some such, and their lead article was a long discussion of
whether a trend toward emphasizing native plants in gardening was
polluted by association with Proposition 187. There was a lot of
discussion about the aesthetic theories of German horticulturalists in
1937 and the like.
>is bound to diffuse a little bit. Perhaps you meant "diffusion" rather
>than decline?
Could I propose as a compromise saying that its universal pragmatic
triumph is identical with its intellectual disappearance?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Oct 17 19:43:55 EDT 1995
Article: 6064 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Further neocon evolution (non-Darwinian)
Date: 17 Oct 1995 16:15:04 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 20
Message-ID: <4612s8$d1v@panix.com>
References: <45h9c6$9e3@panix.com> <45jnnr$sus@tzlink.j51.com> <45tr2c$ns3@gabriel.keele.ac.uk> <813953613.10131@cksed.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <813953613.10131@cksed.demon.co.uk> Stuart writes:
>Nationalists can be anti-imperial either because *their* nation is
>occupied by a foreign power or because they perceive an inconsistency
>between arguing for the rights of their nation while condoning, through
>imperialism, a system which denies that right to others.
A nationalist who couldn't care less about the rights of other nations
might nonetheless oppose imperialism on the grounds that imperial
governments tend to become cosmopolitan governments that put all their
domains on a similar footing. The nation becomes submerged in the
empire, and if the empire is extensive it will ultimately be ruled
mostly by foreigners in the interests of a transnational state.
(If it matters, the phrase "blows against the empire" that started this
off was originally intended to refer to blows against the hegemony of
left/liberal ideology, or some such.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Oct 18 07:48:40 EDT 1995
Article: 6068 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 18 Oct 1995 07:46:15 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <462pe7$ooh@panix.com>
References: <4620qq$o2u@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4620qq$o2u@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>If Denmark --
>Denmark! -- has 21 (count 'em!) shades of Nazi, Fascist, Rexist, etc.
>parties organizing between the wars, and these parties bitterly oppose
>each other, a pan-what phenomenon are we watching? If Mussolini is
>purging royalist/fascists during Salo, if Strasser is organizing a Nazi
>opposition to Hitler in exile, you got pan zilch, my friend. You have
>power politics; you have a political victor making history his way; you
>have no way to sort out your pan-fascism/pan-Europeanism except the
>tried and true smash and grab.
I know next to nothing about the varieties of fascism and related
movements, but the point appears to be the general one that there is no
such thing as true or essential fascism, liberalism, or whatever.
There are just lots of different people doing a variety of things for
different reasons and no natural way to classify any of it.
I don't think that outlook wears well. We deal with complicated
situations by classifying in accordance with the characteristics most
relevant to our purposes and way of acting. So thinking about politics
includes consideration of the nature of the political good, of human
society, of the complex of beliefs, habits and so on that relate the
two, of the historical situation, and of the leading issues in each
connection. When our thought is successful we end with a smallish
number of main points and principles that can guide our actions. We
also identify what's going on around us by reference to those points
and principles -- e.g., that Mr. A and General B are both fascists, and
fascism is thus and such.
It seems that the quoted view makes the foregoing procedure and
therefore intelligent political action impossible. Hence the appeal to
the tried and true smash and grab as the source of all answers in
politics. (I may misunderstand you, of course, but you seemed to go
far beyond the obvious points that no political theory is perfect and
that abstractions must be handled with care.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Oct 19 09:36:45 EDT 1995
Article: 6071 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: More Post OJ response
Date: 18 Oct 1995 19:37:21 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <46433h$moj@panix.com>
References: <45lf6o$qle@panix.com> <45io16$kdt@panix.com> <45k103$6e@tzlink.j51.com> <45kn7v$a9f@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> <672081434wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <672081434wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>In article: <45lf6o$qle@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>> In Europe populations have been reasonably stable and rule by *alien*
>> aliens (nomads from the steppes, for example) a rarity since the end of
>> the early Middle Ages.
>A survey last month by _Prospect_ magazine of a sample of 'high earners'
> in Britain (defined as those earning more than Uk #350K) showed that only
> 57 per cent were children of British subjects.
The situation I described does seem to be coming to an end. Did they
say anything as to the specific origins of the high earners?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Oct 19 09:36:47 EDT 1995
Article: 6073 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Fascism defined (was Re: Surfascism Page)
Date: 19 Oct 1995 06:01:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4657m4$lut@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In bj695@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Geoff Lupton) writes:
>First among these is nationalism and, in a logical extension,
>imperialism.
Is it so logical? Assume you are as gloriously successful as the
Romans. The effect of their success was that the Roman Empire lost its
connection with Rome and her historical institutions and people. By
universalizing itself the Roman nation destroyed itself. Also, the
emphasis on military aggression (I assume imperialism includes military
aggression) leads one to suspect that the nation doesn't really exist
but must give itself the appearance of existence and unity by opposing
itself to outsiders.
>A second aspect of generic fascism is the desire to create a
>new economic and social order that rejects both capitalism
>and communism.
Do you know of a good discussion of the economic side of fascism? My
impression is that people (not just fascists) have been trying to
create third ways for years but without much success.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Oct 20 15:25:51 EDT 1995
Article: 6080 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 20 Oct 1995 12:27:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 70
Message-ID: <468ils$amh@panix.com>
References: <4620qq$o2u@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <462pe7$ooh@panix.com> <464d0d$nee@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>What is amazing is to find self-styled "neo-fascists." This is
>like telling someone "I am inside this complex movement or these
>movements but I use an outsider's generic description to tag my
>innermost, deeply articulated convictions."
Someone sees a group of movements in the past that reflect in varying
ways concerns and aspirations that the political views current in his
surroundings ignore or reject. What's amazing if he takes that group
of movements as an inspiration, uses accepted terminology to describe
it, and calls himself a neo?
>It's as bizarre as if Franco appeared in public to announce "I am a
>Hispanic" (using that outsider's neologism to sum up his life in
>politics).
There would be nothing bizarre about someone in America saying "I am
Hispanic". In the American context that word describes something that
over against other things in the United States has sufficient coherence
and definite character to be distinguishable. Nor would it be bizarre
if Franco said "I am Spanish", even though that's another outsider's
generic description that applies to a very heterogeneous reality.
>And then I ask, since your historic predecessors resolved all their
>differences by force (smash and grab), how do you now resolve
>differences among yourselves?
This seems to be a point that relates to fascism, which is notable (as
I understand it) for extreme emphasis on prerational unity and
skepticism as to the value of discussion of fundamentals, rather than
to the meaning of political language.
>If A's paradigm is the so-called "nation" and B's is the so-called
>"race" and C's is a single-party Imperial monarchy and D's is farm
>living and Catholocism and we call them all "fascists," we have a
>political "science" that is absolutely useless.
It is science that can't find unity of some sort in apparent
heterogeneity that is useless. The movements and their paradigms may
well have features in common that make it possible to say true and
useful things about them collectively. For example, all the movements
might reject the idealization of individual autonomy in favor of
emphasizing prerational loyalty as the basis of society. There might
be a great deal of overlap in the things the movements put forward to
weaken individualism and strengthen prerational loyalties (hierarchical
leadership, emphasis on the common descent and traditions that make a
people a people, religious views that emphasize the community rather
than individual conscience). The movements might have similarities of
style and tactics, or might draw support from similar groups of people
with similar constellations of concerns.
>I did not appeal to smash and grab. Smash and grab is how THOSE people
>resolved their ideological differences.
But if you think it's true and useful to say "THOSE people" and make an
assertion about them collectively I don't see how you can think that a
political science that classifies them together and calls them by some
general term ("fascist", for example) is absolutely useless.
I didn't seriously think that you personally would appeal to smash and
grab. In your post you seemed skeptical of political abstractions to
the point of categorically rejecting their usefulness. What I had in
mind was that avoidance of smash and grab requires an ability to find
common ground and form some sort of notion of the public good. That
requires an ability to abstract and generalize ("really, we're all
after pretty much the same thing in various forms").
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Oct 20 23:38:43 EDT 1995
Article: 6083 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 20 Oct 1995 16:39:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 13
Message-ID: <4691ef$rna@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pas@echonyc.com (Call Me Comrade) writes:
>A culture, today, capable of grounding a politics, has to be willed
>into existence _ex nihilo_.
Culture precedes acts of will; it gives them the setting and significant
content without which they would not be acts of will but only twitches
or convulsions. Acts of a divine will would no doubt be an exception,
but the notion of a divine political movement that creates a world of
value out of nothing is a strange one.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Oct 25 20:13:56 EDT 1995
Article: 6098 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 24 Oct 1995 10:15:24 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 57
Message-ID: <46isds$1pp@panix.com>
References: <4620qq$o2u@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <462pe7$ooh@panix.com> <464d0d$nee@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <468ils$amh@panix.com> <469md8$e9e@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <469md8$e9e@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>The mob you call "fascists" were post-rational, given to extensive
>discussion of fundamentals, and the history of this or that "fasicst"
>movement is the history of the triumph of this or that fundamental
>"principle" -- usually by purge.
It still sounds as if you believe the movements called fascist had
important features in common that set them apart from other movements.
I don't see why the fact they fought among themselves negates that or
tends to show that the term is analytically misconceived. Whether
their mutual emnity shows that it would be misconceived to look to them
for inspiration is a question I will leave to others.
>>What I had in mind was that avoidance of smash and grab requires an
>>ability to find common ground and form some sort of notion of the
>>public good.
>Yes, after the Republic is formed. But the formation of the Republic
>requires smash and grab, purge and burn. And every Republic is an
>exclusive enterprise that requires smashing, grabbing, purging, and
>burning, in an "orderly" and "lawful" way on a continuing basis. Iran
>is an extreme example of modern Republican tendencies.
This is somewhat obscure. You seem to be using "Republic" in a
technical sense of your own. An explanation would be helpful.
>I have to side
>with our man Epstein in saying that "common ground" is exclusively the
>business of monarchy (and in my five years living under a monarch, I
>saw a lot of grabbing but not much smashing).
The states that are monarchies today are among the most peaceful and
stable states, but that strikes me as a consequence of the circumstance
that monarchy is now mostly a remnant of earlier times that survives in
particularly peaceful and stable societies rather than a consequence of
the nature of monarchy as such. Switzerland, the Serenissima and the
Icelandic Old Republic were no less orderly and stable than
contemporary monarchies, and there have been monarchies with lots of
smash and grab. Monarchies tend for example to originate in violence.
>>That requires an ability to abstract and generalize ("really, we're
>>all after pretty much the same thing in various forms").
>Profoundly Republican. We are impossibly different, but can live
>together if we make some accommodations. Why, look at arc!
I didn't mean to suggest that the ability to abstract and generalize is
sufficient for political life or that its value and function has not
often been grossly exaggerated with catastrophic results, only that
it's an important and useful human ability that is necessary for
political life beyond a tribal level. It takes a great many things to
make a tolerable social world, and some degree of reason is one of
them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Oct 27 11:37:04 EDT 1995
Article: 6100 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 25 Oct 1995 20:45:50 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 35
Message-ID: <46mlnu$kfm@panix.com>
References: <46isds$1pp@panix.com> <46m344$cev@pipe6.nyc.pipeline.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
jfcarney@nyc.pipeline.com (John F. Carney) writes:
>Classification, as opposed to classical categorization, is the act of
>naming something for our convenience. It is not a matter of
>identifying essences; it is a reflection of social convenience or
>necessity.
I don't think I went beyond claiming that "fascist" could be a useful
classification in some important settings. If "fascist" names an
essence then that might help explain why the classification is useful,
but I didn't take a position on that issue.
>Objections to this misunderstand the relation between words and their
>objects [ ... ] So when we talk about a cat, we are talking about our
>experience of a cat.
Here you seem to go farther, and say that because of the nature of
language or something of the sort there can only be classification,
which relates to the purposes and experience we happen to have, and
there can't be classical categorization, which relates to identifying
essences that exist without regard to our purposes and experience.
Good God, man! Can that be right? Take the first sentence in this
paragraph as an example. Is it your view that the meaning and
reference of the words in that sentence depend wholly on purposes and
experiences a group I belong to happens to have, so that if our
purposes happened to be different we could classify quite different
things as "good", and stop classifying you as a "man", and perhaps
classify you if it suited our purposes and experience as "raw material
for a cat-food factory", and in principle our revised classification
would be no worse than any other as long as it truly corresponded to
our purposes and experience?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Oct 28 21:27:53 EDT 1995
Article: 23030 of alt.postmodern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,soc.culture.usa,alt.books.reviews,talk.philosophy.misc,talk.philosophy.humanism,sci.psychology.misc,humanities.misc,alt.recovery.codependency
Subject: Re: Clinical Love? Re: The Myth of True Love
Date: 28 Oct 1995 16:23:18 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <46u3fm$huj@panix.com>
References: <46hduk$e52@shore.shore.net> <46itdh$l1@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <46mp1u$mv5@shore.shore.net> <46ra16$22j@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <46s2lc$15c@parlor.hiwaay.net>
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Xref: panix alt.postmodern:23030 soc.culture.usa:95769 alt.books.reviews:21063 talk.philosophy.misc:37110 talk.philosophy.humanism:6041 sci.psychology.misc:1991 humanities.misc:762 alt.recovery.codependency:7415
In <46s2lc$15c@parlor.hiwaay.net> lhedlger@hiwaay.net (Libby H) writes:
> How about being "in love" as a form of obsession, which
> becomes a disorder when it begins to interfere with one's
> "quality of life"...
> From that perspective, "love" would be a more based in
> empathy, while being "in love" would be more narcissistic.
I always thought of "in love" as the beginning of love.
What you love is what makes life what it is for you, so when a new love
begins your old world comes unglued, you're dazed, you don't know what
to make of anything you thought you understood, all you can think about
is your new favorite.
Anyway, that's the way I feel when I discover a new flavor of ice
cream. Eventually things settle down, so you're no long "in love" with
chocolate almond fudge (for example), even though you still love it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 29 05:49:25 EST 1995
Article: 6105 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 28 Oct 1995 22:15:14 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <46uo3i$69d@panix.com>
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jfcarney@nyc.pipeline.com (John F. Carney) writes:
>Can there be an essence of "fascist"?
If there is some fundamental orientation toward politics that under
current circumstances is manifested most clearly in fascist movements
then there would be an essence of fascism.
Many people seem to think of fascism as a tendency to identify what is
valid categorically with what is valid within a society and what is
valid within a society with what is backed by organized social force,
and therefore to attribute a sort of divine creativity to successful
violence. That tendency seems to me real and important; whether it is
so characteristic of the movements called fascist that it could be
called "the essence of fascism" I don't know.
>I think the problem is not one of whether there can be classical
>categorization, but whether this categorization can ever be fully
>articulated in words. Any given language is part of what Wendell Berry
>calls 'the made order' and I am not sure it can ever fully attain 'the
>given order.' The words we use have conventional, temporary, man-made
>meanings: can these words entirely comprehend natural and permanent
>objects?
I assume they can't. To my mind the issue raised by many contemporary
discussions is whether language can have anything at all to do with the
given order or whether it can all be reduced without remainder to the
made order. It seems to me the former is the case, and that otherwise
we can't even begin to make sense of human life as we live it. My "Good
God, man" example was intended to speak to that issue. If language
relates only to a made order none of the words in the example can mean
what we intend them to mean.
>Let me use a standard analogy for talking about words not being their
>objects. It is obvious that a map is not the territory, and that at
>best a map is a representation of the territory.
The analogy assumes a language-independent reality that somehow we have
access to so we can compare the map to it and see how good a map it is.
A controversial assumption today, I believe. The contrary assumption is
that we construct reality. Pomo liberals assert that we construct it
through dialogue, while fascists as described above (correctly or not)
say that reality definitionally must transcend our understanding of it
while dialogue does not, and suggest violence as the principle of
transcendence.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Oct 29 17:09:57 EST 1995
Article: 6110 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SurFascism Page
Date: 29 Oct 1995 07:31:48 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 76
Message-ID: <46vs7k$jmd@panix.com>
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>>Many people seem to think of fascism as a tendency to identify what is
>>valid categorically with what is valid within a society and what is
>>valid within a society with what is backed by organized social force,
>>and therefore to attribute a sort of divine creativity to successful
>>violence. That tendency seems to me real and important; whether it is
>>so characteristic of the movements called fascist that it could be
>>called "the essence of fascism" I don't know.
>
>My mind is boggled by this level of abstraction. What is this analysis
>used for? (What good is it?)
The quoted language has two parts: (1) identification of a very
abstractly-defined tendency, and (2) a suggestion that it is that
tendency that many people view as the essence of fascism.
(1) is for me the more important part. It is intended to coordinate
observations of events and trends of thought, and thereby help us
understand the world in which we find ourselves.
Modern movements for the regeneration of society have often been
extraordinarily violent. Some such movements have actually achieved
power and engaged in atrocities on an unprecedented scale. Even among
people who don't belong to such movements and professedly favor reason,
tolerance, etc., violence has a certain glamor. How to explain? As you
point out, the movements are quite diverse, so an adequate explanation
could not turn on specific features of each movement but would have to
depend on general aspects of the modern situation. That means extreme
abstraction.
(1) suggests that a tendency to idealize violence is a natural
consequence of a rejection of transcendent moral standards. If someone
accepts that suggestion his approach to a great many issues is likely
to be affected. Therefore the suggestion has use.
(2) is intended as a description of what people mean when they talk
about "fascism" and (usually) how bad it is. Whether use of the word in
that sense is justified is something that (as I say in the quoted
language) I don't know enough to comment on.
>How do you draw boundaries between "fascists" and "non-fascists" with
>an analysis such as this?
If you use the word "fascist" in accordance with (2), it's not helpful
for boundary-drawing, just as words like "warm" and "orderly" are not
helpful for boundary-drawing. Given that usage, there would be degrees
of fascism. You could speak of the implicit fascism of this, that or
the other feature of ordinary life. There are indeed people who speak
that way, and other people understand what they're saying, so they must
mean something by it. Why not try to understand what they're getting
at?
>If you're trying to reach the truth, build up from the specific, not
>down, from the general.
Why? There are many roads to truth. Once attained it explains and
interrelates the specific by the general and exemplifies the general by
the specific, no doubt all in a very clear and orderly way, but getting
there is not at all orderly. For example, it's hard to get there
without adopting grand hypotheses and seeing how well they wear.
>we have a public that rejects "essentialized" fascism but applauds
>every fascist particular that is presented to it. Deplorable but
>predictable, given the blind eye presented by our "best thinking" to
>the possibility of multiple "fascisms," a rich diversity of "fascisms."
Here again you speak as if the various fascisms have something in
common that's bad, so that you're justified in dealing with them
categorically and saying their adoption is deplorable. It sounds like
what you really want is a better analysis of what fascism is so that
the multiple fascisms can be recognized and understood as the bad
things they are.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Oct 30 06:51:28 EST 1995
Article: 6114 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: What is a Republic?
Date: 29 Oct 1995 17:49:20 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <46ud55$een@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Is a Republic not a state constituting itself from a subset of the
>polity, based on some paradigm (which it maintains by force after its
>revolution)?
"[C]onstituting itself from a subset of the polity" sounds like there
is a closed ruling class, which doesn't seem more characteristic of the
states generally called republics than other states. "[B]ased on some
paradigm (which it maintains by force" sounds like there are laws
backed by force which conform at least implicitly to a comprehensive
understanding of politics, another characteristic that doesn't seem
specifically republican. That leaves "revolution". Revolution (i.e.,
the successful use of violence by people who previously were not the
rulers) is the typical origin of states generally, not just republican
states.
Which conforms to this definition better, Pharaonic Egypt or
Switzerland? Were King Menes or Ikhnaton republican revolutionaries?
How about Charlemagne?
>A republic constitutes itself. It defines its values. It smites its
>enemies, internal and external. It represents a point of view. And an
>honest republic does not appeal to universals, which must (from a
>republic) be false.
I don't see how the first, second and last sentences apply to your
prime example of republicanism, present-day Iran. Present-day Iran is
based on what its rulers and supporters understand to be universally
valid principles from a source that in principle has nothing special to
do with Iran. In their understanding it is those principles that
constitute and define the values of the Islamic Republic rather than
the Islamic Republic itself. On the contrary understanding their
enterprise would make no sense.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Oct 31 06:26:16 EST 1995
Article: 6123 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: What is a Republic?
Date: 30 Oct 1995 21:31:01 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 63
Message-ID: <4741p5$a7t@panix.com>
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drotov@bfrsys.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>I'm intrigued by the contention that monarchies (and all forms of
>government, generally) originate in an act of violence. Is this from
>Hobbes or from the general run of historic cases?
I thought Machiavelli said something of the sort somewhere. Maybe
Hobbes did too. In any case, I couldn't think of examples to the
contrary.
>It substitutes a teleological universal for an actual universal, and in
>fact, begins a campaign of violence against the actual in the name of
>the teleological. Peaceful republics are rare and usually fail.
Republicanism (at least with a lower-case "r") can be non-
expansionistic. The Icelandic Commonwealth (930-1262) is an example of
a libertarian republic based on traditional usages with no universal
ambitions. It disappeared in part because of the increasing power of
monarchist ideology. Switzerland is another example of a traditional
non-imperial republic. In contrast, many empires (Rome, China, the
Abbasid Caliphate) have been monarchies purporting to be universal by
right.
>A curiosity of constitutional republics is their need for oaths and
>public oath taking. (This is not curious in a monarchy, obviously.)
I don't understand the parenthetical. Oath taking is characteristic of
constitutional governments of any sort. In feudal monarchies for
example vassals swear fealty. It's irrelevant to absolute governments.
Lord Shang thought the people should be punished for praising the
government, how much more for pretending that their obligation to obey
the government had something to do with an oath?
>But Jim asks what makes Iran such an exemplary republic. Answer:
>2. It stages a particularist revolution against the universal order.
I still don't understand what is particularist about submission to the
will of the creator, sustainer and ruler of the universe, which is what
those creating the Islamic Republic understood themselves to be doing.
>We are talking about the establishement of a ruling ideology, not class.
>
>>which doesn't seem more characteristic of the
>>states generally called republics than other states.
>
>It is utterly unique to the republic.
In periods in which monarchy was strong there was a ruling monarchical
ideology. Also a monarchical paradigm. There were serious political
thinkers who put forth reasons why monarchy was the right or natural
form of government.
>>Were King Menes or Ikhnaton republican revolutionaries?
>
>They did not rule on behalf of the few, but for the many; they did not
>define themselves politically with reference to a particular paradigm.
"I am the god-king." How does that stand for rule on behalf of the many
with reference to no particular paradigm?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Oct 31 06:26:17 EST 1995
Article: 6132 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Hitler and classical music (was Re: HOMELAND)
Date: 31 Oct 1995 06:22:28 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Message-ID: <4750tk$mv6@panix.com>
References: <473lp0$p3g@ixnews7.ix.netcom.com>
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In <473lp0$p3g@ixnews7.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
> Reichel explores the Reich's championship of classical music
>and "academy" art over and against avant garde culture represented by
>Weimar and concludes that this championship is *a defining feature of
>Nazism* and a *last gasp* of bourgeois values. (I wonder if he has
>ever encountered the NPR mentality stateside or the raft of Top-40
>Classical stations here.) Anyway, classical = Hitlerian to Reichel, and
>you know what? I agree.
Does he really equate the two? I suppose opposition to political
Bolshevism was a defining feature of Naziism, and also an expression of
bourgeois political values, but it doesn't seem to me that
antiBolshevism=Hitlerism. Also, I'm told there are neonazi rock
groups. Where does this put them?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Nov 1 18:40:05 EST 1995
Article: 6157 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: What is a Republic?
Date: 1 Nov 1995 18:32:49 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 116
Message-ID: <479031$4uc@panix.com>
References: <46ud55$een@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> <4710dg$qdh@panix.com> <4732as$8dg@news.ios.com> <4741p5$a7t@panix.com> <476u2g$975@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>
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drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>>I thought Machiavelli said something of the sort somewhere [that
>>monarchies originate in violence].
That states originate in violence.
>Here are some haphazard, stream-of-consciousness examples. (1) Spain,
>the restoration of Juan Carlos (2) Poland, the election of the monarchs
>(3) Romania, the government's recall of Carol II from France
>(4) Japan, the exaltation of the of the head of the "imperial clan" to
>Emperor in the Taika reform (5) Yugoslavia, the proclamation of a
>monarchy by leading political figures (6) England and/or Britain: the
>post Cromwell restorations (7) Iraq, Faisal's installation by
>plebiscite (8) Norway, installation of Haakon VII after Swedish union
>dissolved (9) Bulgaria, installation of the Battenbergs by Constituent
>Assembly (10) Brazil, legislative restoration of the monarchy under
>Pedro II.
A restoration or an election of a particular monarch is not an
origination. That halves the list. The question to my mind then
becomes whether those establishing the monarchy in the remaining
examples owed their power to do so to violence or at least to something
no better under your smash-and-grab criterion than those who establish
republics.
>>Republicanism (at least with a lower-case "r") can be non-
>>expansionistic. ... [Iceland and] Switzerland [are examples] >of
>>traditional non-imperial republic.
>
>My reference is to internal aggression: defence of the paradigm from
>enemies within and the horror of an intentional division of the polity,
>paradigmatically, followed by paradigm-based persecutions that never
>end.
_Cuius regio, ejus religio_ was not a specifically republican principle.
Far from it. The basis of the principle, I think, was that religion is
part of the ruling social paradigm. So your claims are hard to accept
unless monarchies have been more tolerant religiously than republics. I
don't think that's been so. Holland was noted during the 17th and 18th
c. as a place where you could get books published that called existing
paradigms into question. Also, wasn't paradigm-based persecution more
extensive in France and Spain than in the republics of northern Italy?
>First, examine the form of a republican oath. It does not
>require swearing to the universals proclaimed in the governing
>paradigms but to the existing pragmatic arrangements. That is very odd.
>Admit it! A republican traitor is a technical violator of of some
>detail of contract law, not someone who broke a promise to a person or
>even an ideal.
>
>>In feudal monarchies for example vassals swear fealty.
>
>This is very personal, very real. They swear it to a person. A person.
A republican oath is not contractual in form or content. It pledges
allegiance to the republic and its constitution, and thus to something
neither universal nor purely pragmatic. It's an oath to a concrete
collectivity, something that has both form (the constitution) and matter
(particular people and land) and therefore can only be understood as a
particular real thing.
>>It's irrelevant to absolute governments.
>
>To tyrranies. And if you want to equate tyrrany with monarchy, you need
>to make that argument explicit.
I equate only absolute governments to tyrannies. European monarchies
have typically not been absolute.
>>Lord Shang thought the people should be punished for praising the
>>government, how much more for pretending that their obligation to obey
>>the government had something to do with an oath?
>
>You are mixing your own republicanism into this analysis: no ancient
>Chinese nor European vassal is pledging anything to any damn
>"government."
Read "rulers" for "government", then.
>They know that even in dogma, they are a minority of particularists
How can a Muslim understand himself as a particularist? You seem to be
saying that it's impossible in good faith to be a Muslim.
>>In periods in which monarchy was strong there was a ruling monarchical
>>ideology. Also a monarchical paradigm. There were serious political
>>thinkers who put forth reasons why monarchy was the right or natural
>>form of government.
>
>I think this is anachronistic. The point at which these arguments
>appear is late in the history of monarchies and close to the point of
>no return. At first you have (political) dynastic legitimacy parties,
>which later give way to (yes) paradigmatic monarchist parties. Pity. I
>think people take an interest in the Stuart/Battenberg dispute partly
>because it stands on the very cusp of this transition.
Admittedly theoreticians aren't likely to spend much time arguing for
monarchy unless there seems to be an alternative. Nonetheless, there
were divine-right-of-kings theorists long before the Stuart/Battenberg
dispute. Much earlier, in the 13th century, the view that every people
ought to have a king (who could be an obedient servant of a Church that
post-Hildebrand was emphasizing hierarchical principles) was one of the
factors that led to the end of the Icelandic commonwealth. The king of
Norway had a good theory to support his position, and no one else did,
and that was an advantage for him.
>Rule on God's behalf is even less particularist than rule on behalf of
>the entire polity.
What regime examplifies this principle better than the current one in
Iran?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Nov 3 16:16:49 EST 1995
Article: 6174 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Counter-Rev. vs. Global Teevee?
Date: 3 Nov 1995 12:01:03 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Message-ID: <47dhsf$g4l@panix.com>
References:
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In forman@netcom.com (frank forman) writes:
>How can a Counter-Revolution be possible in a world of global teevee?
They have an off switch. Also, if there are 20,000 channels you can
pick and choose. Maybe you could buy the Monarchist(c) set that only
accepts monarchist broadcasts.
Slightly more to the point, I think global TV gives separatist groups
like Hasidic Jews and the Amish, who have gotten used to the idea that
you have rules that govern the details of what your members do in their
daily lives, a big advantage in the CR sweepstakes. I think social
life is likely to become more like that traditional in the Middle East,
in which there's a market place in which all sorts of things meet and
there are also inward-turning communities that develop rules and
customs that keep out the things that would disrupt their particular
way of life.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Nov 4 06:55:35 EST 1995
Article: 6178 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Call 1-800-856-2469, LIVE LIVE LIVE 809-474-7588 code3073
Date: 3 Nov 1995 20:27:38 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <47efia$qem@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In spotter@netcom.com (Steve Potter) writes:
>18+, 24hours, rates as low as $0.38/min
Sounds quite thrifty. Still, 24 hours at $0.38/min is $547.20 a day.
That can run into money. Could a.r.c. users could set up a conference
call and split the cost?
>Hot, Young women want it NOW ----011-592-247-681
>Gay, Bi, Bi-curious guys at -----809-474-7604
Sounds like the G,B,B-c guys are Americans (where is 809?) and the hot
young women are foreigners. Why is that? Does this have anything to
do with those "meet oriental women" classified ads in conservative
publications?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain -- a maniac!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Nov 4 06:55:36 EST 1995
Article: 6182 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: What is a Republic?
Date: 4 Nov 1995 06:41:48 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 69
Message-ID: <47fjhs$h73@panix.com>
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In <47ca7s$sai@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>SOME states originate in violence. ALL republics.
The Mayflower compact? The adoption of the United States Constitution?
The organization of the Confederate States of America? If Australia
redefines itself as a republic will that necessarily be a violent act?
>You are ignoring the successful, long-term states in which the
>monarch's self-definition was king for all. The definition of "upholder
>of the faith" is indeed a paradigmatic element that critically weakens
>the authority of the king and leads to disaster.
What monarchies do you have in mind?
>>A republican oath is not contractual in form or content.
>It is an explicit promise, made on the public record, the purpose of
>which is to bind.
Not all promises are contractual. The oaths I know of do not for
example mention consideration, they relate to things like loyalty and
faith that are not normally subjects of contracts, and when the oath
is breached people don't think that contractual remedies are the
appropriate way to deal with the situation.
>This is my point: it is a "feudal" anomaly that requires allegiance to
>a modern, slippery, shifting, "concrete" paradigm. That's what makes it
>odd. The officer's oath I took decades ago has not changed -- not a
>word -- but the order to be upheld is so different that the oath would
>probably be unpalatable to me today.
Do you think that's the normal state of affairs in republics? Monarchs
change in character over the course of their reigns as well. George
III went bonkers a couple of times, for example. A political society
can be as stable in character as the collection of habits, beliefs and
intentions that we call a human being.
>>You seem to be saying that it's impossible in good faith to be a
>>Muslim.
>Your reference to Muslim is baffling. Substitute the word "Protestant"
>to get a sense of the strange inaproppriateness.
Don't follow. It seems to me the dogmatic side of a man's religion is
the beliefs he has about the moral and spiritual constitution of the
world that he thinks have nothing to do with particularism but are true
simply. "Islam" is the name of a religion. I am not sure whether
"Protestantism" is.
>Or is there a Muslim
>"essence" that unites their experiences and crosses all the sects?
A Muslim would certainly say there is. It's possible, of course, that
he might be dubious of the degree to which some experiences and sects
calling themselves Muslim participate in that essence.
>The revolutionaries were confronted by the example of Saudi Arabia
>before they began. They had the historic example of caliphates. They
>had the revolutionary/hierophantic Libyan model. They chose a system of
>government, not a vehicle for God's rule.
How would it be possible to try to establish a vehicle for God's
earthly rule without choosing a system of government? Do you think
some other choice would have been better? One could find fault with
Saudi Arabia, the Caliphate, and Libya as well.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain -- a maniac!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Nov 4 06:55:37 EST 1995
Article: 6183 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: a.r.c. FAQ
Date: 4 Nov 1995 06:55:00 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <47fkak$hr0@panix.com>
References: <477l8p$a38@panix.com> <47di0d$h1t@tzlink.j51.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <47di0d$h1t@tzlink.j51.com> lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>How about a system of asterisking so we can tell where a given dated
>version of the FAQ differs from previous ones??
All I do usually is fiddle with a few words and phrases. You're right
that if I make any major substantive changes I should mention it.
>As always,I maintain that devotion to the principles of hierarchical
>divine right monarchism the distinctions ordained by which take precedence
>over all others is the essence of counter-revolution,and that many of
>the schools of thought the FAQ describes as counter-revolutionary are
>in fact species of revolution driven by the same pretexts as revolution.
>Upsetting social orders is wrong BY NATURE.
None of the schools of thought in the FAQ suggest changing any
hierarchical divine right monarchical social order.
Could you and Mr. Rotov agree on a definition of monarchism? Two
posters comes closer to a "school of thought" than one.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain -- a maniac!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Nov 11 16:06:41 EST 1995
Article: 6224 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Monarchism and economics
Date: 10 Nov 1995 09:21:24 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <47vn54$k1v@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
The local monarchists might like an article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in
the summer 1995 issue of the _Journal of Libertarian Studies_. He
contrasts public ownership of government (democratic republics) with
private ownership of the same (monarchies), and as you would expect for
an article in that journal comes out strongly in favor of the latter.
His analysis (basically to the effect that absence of private ownership
leads to short-sighted abuse by temporary possessors) is clear and
vigorously expressed, and leads to an interesting interpretation of
European history that he also sets forth.
At the end he says "well, we all know monarchy really isn't in the
cards, and it's not the optimal system anyway, so let's have
anarcho-capitalism". If they want, though, monarchical enthusiasts
could present reasons for not taking that further step and retain the
rest of the argument as an economic justification for monarchy. They
would then be able use the arguments of a leading disciple of Murray
Rothbard to convert usenet libertarians to their polical persuasion,
and, with the growth of the net and the amazing ability of usenet
libertarians to produce more postings than anyone else, achieve world
domination. Neat, huh?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Cain -- a maniac!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Nov 11 16:06:44 EST 1995
Article: 6231 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Monarchism and economics
Date: 11 Nov 1995 11:09:33 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <482hrt$157@panix.com>
References: <47vn54$k1v@panix.com> <480q8n$bn4@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <480q8n$bn4@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>>Neat, huh?
>
>Grotesque.
What a grouch!
>(BTW, if one is going to brainwash libertarians, the best way is via
>subliminal messages in science fiction novels.)
Given the current sovereignty of the critic, why not develop ways of
putting a monarchical spin on the current corpus of sci-fi? Sometimes
that won't take much. For example, _Star Wars_ is plainly a legitimist
epic that pits Princess Leia and those who come to recognize themselves
as her loyal followers against the evil usurping Galactic Emperor. It
has throne, altar (the Force) and even swords! What more could anyone
ask? Other films and texts may be more resistent, but theory can turn
anything into anything, so I hope I can look forward to your
ground-breaking volume on _The Jacobitical Subtext of the Foundation
Trilogy_.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Nov 13 15:20:43 EST 1995
Article: 6247 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The CIA and Conservative Publishing
Date: 13 Nov 1995 05:55:47 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 20
Message-ID: <48787j$gov@panix.com>
References: <4838cf$s53@pipe9.nyc.pipeline.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4838cf$s53@pipe9.nyc.pipeline.com> jfcarney@nyc.pipeline.com (John F. Carney) writes:
>CIA influence or funding raises a number of questions, but I will only ask
>the foremost in my mind: would a CIA role in the conservative movement have
>been a good thing or a bad thing?
It mostly strikes me as an improbable thing. My impression is that
policymakers at the CIA in the 50s and 60s adhered to the conventional
academic view that the alternative to communism was liberal or
socialist reform. So they would have been much more likely to support
things on the anticommunist left than on the right.
Otherwise, I'd have to ask what kind of role and what the alternatives
were. In general, it seems bad for any movement to attract the
attention and support of someone with lots of money who operates in
secrecy and has a well-organized strategy that is only slightly
connected with the goals of the movement itself.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Nov 13 15:20:44 EST 1995
Article: 6251 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Monarchism and economics
Date: 13 Nov 1995 15:19:42 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <48898u$jjg@panix.com>
References: <47vn54$k1v@panix.com> <480q8n$bn4@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> <485a8m$gjb@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <485a8m$gjb@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com> andrewc@ix.netcom.com (Lord Chesterfield) writes:
> Monarchy should never be
>justified purely on grounds of economic expediency, but rather because
>it is the natural form of government.
All roads lead to Rome. That's what the papists say, anyway. Be that
as it may, it ought to be a characteristic of truth that any line of
inquiry, if honestly pursued, will eventually lead there. If monarchy
is natural then failure to adhere to it ought to lead to all sorts of
bad results, including bad economic results. What's wrong with
pointing that out to people who consider such things important?
>To establish monarchy through
>"democratic" efforts (as libertarians would pursue) would fatally
>undermine the philosophical basis of the system. Thus giving us, at
>best, the largely irrelevant and unimportant constitutional monarchies
>that exist in the West today.
Depends on whether democratic principles survive the establishment of
monarchy. Suppose something like "Resolved, the longer you try it the
stupider democracy looks so let's just have a king and leave it at
that" appeared on the ballot and was adopted by overwhelming majorities
and thereafter there weren't any further elections because people
agreed with Hans-Hermann Hoppe that democracy results in kleptocracy,
undermining of private rights due to fudging of distinctions between
rulers and ruled, increased present orientation and consequent crime,
family deterioration, "recklessness, unreliability, poor manners,
laziness, stupidity or hedonism", etc., etc., etc. Why would such a
situation fatally undermine the philosophical basis of the monarchical
system?
>"If the multitude ever deviate into the right, it is always
>for the wrong reason." -- Lord Chesterfield
But you won't even let the multitude be monarchists unless you think
it's for the right reasons. Do you want to follow Lord Shang, who
considered it a crime for the people even to praise their rulers?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Nov 16 12:54:30 EST 1995
Article: 6264 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Monarchism and economics
Date: 15 Nov 1995 11:22:24 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <48d440$ic1@panix.com>
References: <47vn54$k1v@panix.com> <480q8n$bn4@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> <485a8m$gjb@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com> <48898u$jjg@panix.com> <489655$q33@ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
andrewc@ix.netcom.com (Lord Chesterfield) writes:
> >If monarchy
> >is natural then failure to adhere to it ought to lead to all sorts of
> >bad results, including bad economic results. What's wrong with
> >pointing that out to people who consider such things important?
>
> Pointing out such things would be putting too much faith in the
> reason of the general public, a dubious concept [ ... ] If one believes in the
> accuracy of Polybius's thought, the people will eventually arrive at
> the point where they will demand monarchy because they realize it is
> their *only* option.
Your first sentence and last sentence seem inconsistent. What's wrong
with leading the people toward that realization?
> Democracy does lead to kleptocracy, but that was not your main
> point.
My (and H-H H's) stated point was that democracy leads to short-sighted
abuse of power by its temporary possessors. Kleptocracy is of course
an example.
> If a king is elected, he is never entirely free of the fact
> that his power was bestowed by the consent of those he governed.
The issue I raised was whether a monarchy established (not a monarch
elected) by the people could achieve integrity as a monarchy. Your
Polybius reference suggests you think a monarchy could come into
existence by popular demand. Also, many European monarchies were
originally partly elective and at least in the Middle Ages their
coronation ceremonies reflected that the king was king by the grace of
God and the election of the people.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Nov 24 07:16:15 EST 1995
Article: 6290 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: County Sovereignty
Date: 23 Nov 1995 07:26:15 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <491p97$38t@panix.com>
References: <48rhau$b69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> <48uc6e$hqi@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <48uc6e$hqi@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> andrewc@ix.netcom.com (Lord Chesterfield) writes:
>>>In the spirit of compromise that animated Clinton and Gingrich-Dole, I
>>>offer a compromise between the anarchists and minarchists
> To begin with, Frank, one of the points monarchists make is that
>monarchy is the most efficient form of government. Why should we (or
>society) accept anything less? Why should anarchists accept any
>government at all?
A misunderstanding, I think. "Minarchist" is what the libertarians
call one of their own number who is willing to accept a small
government, as opposed to those (the anarcho-capitalists) who will
accept none whatever.
> Exactly correct, Mr. Rotov. Blood baths are exactly what
>republicans and democrats (little "d"s on both, note) desire.
Does de Maistre count as a monarchist?
"And yet all grandeur, all power all subordination rests on the
executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association.
Remove this incomprensible agent from the world, and at that very
moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society
diappears."
********
"War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world.
"War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature [ ... ]
Who could doubt the benefits that death in war brings? [ ... ]
"War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no
less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.
"War is divine [ ... ] War is divine [ ... ] War is divine [ ... ] War
is divine [ ... ]"
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Nov 24 07:16:16 EST 1995
Article: 6307 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: NY Times endorses monarchy
Date: 24 Nov 1995 07:13:43 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 19
Message-ID: <494ctn$6b8@panix.com>
References: <48glbn$5oi@ixnews7.ix.netcom.com> <48nrc2$589@fileserv.aber.ac.uk> <48rfj7$a69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <48rfj7$a69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>And now the solution. I had the pleasure of living under Saudi rule for
>five years and their fix was -- through strong family councils -- to
>make special arrangements as needed for the throne: abdications (King
>Saud); regencies; shared power; whatever is needed. The rule is that
>the unfit shall not rule. And they stick to it. When that is impossible
>(due to tiny families, for instance) there is always the dynastic
>expedient of deposing the unfit, as Sultan Qaboos did (with you
>government's help) in Oman.
Rule by the able and the good is no doubt an admirable rule. On the
other hand, the strict hereditary principle has tended to preserve
European monarchies from the unpleasantness (large-scale fratricide and
the like) that has too often disturbed the family life of Eastern royal
houses.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Nov 27 06:08:30 EST 1995
Article: 6340 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Are Communist Revivalists now counter-revolutionaries?
Date: 27 Nov 1995 05:56:18 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <49c5gi$bfi@panix.com>
References: <497nna$38j@osfb.aber.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <497nna$38j@osfb.aber.ac.uk> Matthew J Smith writes:
>Now that Communism has been toppled in Eastern Europe in what were in
>many cases revolutions (eg Romania), does this mean that anyone who wants
>to revive communism qualifies to be a counter-revolutionary?
I suppose so, if no form of political society is more natural or
appropriate at least for a particular people than any other, or if
communism has become the most historically natural or appropriate form
of society for say Roumania. Most people with sympathy for the notion
of counterrevolution would however reject both propositions.
One difficulty with viewing revival of communism as
counterrevolutionary is that communism as I understand it believes in
continual transformation of society toward some abstractly specified
and unprecedented goal. The communist parties that achieved rule
accepted that the transformation would be carried forward by
administrative means by an apparatus dominated by a few members of an
international movement with consciousness far superior to that of their
society. So communism looks like the essence of what
counterrevolutionaries have opposed.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Nov 27 06:08:31 EST 1995
Article: 6341 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: County Sovereignty
Date: 27 Nov 1995 06:05:47 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 15
Message-ID: <49c62b$ceo@panix.com>
References: <48rhau$b69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <48rhau$b69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Does the most rabid communist do one quarter of the theoretical
>social engineering and political experimenting of even the most placid
>libertarian?
The advantage of the social engineering and political experimenting of
the latter of course is that it takes place wholly in theory and
reduces to absurdity the notion of social policy. To the extent it is
valid, libertarian theory shows that if what you want to do is engineer
a better society the first thing to do is deprive social engineers of
all power.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Nov 30 06:59:17 EST 1995
Article: 6356 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Question for monarchists
Date: 29 Nov 1995 16:51:51 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 5
Message-ID: <49ikln$35m@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
What is the proverbial number of kings who made France? 40? 80?
Also, with whom does the series conventionally start?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 3 08:17:25 EST 1995
Article: 6366 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: County Sovereignty
Date: 2 Dec 1995 07:47:38 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 70
Message-ID: <49phta$38d@panix.com>
References: <48rhau$b69@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> <49c62b$ceo@panix.com> <49dlqa$2nj@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <49dlqa$2nj@ixnews6.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Steve Forbes is currently
>pushing the Gold Standard as a campaign plank. Consider the effects.
What's so bad about the gold standard?
>Local government privatization has been fueled by Libertarian
>consultants, incl. the publisher of Reason magazine, and it has led to
>a sickening expansion of government services and activities (remember:
>more tax money saved, more is available for peripheral activities).
You are right that local government privatization does not bring about
all good things. In itself it does however reduces the administrative
activity and appetite for money of the state, which are good things.
Other good things like a change in public sentiment concerning the
all-provident state are also needed. It's not much of an objection to
something to point out that something else is also needed.
>The
>Libertarians are quick to support such frauds as welfare reform
>(maximizes expenditures via training and increased payrolls; minimizes
>payments causing greatest personal trauma; increases dependency through
>social services patronage and loophole manipulations, etc.), NAFTA
>(they think trade blocs are the same as free trade zones and we are
>going to pay for it in supra- and extra-governmental supervision),
>willy-nilly tax code changes,
There are no doubt libertarians and libertarians. The only ones I ever
read are Rothbard/Rockwell type paleolibertarians, and they are against
all this stuff. Who are the ones who favor it? Usenet libertarians
for all their problems are usually purists about minimizing government.
>privatization of prisons that are
>*already* rife with corruption, etc.
I would have thought that financial corruption at least would be
reduced by privatization.
>A just and moral society would present the Libertarians with a body
>count (or tax bill) every time one of their cockeyed schemes is
>enacted.
No doubt, if the just and moral society were run by perfect
administrators who for any social input could produce a trustworthy
statistical analysis of outputs. To my mind the most important and
valuable thing about libertarians is that they reject the notion of
such perfect administrators and thereby join conservatives,
counterrevolutionaries, and for all I know SurFascists in rejecting one
of the two fundamental errors of our current regime. (They tend to
share the other, that the good can be reduced without remainder to
actual preferences, but that error in moral theory seems to me less
politically important just now than the error they reject regarding the
construction of the state.)
>BTW, I had my first look at alt. politics. libertarian today. It's a
>good window into a topsy-turvy value system. For instance, out of
>scores of postings not one was NOT cross-posted. Postings were short,
>context-free, careless, loaded with destinations, larded with
>pop-culture references ... one could almost do an anthropological
>study.
Most actual libertarians, at least the ones who talk a lot, are
ignorant and self-satisfied barbarians. So what's new? It's
legitimate to contemplate the state of their souls, if that's what you
want to do, but it's also legitimate to contemplate the political
effects of their beliefs.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 3 08:17:26 EST 1995
Article: 6367 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Monarchists don't care about monarchs!
Date: 2 Dec 1995 07:52:11 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 6
Message-ID: <49pi5r$3df@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
If they did, then they'd certainly tell me how many kings it was who
proverbially made France. Was it "40 kings who made France"? Also,
who what the first in that sequence?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 3 08:17:27 EST 1995
Article: 6375 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Question for monarchists
Date: 3 Dec 1995 07:42:24 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <49s5vg$pnj@panix.com>
References: <49ikln$35m@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>: What is the proverbial number of kings who made France? 40? 80?
>Hmmm...there have been a series of Kingdoms in France.
All very true, but still I've seen from time to time references in
monarchist-symp literature, mostly I think from the 19th century, to
"the [40? 80? some other number?] kings who made France". I thought
some of the local 1-archists might be able to tell me what the number
was and where it came from. It seems not.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 3 08:17:28 EST 1995
Article: 6378 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: a.r.c. FAQ
Date: 3 Dec 1995 08:16:39 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 32
Message-ID: <49s7vn$rdg@panix.com>
References: <49mkq7$bb2@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In pas@phantom.com (Comrade Jo-Jo) writes:
>You've neglected to mention the entire National Syndicalist, SurFascist,
>National Bolshevik, Red Fascist, Red/Brown component. Though we're
>sometimes mistaken for ENR, it's only due to our similar emphasis on
>culture and deprecation of liberalism and the market.
I was under the impression you considered yourself a Rev rather than a
CounterRev. There's also the problem that I don't know much about the
content of any of these views.
All this brings up the question of the meaning if any of the term
"counterrevolutionary". I understand it to imply recognition of the
left/liberal revolution of modern times as a bad thing that has
triumphed, combined with adoption of some prior state of affairs as a
goal or at least guide or symbol. On that understanding I'm not sure
SurFascism and the others would qualify. It seems it would not with
respect to the latter component of "counterrevolutionary", and as to
the first component it seems that Fascism and related views favor the
omnipotence of the administrative apparatus of the centralized state
and thus participate in one of the defining features of the
left/liberal revolution. They do seem to reject the other, the
identification of the good with aggregate actual preferences, but seem
at least sometimes to do something equally reductionist by identifying
it with the actual preferences of a single man.
As I said, though, I really don't know much about the trends of thought
you mention. Why do you thing they should be classified as
counterrevolutionary?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 3 18:06:49 EST 1995
Article: 6383 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can Parliament choose a monarch?
Date: 3 Dec 1995 18:05:05 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <49taf1$pto@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>The "Glorious Revolution" was indeed a wrong,
>as for that matter was the Norman Conquest.But Parliament's ability to
>get away with forcing a change in the person who possesses the ability to
>abolish Parliament forever at will(i.e.,is the monarch) does not mean it
>has the authority...authority stems from Almighty God.That the Mandate
>of Heaven was with the new dynasty,and that Henry IX conveyed certain
>items to George IV as his tanist,is what legitimizes it.
Who has the Mandate of Heaven in the U.S.A. today? Also, do the _de
facto_ governments of the states and of the United States have any
authority at all? If so, what is the source of that authority?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Dec 4 10:02:33 EST 1995
Article: 6388 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Monarchists don't care about monarchs!
Date: 4 Dec 1995 10:01:56 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <49v2h4$qbe@panix.com>
References: <49pi5r$3df@panix.com> <49pnem$em3@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <49pnem$em3@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com (Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>Jim, your best bet for an answer is to post to alt.talk.royalty where
>they devour such questions.
A good suggestion, and I've followed it.
>>If ["monarchists" would just rise to the bait]
>Unless your
>question is some sort of political trick designed to catch some
>"monarchist" out in a.r.c. ...
????????? Jocular comments, I hope.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Dec 4 10:02:39 EST 1995
Article: 8205 of alt.talk.royalty
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.talk.royalty
Subject: Kings who made France
Date: 4 Dec 1995 06:43:44 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 7
Message-ID: <49umtg$382@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
I've seen references, mostly I think in 19th century literature
sympathetic to monarchy, to "the [40? 80?] kings who made France". It
appeared to be a somewhat proverbial expression. Does anyone know what
the accepted number is or was and how it was arrived at?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Dec 14 09:04:51 EST 1995
Article: 6436 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Sam Francis
Date: 13 Dec 1995 07:32:05 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <4amh45$j02@panix.com>
References: <4akm3k$2sd@insosf1.netins.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4akm3k$2sd@insosf1.netins.net> wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
>I read that the Washington Times has fired Sam Francis. Cause: racism.
No special surprise, the world being as it is. They want to be part of
the mainstream, and the custodians of the mainstream are strict on some
issues. Very likely people had been saying things to them.
As I understand it, the specifics were that SF had said in a speech
that more explicit white racial consciousness would be a good thing in
politics, and that the Southern Baptists shouldn't have announced they
were repenting for not being abolitionists way back when. Does anyone
know whether it had anything to do with his columns in the WT, or was
it purely extramural activities that got him in trouble?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Dec 14 09:05:05 EST 1995
Article: 28329 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Conservatism and Capitalism
Date: 14 Dec 1995 06:57:09 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4ap3el$4rl@panix.com>
References: <818797548snz@augur.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <818797548snz@augur.demon.co.uk> Vinothan Sangarapillai writes:
>I would like to know if there is a situation in which conservatives
>believe that unfettered capitalism is a bad idea?
>From the conservatism FAQ:
Conservatives typically are not fans of pure laissez-faire,
althought they view economic liberty as one of the traditional
liberties of the American people that has served that people well.
Many are skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on
immigration for the sake of permitting the existence and
development of a national community. Nor do they oppose in
principle the regulation or suppression of businesses that affect
the moral order of society, such as prostitution, pornography, and
the sale of certain drugs.
The foregoing has to do with American conservatism, which I suppose is
the most pro-capitalist form. Also, "unfettered capitalism" is a broad
expression. Almost any law might be viewed as violating it, and
conservatives generally are not in favor of abolishing all laws.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Kayak salad -- Alaska yak.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 17 05:42:14 EST 1995
Article: 54598 of alt.discrimination
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.discrimination
Subject: Draft right-wing FAQ on inclusiveness
Date: 16 Dec 1995 09:29:22 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 321
Message-ID: <4aul42$mbv@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Any comments on the following?
Draft Inclusiveness FAQ
Inclusiveness is a central moral issue for liberals today. It has long
been a liberal principle that the benefits of society should be equally
available to all, with "benefits" and "all" construed more and more
broadly as liberalism has developed. In recent years this egalitarian
principle has come to demand that persons of every race, ethnicity,
religious background, sex, disability status and sexual orientation be
able to participate equally in major social activities, with roughly
equal receipt of rewards the test for equal ability to participate.
Social policies based on that principle enjoy powerful political support
and carry enormous moral prestige, but some people oppose them. The
purpose of this FAQ is to answer common questions regarding such
opposition. It is in draft form; updates will be available at
http://www.panix.com/~jk/inclus.faq.
QUESTIONS
1. Isn't exclusionary conduct based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
2. What possible justification could there be for exclusion on grounds
forbidden by civil rights measures?
3. What is the connection between community and forbidden grounds for
discrimination, and why does it matter?
4. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
5. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
6. What happens to those excluded?
7. Didn't discrimination and exclusionary practices result in
disadvantages that had to be remedied by civil rights measures?
8. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
9 Whatever errors or excesses it may give rise to, isn't the ideal of
inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
10. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
ANSWERS
1. Isn't exclusionary conduct based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
"Exclusionary conduct" is simply associating by preference with people
of one sort rather than another. Why can't it be based on recognition
of kinship as easily as on dislike of outsiders? People invite
relatives to Thanksgiving dinner and join clubs for graduates of their
own colleges. That doesn't mean they hate and fear non-relatives or
alumni of other colleges. Similarly, many liberal professionals seek
out and enjoy the company of other liberal professionals in preference
to that of Southern Baptist used car salesmen without necessarily hating
and fearing the latter.
2. What possible justification could there be for exclusion on grounds
forbidden by civil rights measures?
Different grounds have different justifications. In general, people
find it easier to associate productively with those of similar
background because of similar habits, attitudes and standards. To take
ethnicity and employment discrimination as an example, an ethnic culture
is in large part a collection of attitudes, habits and standards that
has grown up among a group of people who have lived and worked together
for a very long time. People who share such things tend to find it
easier to work together, and so tend to associate with each other for
that purpose. Also, since diversity is recognized as a major challenge
for employers, an organization that wanted to limit the number of
challenges it must deal with might reasonably seek out a niche in the
market for people to hire just as it might seek out a niche in the
market for goods and services to provide.
Other forbidden grounds include sex, which all societies everywhere and
always have treated as socially important. Tolerance of the views of
nearly the entire human race, as well as consideration of the effects of
increasingly indefinite sex roles on family stability and the well-being
of children and others, suggests caution in attempts to extirpate sex
discrimination. Another ground that has more recently been forbidden is
disability, which is obviously relevant to decisions regarding
employment and other aspects of social position even on the most
narrowly functional understanding of relevance.
"Exclude" of course includes "fail to include in numbers roughly
proportionate to presence in population". Since the problems specific
to affirmative action programs have already been extensively discussed
on the net and elsewhere I will not go into them.
Some forbidden grounds of discrimination, such as ethnicity, religion
and lifestyle, help define the communities people belong to. Community
definition is important, so things related to it are a reasonable basis
for decisions as to affiliation. If a Mormon wants to earn his living
working with other Mormons, the better to participate in a distinctively
Mormon way of life, he is not acting unreasonably in choosing to do so.
3. What is the connection between community and forbidden grounds for
discrimination, and why does it matter?
"Discrimination" has to do with the demand that the benefits of human
society be made equal for everyone. That is easier said than done,
because those benefits do not arise in accordance with some abstract
scheme that can be revised to meet uniform standards but rather within
concrete ways of life carried on by specific communities. Family is the
most obvious example of community, but beyond family almost all of us
belong to networks of personal connections and groups of "people like
us" by reference to whom we understand our lives and find them
satisfying or the contrary, and with whom we prefer to deal because when
we do so we feel we are in a world we understand and trust.
As a rule, the communities we inhabit don't include everyone. The ties
necessary for them to exist generally include beliefs about the world
and the good life, so they are unlikely to be fully inclusive as to
religion and lifestyle. They also usually include the half-conscious
attitudes and habits that people grow up with, and perhaps a sense of
common history and destiny, and so are rarely fully inclusive as to
ethnicity, region or class.
It follows that to try to divorce the arrangements by which a person
comes to enjoy the benefits of society from his religion, lifestyle,
ethnicity and class background demonstrates a fundamental failure to
understand how human life is carried on. The attempt is destructive; to
the extent it is successful it divorces material success from personal
loyalties and from any common understanding of the use to be made of
success, because those are things that find their home within particular
communities. It thus makes position, money and power self-sufficient
goals and the only ones given social recognition.
4. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Because we are finite creatures, unlimited
breadth is impossible for us. No single person or society can express
the full richness of humanity; social diversity and particularity is
necessary to correspond to the diversity and particularity of human
life. Inclusiveness denies that need. One social shoe (the inclusive
society) is to be designed to fit everyone, supposedly equally well, and
everyone is to be forced to wear it.
The Vikings, the Abbasid Caliphate, and Heian Japan all achieved
splendid things, but it is unlikely that combining them would have
created something that manifested human capacities better than the three
did separately. Each might have profited in its own way by learning
>from the others, but not by attempting to reconstruct its institutions
and usages to make them equally accessible to the other two. Why
suppose that the world now and the world a thousand years ago are
different in that regard?
It is also possible that in spite of its multiplicity mankind may have
an essential nature to which some religions and lifestyles correspond
better than others. To demand that each society be equally open to all
religions and lifestyles is to deny such a possibility, and therefore
(among other things) to deny the notion of moral progress. Without a
notion of moral progress, however, it is hard to make sense of
liberalism itself.
5. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
On the contrary, it is inclusiveness that requires such stereotypes.
Every society assigns rights and obligations to people based on
expectations of what they are like, what has to be done, and how things
will be organized. The rights, obligations and expectations with
respect to a class of persons constitute the "stereotype" for that
class. Thus, the stereotype for "U.S. citizen" is someone who obeys the
law, follows the news, votes, works for a living, pays his taxes,
believes in education, and so on, and who finds that all those things
constitute a satisfying way of life worthy of his loyalty.
The nondiscrimination principle is the principle that the stereotype
should be the same for everyone. It is thus a moral demand that society
base its treatment of persons on the broadest possible stereotypes.
Stereotypical thinking is unavoidable, but one might reasonably ask
whether it would be more intelligent to have a single stereotype for
"adult human being" or to have (for example) separate stereotypes for
"man" and "woman". Our society has officially decided in favor of the
former, but it's hard to make the decision stick in practice and its
justification isn't clear to everyone.
6. What happens to those excluded?
That depends on the size and power of the group in which they have
failed to find a home. Usually if someone doesn't get in one place
he'll get in another. If I'm excluded by the Century Club I may be able
to join the Shriners. If the group is socially very dominant, so that
another home is hard to find, those excluded may suffer the same thing
religious and social conservatives, and ethnics who consider their
ethnicity important, suffer in an inclusive society. They may find
themselves in a social order they do not like run by people who look
down on them in which it is difficult to live as they prefer.
In both kinds of society people on the outs may be able to practice the
way of life they prefer in private, or perhaps establish their own
communities. Such a possibility can be more realistic in a non-
inclusive society than in a inclusive society, since the latter by
definition tries to establish a single social order that applies equally
to everyone. For example, ethnic minorities in a non-inclusive society
may be able to thrive through some combination of adaptation and niche-
finding, while in an inclusive society they will find themselves on the
receiving end of public policies designed to make their (and every
other) ethnic culture irrelevant to everything of serious concern.
7. Didn't discrimination and exclusionary practices result in
disadvantages that had to be remedied by civil rights measures?
You wouldn't think so looking at the statistics. The economic position
of black people is usually thought to present the strongest case for
state intervention. Black people indeed have problems, but
discrimination and civil rights measures don't seem to be the key.
In 1959 55.1% of blacks and 18.1% of whites were in poverty. By 1966
those percentages had fallen to 41.8% and 12.2% and by 1969 to 32.2% and
9.5% . Since then they have not changed much; in 1990 they were 31.9%
and 10.7%. The ratio of the percentages has varied between 3 to 1 to
3.4 to 1, with the lower ratios in 1959 and 1990. The gap doesn't seem
to be closing, in spite of antidiscrimination legislation adopted in the
middle to late 60s and strengthened and extended in the 70s through
affirmative action requirements and the like. Figures for the
population as a whole suggest a similar conclusion. In 1970 the median
income of all black households in constant 1990 dollars was $18,652; in
1990 it was $18,767. For white households the figures were $30,644 and
$31,231.
Judging by these figures, 30 years of antidiscrimination measures and
radical changes in public attitudes regarding race have not done
anything substantial to reduce relative black economic disadvantage.
Poverty dropped for both blacks and whites during the 60s (it had
dropped at a similar rate since the Second World War), but
proportionately somewhat more for whites, and since then has rebounded
slightly as household income has stagnated. The relative economic
status of whites and blacks has remained on the whole about the same.
(Source of figures: _Statistical Abstract of the United States_.)
8. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
People who take a technological view of human society naturally find
exclusion a moral outrage. If "society" is a single system that
dispenses benefits and detriments by design, so that what the life of
each is like can be explained by reference to the overall social scheme,
then the proper design of the scheme becomes the fundamental moral
issue. If society is the actor and men the recipients, with no man
having greater rights against the social machine than any other, the
scheme should be designed to benefit all men as much and as equally as
possible. If some in fact live better than others then the existing
scheme needs reform, and in a technological age it is assumed possible
to redesign a system to achieve or at least progressively approximate
specifications. The only possible motives for opposition to reform, on
such a view, are stupidity, greed and bigotry.
This view of society seems natural to many people today. The problem
with it is that it is false. "Society" can't be conceived as an actor
following a single script, because it is composed of men and women who
are themselves irreducibly independent moral actors. Although they may
form communities that are unified enough to become moral actors
themselves, the society as a whole is far less likely to become such a
community than a family, church or other particular group based on
specific ties. To say that the latter kind of community excludes is
simply to say it exists, because to exist is to be one thing and not
something else.
The idealization of inclusiveness is also related to a degree to the
romantic tendency to resist categorization and external rules in favor
of infinitely varying and willful subjectivity. If I am excluded then I
have been categorized and subjected to someone else's rules, a terrible
offense to the ego. The connection to such tendencies seems less
important than that to technological thought, though, since the demand
for legally binding rules is so dominant within inclusiveness ideology.
Inclusiveness tends to be legalistic and moralizing, while romanticism
does not.
9 Whatever errors or excesses it may give rise to, isn't the ideal of
inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
There are explanations other than generosity for the social power of
inclusiveness ideology because it serves powerful social interests quite
apart from those it benefits directly. The issue of inclusiveness
arises when society is thought of as a single actor with a single
script, and to demand inclusiveness is to demand that the script be
rewritten and a new one put into effect. Attempting to carry out such a
demand requires an enormous grant of power to some rather small and
cohesive group, a grant that is all the greater because up to now there
has in fact been no script. On the design side, that group includes
social theoreticians, legal experts and social scientists, and on the
implementation side civil servants, jurists, lawyers and educators
(including journalists and media people). Not surprisingly, the ideals
of inclusiveness find most support among the people named, whose power
it does so much to increase.
10. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
Divisiveness is not a separate issue. People who don't intend to change
their position and think everyone should agree with it naturally view
disagreement as divisive.
The first task of liberation movements has been to raise consciousness
-- that is, to use hate-filled rhetoric to create division, to violate
the law to demonstrate contempt for established order, and so on. The
second has been to offer a series of terms for truce, each more
demanding than the last, and to portray those who would reject their
terms as divisive. It is unclear why anyone who rejects the substantive
demands of such a movement should take its rhetoric about divisiveness
seriously.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Dec 19 12:53:18 EST 1995
Article: 6462 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can monarchists choose a paradigm?
Date: 19 Dec 1995 12:35:32 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <4b6t54$3b3@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2> <818467963.3904@londwill.demon.co.uk> <4aj4ip$g1v@wariat.wariat.org> <4ans2e$9qm@paladin.american.edu> <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com(Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>(2) Monarchy is treated wrongly as a principle (paradigm) from which
>order flows rather than representative of the end result of order or
>the sum total of interdependent personal relationships.
If you think of order as immanent rather than resulting from a
principle, why bother having a king? I would think that having one
would only confuse things by identifying some particular man as the
source, keystone or whatever of order. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the
libertarian disciple of Murray Rothbard and economist, suggests
transcending monarchy, which he thinks people are unlikely to take
seriously today in spite of its vast superiority over liberal
democracy, through acceptance of a stateless "system" in which
particular families and men emerge as leaders because of an
accumulation of interdependent personal relationships about them.
Presumably you disagree, and think that it is necessary to identify
some one man as the king. Why?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Dec 19 12:53:20 EST 1995
Article: 6463 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Gawd Save Our Little Newsgroup!
Date: 19 Dec 1995 12:40:53 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <4b6tf5$4j3@panix.com>
References: <4b2len$1a0@cloner2.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4b2len$1a0@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> drotov@ix.netcom.com(Dimitri Rotov) writes:
>if it
>weren't for them (and the FAQs), we'd have no news at all.
The purpose of the FAQs, of course, is to summarize one understanding
of discussions to date. Unless they perfectly summarize an accurate
understanding of exhaustive discussions, it seems to me that one way of
advancing our discussions here would be to comment on them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Dec 19 12:53:22 EST 1995
Article: 6464 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Extreme-right politics in Europe
Date: 19 Dec 1995 12:52:36 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 15
Message-ID: <4b6u54$6ob@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
The _New York Times_ has adopted "extreme-right" as its standard
adjective for Haider in Austria and politicians with similar views in
other countries. So far as I can tell from the news reports, the
entire content of the positions that define the "extreme right" in
Europe is opposition to immigration, together with possibly the desire
to reduce the size of government somewhat and a certain regionalist and
populist spirit.
Any comments from anyone who knows the situation in Europe? Do people
there use expressions equivalent to "extreme right" to mean
"anti-immigration"? Or are there some actually extreme positions
associated with the "extreme right"?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Dec 21 07:42:07 EST 1995
Article: 6472 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can monarchists choose a paradigm?
Date: 20 Dec 1995 17:15:27 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <4ba1tv$869@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2> <818467963.3904@londwill.demon.co.uk> <4aj4ip$g1v@wariat.wariat.org> <4ans2e$9qm@paladin.american.edu> <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> <4b6t54$3b3@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>To deify "the system" in
>place of the Sovereign is to cave in to modernist collectivism and
>attribute power to that fiction "The People",god of Marx and
>Robespierre.It also fails to serve the function of reminding people
>that there are things they can not change and that life requires
>accepting this.
I put "system" in quotes to indicate my awareness that people tend to
give it more concrete reality than it really has. I wouldn't suggest
deifying a system.
>The Sovereign must be singular just as God is singular.
But Israel had no king before Saul, and God took a dim view of the
demand for one. Disgusting collectivist fictions were nowhere in
sight. Ditto for mediaeval Iceland. No king, no deified system, just
particular men and their mutual rights, obligations and loyalties.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Dec 21 07:42:20 EST 1995
Article: 72750 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Draft right-wing FAQ on inclusiveness
Date: 20 Dec 1995 10:14:21 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 338
Message-ID: <4b998d$714@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Any comments on the following? It seems to me consistent with
libertarian legal proposals, which ought to get it a hearing on the
net, but it also suggests ways in which exercise of rights of free
association in ways current law forbids can be part of a reasonable way
of life rather than simply acting out bizarre prejudices. If you found
Richard Epstein's _Forbidden Grounds_ thought-provoking you may find
something of interest here.
Draft Inclusiveness FAQ
Inclusiveness is a central moral issue for liberals today. It has long
been a liberal principle that the benefits of society should be equally
available to all, with "benefits" and "all" construed more and more
broadly as liberalism has developed. In recent years this egalitarian
principle has come to demand that persons of every race, ethnicity,
religious background, sex, disability status and sexual orientation be
able to participate equally in major social activities, with roughly
equal receipt of status and rewards the test for equal ability to
participate.
Social policies based on that principle enjoy powerful political support
and carry enormous moral prestige. Nonetheless, some people oppose
them. The purpose of this draft FAQ is to answer common questions
regarding such opposition. Comments are welcome and should be directed
to jk@panix.com. The current version of the FAQ will always be
available at http://www.panix.com/~jk/inclus.faq.
QUESTIONS
1. Isn't exclusionary conduct based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
2. What possible justification could there be for exclusion on grounds
forbidden by civil rights measures?
3. Just what is the connection between community and forbidden grounds
for discrimination, and why does it matter?
4. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
5. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
6. What happens to those excluded?
7. Weren't civil rights measures necessary to redress evils caused by
discrimination and exclusionary practices?
8. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
9. Whatever errors or excesses it may give rise to, isn't the ideal of
inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
10. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
ANSWERS
1. Isn't exclusionary conduct based on fear and hatred of "the other"?
"Exclusionary conduct" is simply associating by preference with people
of one sort rather than another, and so need not be based on fear and
hatred. People who invite relatives to Thanksgiving dinner and join
clubs for graduates of their own colleges do not therefore hate and fear
non-relatives and alumni of other colleges. Similarly, liberal
professionals who seek out and enjoy the company of other liberal
professionals more than that of Southern Baptist used car salesmen may
have no particular negative feelings regarding the latter.
2. What possible justification could there be for exclusion on grounds
forbidden by civil rights measures?
In general, similar habits, attitudes and standards make it easier for
people to associate productively with those of similar background. To
take ethnicity and employment discrimination as an example, an ethnic
culture is in large part a collection of attitudes, habits and standards
that has grown up among a group of people who have lived and worked
together for a very long time. People who share such things tend to
find it easier to work together, and so tend to associate with each
other for that purpose. Ethnic diversity is recognized as a major
challenge for employers; it follows that an organization that wanted to
limit the number of challenges it must deal with might reasonably seek
out a niche in the market for people to hire just as it might seek out a
niche in the market for goods and services to provide.
Other forbidden grounds include sex, which all societies always and
everywhere have treated as socially important. Tolerance of the views
of nearly the entire human race, as well as consideration of the effects
of increasingly ill-defined sex roles on family stability and the well-
being of children and others, suggests caution in attempts to create a
gender-blind society. Yet another forbidden ground is disability, which
is obviously relevant to decisions regarding employment and other
aspects of social position.
Apart from purely functional issues, some forbidden grounds of
discrimination, such as ethnicity, religion and lifestyle, help define
the communities people belong to. Community is important, so things
related to defining it are a reasonable basis for decisions as to
affiliation. If a Mormon wants to earn his living working with other
Mormons, the better to participate in a distinctively Mormon way of
life, he is not acting unreasonably in choosing to do so.
"Exclude" of course includes "fail to include in numbers roughly
proportionate to presence in population". The problems specific to
affirmative action programs have already been extensively discussed on
the net and elsewhere and will not be discussed in this FAQ.
3. Just what is the connection between community and forbidden grounds
for discrimination, and why does it matter?
"Discrimination" has to do with the demand that the benefits of human
society be made equal for everyone. That is easier said than done, or
even approximated, because the benefits of human society arise within
concrete ways of life carried on by specific communities rather in
accordance with an abstract scheme that can be revised to meet uniform
standards.
We all belong to networks of personal connections and groups of "people
like us" by reference to whom we understand our lives and find them
satisfying or the contrary, and with whom we prefer to deal because
doing so places us in a world we understand and trust. Families are the
most obvious examples of such communities, but we belong to others as
well. It is on account of such connections that we can form our goals,
give them stability, and find them valuable. Many people want to be
CEO, but very few would choose (if it were somehow possible) to do the
things a CEO does in exchange for the material benefits of the position
if they were permanently marooned on a desert island.
The communities within which we live don't include everyone. They are
never fully inclusive as to religion and lifestyle because the ties by
which they exist include beliefs about the world and the good life.
They also usually include half-conscious attitudes and habits that
people grow up with, and perhaps a sense of common history and destiny,
and so are rarely fully inclusive as to ethnicity, region or class.
It follows that to try to divorce the arrangements by which a person
comes to enjoy the benefits of society from his religion, lifestyle,
ethnicity and class background demonstrates a fundamental failure to
understand how human life is carried on. To the extent that attempt is
successful it divorces material success from personal loyalties and from
any shared understanding of the use to be made of success, because those
are things that find their home within particular communities. It thus
makes position, money and power self-sufficient goals and the only ones
given social recognition.
4. Shouldn't communities that define themselves by reference to
ethnicity, religion, lifestyle and so on broaden themselves to reflect a
fuller appreciation of the richness of humanity?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Unlimited breadth is impossible for us
because we are finite creatures. Since no single person or society can
express the full richness of humanity, social diversity and
particularity is necessary to correspond to the diversity and
particularity of human life. It is that necessity that inclusiveness
denies. One social shoe (the inclusive society) is to be designed to
fit everyone, supposedly equally well, and everyone is to be forced to
wear it.
To pick an historical example which I hope is non-provocative: the
Vikings, the Abbasid Caliphate, and Heian Japan all achieved splendid
things, but it is unlikely that combining them would have created
something that manifested human capacities better than the three did
separately. Each might have profited in its own way by learning from
the others, but not by attempting to reconstruct its institutions and
usages to make them equally accessible to the other two. Why suppose
that the world now and the world a thousand years ago are different in
that regard?
Another consideration is that in spite of its multiplicity mankind may
have an essential nature to which some religions and lifestyles
correspond better than others. To demand that each society be equally
open to all religions and lifestyles is to deny such a possibility, and
therefore (among other things) to deny the possibility of moral
progress. Without a notion of moral progress, however, it is hard to
make sense of liberalism itself.
5. Isn't discrimination based on overbroad stereotypes that it would
be more intelligent to avoid?
On the contrary, it is inclusiveness that requires such stereotypes.
Every society assigns rights and obligations to people based on
expectations of what they are like, what has to be done, and how things
will be organized. The rights, obligations and expectations with
respect to a class of persons constitute the "stereotype" for that
class. Thus, the stereotype for "U.S. citizen" is someone who obeys the
law, follows the news, votes, works for a living, pays his taxes,
believes in education, and so on, and who finds that all those things
add up to a satisfying way of life worthy of his loyalty.
The nondiscrimination principle is the principle that the stereotype
should be the same for everyone. It thus demands that society base its
treatment of persons on the broadest possible stereotypes.
Stereotypical thinking is unavoidable, but one might reasonably ask
whether it would be more intelligent to have a single stereotype for
"adult human being" or to have (for example) separate stereotypes for
"man" and "woman". Our society has officially decided in favor of the
former, but it's hard to make the decision stick in practice and its
justification isn't clear to everyone.
6. What happens to those excluded?
That depends on the size and power of the group in which they have
failed to find a home. Usually if someone doesn't get in one place
he'll get in another. If I'm excluded by the Century Club I may be able
to join the Shriners. If the group is socially very dominant, so that
another home is hard to find, those excluded may suffer the same thing
religious and social conservatives, and ethnics who consider their
ethnicity important, suffer in an inclusive society: they may find
themselves in a social order they do not like run by people who look
down on them in which it is difficult to live as they prefer.
In both kinds of society people on the outs may be able to practice the
way of life they prefer in private, perhaps by establishing their own
communities. Such a possibility can be more realistic in a non-
inclusive society than in a inclusive society, since the latter by
definition tries to establish a single social order that applies equally
to everyone. For example, ethnic minorities in a non-inclusive society
may be able to thrive through some combination of adaptation and niche-
finding, while in an inclusive society they will find themselves on the
receiving end of public policies designed to make their (and every
other) ethnic culture irrelevant to all matters of serious concern.
7. Weren't civil rights measures necessary to redress evils caused by
discrimination and exclusionary practices?
Many evils have been attributed to such practices, and it is difficult
to discuss them all in a FAQ. However, the economic position of black
people is usually thought to present the strongest case for state
intervention, so commenting on it will serve as a partial answer.
Black people indeed have problems, but statistics suggest that
discrimination and civil rights measures are not the key. In 1959 55.1%
of blacks and 18.1% of whites were in poverty. By 1966 those
percentages had fallen to 41.8% and 12.2% and by 1969 to 32.2% and 9.5%.
Since then they have not changed much; in 1990 they were 31.9% and
10.7%. The ratio of the percentages has varied between 3 to 1 to 3.4 to
1, with the lower ratios in 1959 and 1990. The gap doesn't seem to be
closing, in spite of antidiscrimination legislation adopted in the
middle to late 60s and strengthened and extended in the 70s through
affirmative action requirements and the like. Figures for the
population as a whole, rich and poor, suggest a similar conclusion. In
1970 the median income of all black households in constant 1990 dollars
was $18,652; in 1990 it was $18,767. For white households the figures
were $30,644 and $31,231.
Judging by these figures, 30 years of antidiscrimination measures and
radical changes in public attitudes regarding race have done nothing
substantial to reduce relative black economic disadvantage. Poverty
dropped for both blacks and whites during the 60s (it had dropped at a
similar rate since the Second World War), but proportionately somewhat
more for whites, and since then has rebounded slightly as household
income has stagnated. The relative economic status of whites and blacks
has remained on the whole about the same.
(Source of figures: _Statistical Abstract of the United States_.)
8. If exclusion is morally OK, why are so many conscientious people so
very troubled by it?
It is natural for people who take a technological view of human society
to find exclusion a moral outrage. If "society" is a single system that
dispenses benefits and detriments by design, so that what life is like
for each can be explained by reference to an overall scheme, then the
proper design of the scheme becomes the fundamental moral issue. If
society is the actor and men the recipients, with no man having greater
rights against the social machine than any other, the scheme should be
designed to benefit all men as much and as equally as possible. If some
in fact live better than others (that is, some are excluded from some
benefits) then the existing scheme needs reform, and in a technological
age it is assumed possible to redesign a system to achieve or at least
progressively approximate specifications. On such a view, the only
possible motives for opposition to reform are inertia, stupidity, greed
and bigotry.
Many people today accept this view of society without much question.
The problem with it is that it is false. "Society" can't be conceived
as an actor following a single script, because it is composed of men and
women who are themselves irreducibly independent moral actors. Although
men and women may form communities that are unified enough to become
moral actors themselves, the society as a whole is far less likely to
become such a community than a family, church or other particular group
based on specific ties. Such communities exclude simply because they
exist, since to exist is to be one thing and not another.
The idealization of inclusiveness is also related to the romantic
tendency to resist categorization and external rules in favor of
infinitely varying and willful subjectivity. If I am excluded then I
have been categorized and subjected to someone else's rules, a terrible
offense to the ego. The connection to such tendencies seems less
important than that to technological thought, though, since within
inclusiveness ideology the demand for binding formal rules is so strong;
inclusiveness tends to be legally-minded and moralistic, while
romanticism does not.
9. Whatever errors or excesses it may give rise to, isn't the ideal of
inclusiveness clearly a generous one?
There are explanations other than generosity for the social power of
inclusiveness ideology. It benefits some people directly, and such
people might support it out of motives other than generosity and
disinterested love of justice. It also serves powerful social interests
that ostensibly are not intended beneficiaries at all. The issue of
inclusiveness arises when society is thought of as a single actor with a
single script, and to demand inclusiveness is to demand that the script
be rewritten and a new one put into effect. Attempting to carry out
such a demand requires an enormous grant of power to some rather small
and cohesive group, a grant that is all the greater because up to now
there has in fact been no script. On the design side, that group
includes social theoreticians, legal experts and social scientists, and
on the implementation side civil servants, jurists, lawyers and
educators (including journalists and media people). Not surprisingly,
the ideals of inclusiveness find most support among the people named,
whose power it does so much to increase.
10. Isn't it divisive to oppose measures designed to promote
inclusiveness?
One could argue the contrary at least as easily. The first task of
liberation movements has been to raise consciousness -- that is, to use
hate-filled rhetoric to create division, to violate the law to
demonstrate contempt for established order and thereby undermine that
order, and so on. The second has been to offer terms for truce and to
portray those who would reject their terms as divisive.
Divisiveness is not an issue separate from the merits. People who
believe certain principles should be fundamental to social order
naturally view opposition as divisive. It is unclear why anyone who
rejects the substantive demands of a movement should take its rhetoric
about divisiveness seriously.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Dec 23 10:39:42 EST 1995
Article: 6494 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can monarchists choose a paradigm?
Date: 23 Dec 1995 10:37:19 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <4bh7nf$88s@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2> <818467963.3904@londwill.demon.co.uk> <4aj4ip$g1v@wariat.wariat.org> <4ans2e$9qm@paladin.american.edu> <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> <4b6t54$3b3@panix.com> <4ba1tv$869@panix.com> <30d66038.2319263@nntp.ix.netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <30d66038.2319263@nntp.ix.netcom.com> andrewc@ix.netcom.com (Lord Chesterfield) writes:
>jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) wrote:
>>But Israel had no king before Saul, and God took a dim view of the
>>demand for one. Disgusting collectivist fictions were nowhere in
>>sight. Ditto for mediaeval Iceland. No king, no deified system, just
>>particular men and their mutual rights, obligations and loyalties.
> Of course, such a system is based on the assumption that each man
>knows, comprehends, and fulfills his obligations on his own. That is,
>in my opinion, a over generous assessment of the average individual's
>intellectual capacity.
My "just particular men ..." was too strong. Man is a social animal,
which means among other things that human society cannot be reduced
without remainder to the individuals that compose it. There are social
standards and expectations backed up by social rewards and pressures
that exist without centralized authority. For example, the English
language has standards and rules that exist without being adopted by
anyone in particular. When particular persons do try consciously to
create and enforce new standards (as in the case of the movement for
"inclusive language") it's offensive and the result is not good
English.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 24 18:48:56 EST 1995
Article: 6495 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The World's Most Complicated Political Quiz!
Date: 23 Dec 1995 13:03:21 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 61
Message-ID: <4bhg99$iq8@panix.com>
References: <4bcgaa$rh6@insosf1.netins.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
> (f) I am (e) and a part of the living world or, in the language of
> the faithful, "God created this world as a home for me and piety
> requires me to treat it in a certain way."
There are a variety of views here, all of which recognize that man is
part of a cosmos. Whether you take the step to (f) in some
form depends on whether you think social order can be understood as a
purely human construction. The goal of modernity is to avoid taking
that step. I think it's an impossible goal.
>A problem: it might be claimed that order is created by some and
>received by others. Those with the will or the intellect to achieve
>their visions deliver it to those who don't, who in turn call that
>order "tradition" or "God's will". And some will claim that market
>order is imposed on the many by the few. Ought I care as to the origin
>of order which is transcendental to me, if not to everyone?
If you're theorizing about politics presumably you put yourself in the
position of those who create order, if you believe order is created by
some and received by others. You can't tell the world that if you want
your project to succeed, so you will have to come up with both an
exoteric and an esoteric teaching. The Straussians talk about this kind
of issue.
>(3) LEGITIMATE CONCERNS OF THE STATE.
This strikes me as a way of distinguishing various forms of liberalism.
Other views tend to view the state as concerned with preserving and
forwarding the common good. On the latter view it's hard to pick out
whole classes of things and say they are never of legitimate state
interest.
>(4) SCOPE OF STATE POWER.
>
>We may feel that the State is legitimately concerned with "X", but deny
>that it has arbitrary power in that domain.
A natural distinction if order is not thought to be a pure human
invention. A modern instance is the abortion debate, in which pro-
abortionists say that if the state intervenes in the abortion decision
today by forbidding it, it can just as well intervene next year by
commanding it. Anti-abortionists no more accept that line of reasoning
in the case of the abortion decision than in the case of the matricide
decision, believing that in both cases the correct answer depends on an
order of things that the state did not create but must respect and in a
proper case enforce.
>But is there another concern: that local rule is somehow more or less
>legitimate than rule by higher levels?
If you emphasize social justice you'll prefer rule by higher levels
because it makes it more likely that similar rules will apply to similar
cases everywhere. If you emphasize participation you'll take the
opposite view. Your bias on this issue will also be affected by whether
you emphasize universalizable expert knowledge or the local knowledge
that comes from responsibility and concrete experience.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Dec 24 18:48:57 EST 1995
Article: 6505 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can monarchists choose a paradigm?
Date: 24 Dec 1995 13:32:40 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <4bk6c8$d7g@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2> <818467963.3904@londwill.demon.co.uk> <4aj4ip$g1v@wariat.wariat.org> <4ans2e$9qm@paladin.american.edu> <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> <4b6t54$3b3@panix.com> <4ba1tv$869@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>: Israel had no king before Saul, and God took a dim view of the
>: demand for one. Disgusting collectivist fictions were nowhere in
>: sight. Ditto for mediaeval Iceland. No king, no deified system, just
>: particular men and their mutual rights, obligations and loyalties.
>In other words,anarchy...no thank you.
Neither society was an anarchy, any more than the English language is
an anarchy in the absence of a single person who determines grammar,
meaning, and usage or natural science is an anarchy in the absence of a
single Supreme Scientist.
>The governance of individuals must
>be entrusted to an individual.
Reminds me of Dr. Johnson's "Who drives fat cattle must himself be fat"
(proposed in response to a line in a play, "who rules free men must
himself be free").
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Dec 27 09:49:32 EST 1995
Article: 6514 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Can monarchists choose a paradigm?
Date: 24 Dec 1995 22:04:00 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <4bl4b0$srt@panix.com>
References: <2063.wrei@rs8_POPMail/PC_3.2.3_Beta_2> <818467963.3904@londwill.demon.co.uk> <4aj4ip$g1v@wariat.wariat.org> <4ans2e$9qm@paladin.american.edu> <4b2nmn$3al@cloner2.ix.netcom.com> <4b6t54$3b3@panix.com> <4ba1tv$869@panix.com> <4bciss$omm@arther.castle.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Keywords: none
In <4bciss$omm@arther.castle.net> drotov@mail.castle.net (dimitri rotov) writes:
>All rights, obligations and loyalties intersect at
>different places and at that point is a king, crowned
>or not, recognized or not. If you did not live in a
>mass society, surrounded by transients who work in a
>nationalized economy, your neighborhood would have a
>king.
"King" usually means something beyond "local notable". It suggests
that for a discrete society with borders all rights, obligations and
loyalties for those living within the borders (except for tolerated
aliens) intersect and are recognized to intersect in a single man.
Of course, you can use the word "king" as you wish. If you don't mean
to suggest geographical exclusivity, though, so that kings could just
arise here and there in accordance with the development of patterns of
loyalties and obligations, I'm even more puzzled to know how your views
differ from those of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Dec 27 09:49:33 EST 1995
Article: 6521 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The World's Most Complicated Political Quiz!
Date: 26 Dec 1995 14:11:36 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <4bphd8$bs0@panix.com>
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NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4bp7ch$1te@insosf1.netins.net> wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
>When some affirm transcendent order and others say it is a scam--what
>then?
I don't think coherent thought, discussion or action is possible if
there is no transcendent order, so my decision is made on the point.
As to the skeptics, they should be held to the same standards to which
they hold others. One should ask, for example, what concrete interests
their theories advance, what apart from radiant goodness and truth
(which is something that can't exist on the skeptical account anyway)
might lead people to hold them, and so on. Then they should be asked
what overall way of understanding and dealing with the world their
theories are part of and why that way is best.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 07:05:43 EST 1995
Article: 6528 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The World's Most Complicated Political Quiz!
Date: 27 Dec 1995 14:21:12 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <4bs6b8$r4i@panix.com>
References: <4bcgaa$rh6@insosf1.netins.net> <4bhg99$iq8@panix.com> <4breh0$8ll@insosf1.netins.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
>> >(3) LEGITIMATE CONCERNS OF THE STATE.
>>
>> This strikes me as a way of distinguishing various forms of liberalism.
>(2) There is the more limited sense that the State should not attempt to
>enforce a certain end. A regime with no gambling laws is said to be
>"liberal" in that regard, but no moral judgement as to the worth of
>gambling is implied. We might have all sorts of reasons for refraining
>to use the State as a means to a specific end. This is a method, not a
>moral argument.
Your use of the expression "legitimate concerns" led me to think you
had something stronger in mind.
>Is (2) properly called "liberalism", and if not, what ought we to call
>it? We may employ (2) in many situations where we do not hold (1).
Your (2) doesn't seem to be an "ism". It's more a collection of
particular judgments and practices based on prudence, tradition, and
maybe some catchall biases like limited government, decentralization and
so on. A regime might not forbid gambling but it might be somehow
concerned with it and legitimately so. For example, it might permit
localities to regulate or forbid it, not allow it in public schools,
refuse gambling the public sanction that would be given for example by
state lotteries, impose a special tax on gambling enterprises, refuse to
enforce gambling contracts, treat habitual gambling as something that
disqualifies a man for responsible office, fund an anti-gambling public
education program, or whatever.
I suppose I'd call (2) "limited government" -- the idea that government
can't do everything, and that part of the art of government is knowing
what to leave alone.
The contemporary liberal outlook seems to be that government is not an
art but a technology that in principle is omnicapable, so the only way
to limit government that can stand up in the long run is to hold certain
issues to be in principle outside the competence of government for
conceptual reasons. If gambling were not a legitimate concern of the
state then presumably on the liberal view it would be part of something
like the "right of privacy", and state action that without compelling
reason burdened the right to gamble or discriminated against gambling or
gamblers would be constitutionally impermissible.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 07:05:44 EST 1995
Article: 6532 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SUPERHIGHWAY TO DYSTOPIA
Date: 28 Dec 1995 11:29:03 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <4bugkf$opd@panix.com>
References: <4brdi8$ha8@sydney1.world.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Any comments on this kind of issue?
I agree with the writer that at the moment techno-optimism, at least as
to computers, seems to be dominant, and that's surprising because
technopessimism has always been so common.
My own tendency is to reject technopessimism, at least at its most
pessimistic, because I don't think social technology is possible and
that's what radical technopessimism depends on.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 09:25:46 EST 1995
Article: 6537 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The World's Most Complicated Political Quiz!
Date: 29 Dec 1995 09:24:01 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <4c0tm1$979@panix.com>
References: <4breh0$8ll@insosf1.netins.net> <4bs6b8$r4i@panix.com> <4bupu8$82l@insosf1.netins.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
>"Local option" would seem more sensible but is contrary to contemporary
>legal opinion.
For sure! American courts have emancipated themselves from the
authority of accepted practice. In an American court today to say that
something is a "deeply rooted social stereotype" is to put it on the
defensive. Theorizing about the law has accordingly taken on enormous
importance. Dominant trends in legal theory emphasize social justice.
Social justice, especially for a lawyer, includes formal justice, the
principle that similar cases should be treated similarly. The way to
achieve formal justice is to make as many and as important decisions in
as centrally unified way as possible. If you ask how that is to be
done, you will find that eminent law professors, judges, lawyers and
social scientists are patriotically ready to offer their services, and
renowned journalists and educators are available to explain to everyone
why it's all for the best and only weirdos, bigots and greedheads would
object.
>"Art" vs "technology" deserves consideration.
I think of the technological outlook as the key to modern politics.
Society is conceived as a rational system designed to marshall all
resources and use them to satisfy whatever ends its members might happen
to have.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 09:25:47 EST 1995
Article: 6538 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SUPERHIGHWAY TO DYSTOPIA
Date: 29 Dec 1995 09:25:36 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <4c0tp0$9ea@panix.com>
References: <4bugkf$opd@panix.com> <4brdi8$ha8@sydney1.world.net> <419270790wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
rafael cardenas writes:
>There's an interesting article on this by Will Hutton in the Guardian,
>28 December 1995.
>Beside all that [what grandparents and great-grandparents lived
>through] the internet, on which much of the case for great technical
>change rests, is small beer'. 'Take the much vaunted capacity to shop
>via the internet... the technology to achieve all this is available
>now.. it's called phoning the grocer'.
The difference from phoning the grocer is that on the Internet you
could instantaneously get quotations on a can of lima beans from every
grocer in the world. The effect, I suppose, will be greatly to
increase the abstractness, impersonality and power of markets. In the
80's the increasing ability to collect and process information made a
huge difference in financial markets and also made it possible to
integrate with retail operations manufacturing processes taking place
all over the world carried on by a variety of suppliers. One could
imagine changes continuing and affecting shopping -- you do a web
search for products meeting particular specifications, examine them in
virtual reality, and order them, and they're fabricated and delivered
to you in the manner that's most efficient at the moment based on your
software's instant compilation of quotes from providers.
An issue a.r.c. types are probably interested in is whether the Internet
and related developments will make it easier for 100 flowers to bloom,
including their own favorite flower, or anyway things that are
recognizably flowers, or whether it will continue the tendency to reduce
all things to a combination of asocial impulse and abstract common
denominators like money and political power. In the latter case my
guess is that the Unabomber will turn out to be the great prophet of our
age.
>And most interesting is this: 'In the economy, the latest evidence is
>that multi-nationals are deglobalising their production and pulling
>back into their home regions'.
But world trade (as I understand it) continues to climb. One possible
inference is that internationally markets are replacing non-market forms
of organization such as the bureaucracies of multi-national
corporations.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 13:11:18 EST 1995
Article: 6539 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Extreme-right politics in Europe
Date: 29 Dec 1995 09:28:06 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 53
Message-ID: <4c0ttm$9o9@panix.com>
References: <4bvr1a$dr@news.ysu.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
ak048@yfn.ysu.edu (Paul Wallpe) writes:
>I feel you are correct in predicting the browning of America, but
>I would like to know why this is a bad thing.
I'm not the "you" who's addressed, but I have a couple of comments
anyway.
A problem with perpetual large-scale immigration is that it makes it
harder for a self-governing people to exist. Self-government is not
easy or automatic, and needs whatever aids are available.
For a people to be self-governing it helps to have a common way of life
and culture, a sense of common history and destiny, and so on. To the
extent there are differences it helps for them to be old differences so
that various accommodations and spheres of communal self-government can
have been worked out. Such things are harder to achieve if there are
lots of people in the society who have very different origins within
living memory, differ radically in religion and sense of what life is
about, have different historical memories, loyalties and hatreds, and
don't speak the same language (figuratively or literally). Life becomes
even more difficult if all these differences are associated with
different physical appearance that is a perpetual reminder of them.
None of the above stuff is absolute, because we're talking about
politics which is a matter of tendencies rather than proof.
Nonetheless, it does seem to me that despotism would be the most likely
form of government in a cosmopolitan multicultural multiethnic
multireligious society of continental size, and that seems worth trying
to avoid.
>How do we justify asking the rest of the world to get along with one
>another,
How indeed? Why suppose that we have a special mission to tell the rest
of the world what to do?
>when we can't tolerate the color of someone's skin? or where
>they came from?
How does toleration come into this? The issue is not whether an
immigrant is a tolerable or intolerable person, but the long-term
effects of immigration.
>Where did you come from? What can you point to as a significant
>contribution to today's world?
I don't understand the relevance of the questions. Surely it is
permissible to have an opinion on public policy without being a Nobel
Prize winner.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!news.cloud9.net!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!chi-news.cic.net!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news.eecs.umich.edu!panix!not-for-mail Fri Dec 29 13:11:19 EST 1995
Article: 6540 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!news.cloud9.net!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!chi-news.cic.net!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news.eecs.umich.edu!panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The World's Most Complicated Political Quiz!
Date: 29 Dec 1995 09:24:01 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <4c0tm1$979@panix.com>
References: <4breh0$8ll@insosf1.netins.net> <4bs6b8$r4i@panix.com> <4bupu8$82l@insosf1.netins.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
wmcclain@worf.netins.net (Bill McClain) writes:
>"Local option" would seem more sensible but is contrary to contemporary
>legal opinion.
For sure! American courts have emancipated themselves from the
authority of accepted practice. In an American court today to say that
something is a "deeply rooted social stereotype" is to put it on the
defensive. Theorizing about the law has accordingly taken on enormous
importance. Dominant trends in legal theory emphasize social justice.
Social justice, especially for a lawyer, includes formal justice, the
principle that similar cases should be treated similarly. The way to
achieve formal justice is to make as many and as important decisions in
as centrally unified way as possible. If you ask how that is to be
done, you will find that eminent law professors, judges, lawyers and
social scientists are patriotically ready to offer their services, and
renowned journalists and educators are available to explain to everyone
why it's all for the best and only weirdos, bigots and greedheads would
object.
>"Art" vs "technology" deserves consideration.
I think of the technological outlook as the key to modern politics.
Society is conceived as a rational system designed to marshall all
resources and use them to satisfy whatever ends its members might happen
to have.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jan 1 12:17:11 EST 1996
Article: 6545 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Extreme-right politics in Europe
Date: 30 Dec 1995 04:48:27 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 13
Message-ID: <4c31tb$b9i@panix.com>
References: <4bvr1a$dr@news.ysu.edu> <4c0ttm$9o9@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In lepslog@j51.com (Louis Epstein) writes:
>: For a people to be self-governing it helps to have a common way of life
>All this assumes the propriety of "a people" as a concept.This is a
>collectivist fiction...only individuals making common cause as suits
>them individually exist.
Would you say that there's no such thing as "a language", only
individual utterances?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: A Santa deified at NASA.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 2 09:14:46 EST 1996
Article: 6567 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SUPERHIGHWAY TO DYSTOPIA
Date: 1 Jan 1996 18:24:17 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <4c9qf1$r7j@panix.com>
References: <4c0tp0$9ea@panix.com> <4bugkf$opd@panix.com> <4brdi8$ha8@sydney1.world.net> <419270790wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <718785077wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <718785077wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>The cost of providing _effective_ choice to the home consumer, from worldwide
>suppliers, will be insuperable; neither the consumers nor small producers will
>be able or willing to pay it. More likely a small number of big suppliers will
>work this way, and the costs of access to the Net both for the small consumer
>and the small producer will rise.
I really have no idea why. The costs of communicating and processing
information continue to decline rapidly with no end in sight. Why
should it be forever impossible to retail communications, data
processing and transactional services to consumers and small producers?
To give an example: an entrepreneur, trade association, producers'
collective or whatever could set up a web site accessible to consumers
for free. The web site would be in effect a searchable database of
(say) wool sweaters offered for sale by producers who pay a fee small
enough for the thing to work, belong to the trade association or
producers' collective, or whatever. The info available for each
sweater could include price, colors, photographs, virtual reality
representations, quality grade in accordance with the system
established by the association or collective, customer references,
etc., etc., etc.
I'm not sure why such a thing couldn't be made more easily useable than
a mail order catalog. Someone else could link together many such sites
to make in effect a master electronic mail order catalog that
consolidates all other catalogs, permits any supplier to add his wares,
permits searches of the whole in accordance with criteria established
by the consumer, etc. It's certain that such developments would create
their own problems. The universal rational cash nexus may not be the
way to create the ideal society. I don't think though that we can
understand what the problems are going to be by supposing that data
communications and processing are permanently going to remain expensive
for large classes of potential users.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 2 09:14:47 EST 1996
Article: 6569 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SUPERHIGHWAY TO DYSTOPIA
Date: 2 Jan 1996 05:35:08 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4cb1os$bb0@panix.com>
References: <4c0tp0$9ea@panix.com> <419270790wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <718785077wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <4c9qf1$r7j@panix.com> <4cacak$en7@crl13.crl.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4cacak$en7@crl13.crl.com> mcgredo@crl.com (Donald R. McGregor) writes:
>So: probably a web-based, 'bot-searchable for price system would work
>for commodity sales, with no continuing relationship.
One effect of increasingly available information is to turn things into
commodities. People look for substitutes for relationships in grading
systems, increasingly complex codes of expected behavior incorporated
into standard contracts, membership in producers' organizations with
ethical codes, etc.
More to the point -- I was talking about consumer sales, and most
consumer sales don't much rely on continuing relationships and the
tendency is to reduce what reliance there is. That's not how chain
stores, discount clubs, mail-order houses, etc. work. Also, searches
and valuations would be not only for price. You could search for thick
hand-knit red wool sweaters costing between $45 and $60, get 10,000 to
choose from, and when you've looked at a few in virtual reality and
found one you like somewhat you could ask to see just the ones that are
generally similar, but a little deeper in color and with a more rugged
texture.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jan 4 13:06:28 EST 1996
Article: 6577 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: SUPERHIGHWAY TO DYSTOPIA
Date: 3 Jan 1996 09:59:32 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <4ce5kk$927@panix.com>
References: <4c0tp0$9ea@panix.com> <4c9qf1$r7j@panix.com> <4cacak$en7@crl13.crl.com> <4cb1os$bb0@panix.com> <4cdd2h$99d@crl14.crl.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4cdd2h$99d@crl14.crl.com> mcgredo@crl.com (Donald R. McGregor) writes:
>What aspects of the "current" or past system would be deserving
>of being preserved in a newer, "modern" system? What human or
>social interactions involved in the transactions are "good things"?
>To what extent can they be replicated in cyberspace?
It seems that there are refinements of taste and performance that
require a continuing connection between producers and customers to
develop. The relation between artist and audience is one example of
that kind of relation. Also, it seems that products could contribute
better to a good material way of life if they were used, evaluated and
therefore produced in connection with a particular way of life. An
example of that would be the way the foodstuffs, style of cooking,
wines, and manner of eating of particular regions in France complement
each other. They use that mixture of grapes to make wine that way
because it tastes better with food prepared from those things in that
fashion. The cosmomarket gives us a world of modular components and
what you can put together from modular components isn't necessarily
going to be the best thing imaginable.
I have no idea how any of the foregoing can be replicated in
cyberspace. A way of life exists because it's second nature, and
people are lazy enough that what's easiest and most efficient usually
becomes habit and second nature. In connection with the larger
question of how to limit the losses when life is carried on more and
more through universal rational structures the best I can come up with
is radical sectarian dissolution of society. The civic society that
has been characteristic of the West evaporates and we get something
like traditional Middle Eastern society, a congeries of inward-turning
sects and ethnicities with a despotic government that does nothing much
other than collect taxes and crudely keep social peace. Everyone
becomes like the Hasidim or Amish because the overall public order no
longer has enough content to be lived in. That development would be
more like collapse than engineering, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jan 4 13:06:30 EST 1996
Article: 6580 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Traditional ME Society
Date: 4 Jan 1996 11:06:49 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <4cgtup$k4j@panix.com>
References: <4cfork$uj@arther.castle.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Keywords: none
In <4cfork$uj@arther.castle.net> drotov@mail.castle.net (dimitri rotov) writes:
>A life lived traditionally is filled with hardship: cohabiting
>inlaws, invalid relatives, aged parents, things made or fixed by
>hand, injuries that don't heal right, tithing big chunks of tiny
>incomes, long workdays, constant visiting and being visited, 3-6
>religious services per day, and more.
The hardships are not chosen and so don't disprove a natural tendency
to follow the path of least resistence. You're right though that
laziness is not the whole story -- people have time and resources left
over from what is needed for bare survival, and in traditional society
the time and resources tend to get worked up into systems of customary
and perhaps ritualized activity that express a satisfying understanding
of human life and the world. Those systems tend to break down when
people get lots of choices that they are free to make individually
(which is the position we are in now), because people really are lazy
and shortsighted, and ultimately perhaps lives become so incoherent as
to be intolerable and acceptance of transcendentally-based codes of
conduct that restore something like the former ritualized system
becomes the only way many people can find a bearable life. So they
join the Hasidim, Amish or whatever. The Branch Davidians and
Jonestown too, but not all groups survive.
>Everyone has met the king, or knows a relative of the king, or has
>communicated with the king, or will soon see the king -- it's not
>like he's a member of the city council of New York -- and sometime
>in the next few months, the king will have visited your
>neighborhood.
A traditional attribute of the traditional Middle Eastern monarch is
the headman and the power to order the execution of anyone at any time
for any reason. Middle Eastern states were traditionally dynastic,
with no fixed borders. That meant they had no organic relation to the
territories they ruled. One might call them family businesses but the
lack of control on the appetites of the head man (due to the lack of
organic connection to society and the emphasis on limitless royal
power) meant dysfunctional family life in the ruling house with lots of
half-brothers, uncles and so on murdering each other.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jan 6 11:36:32 EST 1996
Article: 6596 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Why Governments Will Devolve (repost)
Date: 6 Jan 1996 11:36:10 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 44
Message-ID: <4cm8dq$t4c@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
forman@netcom.com (frank forman) writes:
[In line with Mr. Forman's devolutionary theories, I am posting to
a.r.c. alone. Possibly his principles will lead him to respect our
local equivalent of county sovereignty by not including us in massive
crossposts.]
>[There is one aspect of the whole managerial
>mindset that I have never been able to fit into
>any general picture. This is why the current and
>doomed elite emphasizes short-term gratification
>and hedonism as opposed to the traditional ethic
>of hard work.
A couple of comments:
1. Several cyclical theories of history (e.g. Plato and Ibn Khaldun)
hold that something similar happens in every historical cycle as the
society's original moral unity dissolves into hedonistic self-seeking.
Plato (_Republic_ viii-ix) suggests that one reason for the transition
>from commercial oligarchy to democratic consumer society is that money-
lovers promote short-sighted pleasure-seeking in other people to make it
easier for self-disciplined money-lovers to acquire other people's
property. If you look at advertising today you might think he has a
point. Ibn Khaldun tended to tie the development to the prosperity
brought about by the success of a dynasty and to political
centralization and corresponding decline of informal group solidarity.
2. The managerial state wants above all for people to be uniform,
predictable and controllable, with no interest in public affairs or
tendency to cooperate for purposes not set by the managers. If people
are solely interested in immediate gratification of private impulse that
great end is attained, and the managers don't begrudge efficiency as a
price for attaining it. An "ethic of hard work" can't exist on its own.
It's part of a larger ethic in which people have goals for which they
are willing to sacrifice that can't be reduced to satisfaction of
impulse. Those goals are normally connected to larger schemes, such as
religions, systems of family or community loyalty, etc. that compete
with the managerial state. So the managers might like the idea of hard
work in the abstract, but they don't want people to live in a moral
world of a kind that would make hard work acceptable to them.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jan 6 11:37:25 EST 1996
Article: 6597 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: a.r.c. FAQ
Date: 6 Jan 1996 11:37:14 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <4cm8fq$t9c@panix.com>
References: <4c9535$7p3@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
bjohnson@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (Benjamin Johnson) writes:
> What is integrism? Would be very interested in this aspect.
Our original integrists have unfortunately abandoned us. The resource
lists have some organizations and publications that might help you.
Also, there's always your university library.
Good luck!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jan 6 11:39:53 EST 1996
Article: 6598 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 6 Jan 1996 11:39:45 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <4cm8kh$e3@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
forman@netcom.com (frank forman) writes:
>However much nations may come to junk the globalizing forces of
>capitalism and reconceive the major purpose of national politics to
>promote their own cultures, instead of promoting the free market, they
>have to contend with global teevee and the Internet. (I asked about
>this on alt.revolution.counter and got a reply saying we could always
>unplug our teevees.
I thought I said a bit more, but be that as it may it's an interesting
topic and worth going into again.
One possibility is that groups that promiscuously watch the tube and
otherwise stay on-line with the omniculture will tend to die out over
the next (say) 200 years because they will be unable to maintain a way
of life coherent enough to sustain their members. As a straw in the
wind, consider that Hasidic Jews, Amish and Hutterites, who don't watch
TV and aren't into omnicultural globalism (o.g.), average from 6
(Hasids) to 10+ (Hutterians) children per family, while birth rates in
most Western European countries are far below replacement levels. In
the case of the Hasids the contrast with secular Jews is particularly
striking. Birthrates among non-Orthodox Jews in Israel, a small
society under siege that stresses its ethnic nature, are intermediate
between those among Hasids and those among diaspora secular Jews.
Presumably, birth rates in other places will go the way of those in
Western Europe as o.g. takes hold there, except maybe where the
population keeps growing and nothing modern takes hold and everyone
starves to death or something equally horrible. The difficulty of
successful reproduction in the absence of a coherent way of life, family
values and so on will increase if (as most of the net seems to believe)
the world of the future will have no social welfare programs.
Another possibility is that people will reject omnicultural globalism
without going to the extreme of growing whiskers, wearing black clothes
and learning to speak archaic German dialects. When gigachannel TV
becomes available the Catholics could program their sets to display only
the megachannels that have their bishop's _imprimatur_ (_videtur_?) and
so on. Alcohol and opiates do bad things to peoples who aren't
accustomed to them, but eventually habits, moral standards, etc. evolve
that put them in their place and reduce their capacity to disrupt life.
It seems to me the same sort of thing could happen to TV.
The foregoing is based on the notion that o.g. won't work long term, so
one way or another something else will arise. Any arguments against
that notion would of course be of interest.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jan 6 11:52:55 EST 1996
Article: 6599 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Traditional ME Society
Date: 6 Jan 1996 11:41:52 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <4cm8og$pk@panix.com>
References: <4cfork$uj@arther.castle.net> <4cgtup$k4j@panix.com> <4ckt1u$gqq@arther.castle.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Keywords: none
drotov@mail.castle.net (dimitri rotov) writes:
>This posting, along with previous ones, seems to take elements of
>analysis from Ibn Khaldun's constructs of the stages of state
>development -- particularly taking the state's last stage, its zenith,
>its age of contentment -- allocating that zenith to us, while
>consigning current, traditional ME societies to the second stage, the
>struggle for "absolute kingship."
I don't think so, but it doesn't matter much because my interest was
not in ME society as such but in developing a theory of what a
radically multicultural polity in which (of necessity) there is no
organic relation between state and society would look like. I used
traditional ME society as an historical precedent because ME societies
(Ottoman Turkey, the Abbasid Caliphate) have typically been radically
multicultural and because "government in Muslim society . . . was
never, or almost never, anything other than superimposed; never, or
almost never, the emanation or expression of that society." Claude
Cahen, "Economy, Society, Institutions," _The Cambridge History of
Islam_ (Cambridge, 1970), vol. 2, 511-38, 530. If you don't like the
example it's no purpose of mine to spend time arguing for it. Perhaps
you can take me as referring only to the ME polities that match my
description. It would be enough from my standpoint for at least some
such polities to have existed.
>The kings of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco do not have the authority
>to kill anyone.
Those states are not the ones I am interested in. None of them is
multicultural, and Jordan and Morocco are constitutional monarchies.
Saudi Arabia is essentially all Arab and all Muslim. Morocco is all
Arabs and Berbers, who have been living next to each other for close to
1000 years, and they're all Sunni Muslims. Jordan is only 92% Sunni
Muslim (the rest are Christians) but they're all Arabs.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 7 07:34:54 EST 1996
Article: 6613 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: a.r.c. FAQ
Date: 7 Jan 1996 06:42:44 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 9
Message-ID: <4cobjk$5bm@panix.com>
References: <4cl2gf$8ke@echo2.echonyc.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4cl2gf$8ke@echo2.echonyc.com> pas@echonyc.com writes:
>And still no mention of Fascism (Sur- and otherwise)!
I posted a whole discussion of the point last month that you didn't
respond to, or at least your response didn't get to my site.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 7 07:34:55 EST 1996
Article: 6614 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 7 Jan 1996 07:12:24 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <4codb8$6ig@panix.com>
References: <4cm8kh$e3@panix.com> <456239784wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <456239784wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>social welfare programs are essential to
>capitalism (at least where extended-family systems don't exist or have
>collapsed). The alternatives are chattel slavery or uncontrolled out-migration
>(no longer possible).
Why treat the absence of an extended family system or something similar
(e.g., mutual aid systems among Mormons and other religious minorities
I'm getting tired of mentioning) as an ultimate social fact?
The line of thought I've been presenting has been that modern
conditions, which overlap with what you call capitalism, lead to a
disappearance of public moral standards that are sufficient to order
people's lives and establish a setting in which successful reproduction
and childrearing can take place. The effect will be (or so I claim) to
give close-knit religious sects and maybe things like traditional
Chinese extended families an enormous survival advantage because they
are bearers of concrete standards that members experience as
authoritative that tell people how to lead what modern secular types
call "private life". Such groups typically have a very strong ethic of
mutual aid; they wouldn't have the cohesion needed for the survival of
their peculiar and demanding ways if their members typically relied on
outsiders in case of need.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 7 07:34:56 EST 1996
Article: 6615 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 7 Jan 1996 07:24:23 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <4coe1n$78f@panix.com>
References: <4cm8kh$e3@panix.com> <233331210wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <233331210wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>Of course something else will rise: omnicultural globalism isn't omnicultural at all, it's
>a form of American cultural imperialism, and it will decline when the
>U.S. declines.
Does technology that is making and will ultimately make instant
transmission of vast amounts of data (like TV shows) between any two
points in the world vanishingly cheap constitute American cultural
imperialism? Is its acquisition and use by people all over the world
imperialism? If the U.S. disappeared tomorrow would such technology no
longer exist or no longer erode local cultural distinctions and promote
a universal culture that emphasizes image, celebrity, sensation, and
the rest of it?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jan 7 07:35:13 EST 1996
Article: 32693 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: How many 'right-wing extremists' are there ?
Date: 7 Jan 1996 07:30:34 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <4coeda$7mj@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In dwm7437@venus.tamu.edu (Frank R. Hipp) writes:
>I hear this phrase quite frequently, along with nazis, hate-mongerers,
>fascists, etc. I've wondered how many of them are out there? 10, 100, 1000 ?
>I don't believe that there are too many conservatives with extremist views and
>the rest are only referred to in that manner because they don't agree with the
>liberal line. It sounds like the dems are the party of hate and fear.
In the _New York Times_ "extreme-right" when applied to Europe simply
means "anti-immigration". At least none of their stories I've read
suggests any other content to the expression.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
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Article: 89362 of bit.listserv.catholic
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Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 15:39:57 -0500
Sender: Free Catholic Mailing List
From: Jim Kalb
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Subject: On Slavery
Comments: To: bit-listserv-catholic@uunet.uu.net
It's an interesting topic, so I thought I'd write something and once I
had written it it seemed silly not to post it. It's long-winded, but
no-one has to read it and maybe a dose of boredom is what's needed.
The problem regarding slavery is not that slaves were often very badly
treated. All social institutions are capable of being used to bring
about gross evil. As a general thing we are nonetheless required to
fulfill socially-recognized obligations, even when the institutions to
which the obligations relate are being horribly abused and could be
much better than they are. For example, I suppose we are obligated to
pay taxes even though the taxes are unfairly imposed and some things
for which the government, like most actual governments, uses taxes are
very bad. We are obligated to respect private property even when the
property is that of an abortion clinic or the headquarters of the Nazi
Party.
The legitimacy of social institutions and therefore of moral
obligations regarding them depend on history and existing circumstances
and understandings. Thus, in a time and place in which slavery was
fundamental to the social order, in which so far as anyone knew it had
always and everywhere existed in societies of any size and complexity,
and in which there was in any case no one to free all the slaves, so
there was no prospect of a world without slavery, it seems that slavery
had to be recognized as something that was here to stay, and a slave
would except in special circumstances have been subject to a genuine
obligation of obedience. On this line of thought Paul was right to
send Onesimus back to Philemon and Philemon wasn't obligated to free
Onesimus because we are not in general obligated to free others from
their legitimate obligations to ourselves.
The foregoing of course falls apart if slavery is in itself a moral
monstrosity. That is so if it is always and everywhere inadmissible to
bind A without his consent to obey B. Some such principle is
fundamental to modern moral views, which are liberal in inspiration.
Our tendency to accept that principle today seems to be why we tend to
think we know better than Paul about slavery, that is, we tend to think
that if Paul had understood things better he wouldn't have sent Onesimus
back or would at least have told Philemon he was obligated to free him.
So far as I can tell, though, the principle requiring consent for
obligations is wrong. The world doesn't and can't work that way. Just
by existing I am subject to obligations and I didn't consent to being
born. My children ought on the whole to do what I tell them to do,
which means they are bound without their consent to obey me. I am bound
without my consent to obey the government within whose jurisdiction I
find myself. If I am drafted in wartime that obligation can be an
obligation to kill other people and to expose myself to certain death.
My actual government has gone to the trouble of promulgating a theory of
consent to justify its coercive power, but I don't believe the theory.
I could move to another country, if another country would have me, but
there's a finite number of countries to which I could move, I didn't
consent to the legal system of any of them, and all of them have laws to
which I could reasonably object.
So like Onesimus I'm stuck in a web of obligations I never chose and
that could have been designed much, much better. One difference
between a slave, my children, and me as someone subject to law is that
my rule over my children and the law's rule over me is ostensibly for
the benefit of those ruled, while a master's rule over his slaves was
for his own benefit. To the extent this point is valid Paul has
addressed it by telling Philemon to treat Onesimus as a brother. The
laws governing slavery did not of course enforce such an obligation,
but neither does international law require governments to be motivated
by the good of the people rather than ruling-class self-interest; the
principle that a man is subject to his own local law is nonetheless not
considered an inconceivable moral outrage.
One might think of each household in the Roman world as a kingdom with
the _paterfamilias_ as the king and the laws of the state as the
international law of the world society constituted by the multitude of
tiny kingdoms. That view is consistent with the father's power over
the lives and fortunes of his children. From that point of view, what
Paul consented to in the Roman institution of slavery was simply an
overall rule that assigned each person to a petty kingdom, recognized
the absolute authority of the petty kings within their domains, and
didn't require any particular manner or form of rule within a kingdom.
His response was to tell the petty kings how to exercise their
authority rather than to denounce the overall constitution of the
system. I don't see necessary moral ignorance in such a response. How
would Paul have gone about devising and implementing a new and improved
constitution for society as a whole?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jan 8 08:51:05 EST 1996
Article: 6628 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Canada: Crowns & Sceptres
Date: 7 Jan 1996 20:21:14 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <4cpria$65e@panix.com>
References: <4ccnqf$vir@noc.tor.hookup.net> <4cpjaf$hp3@news.mainelink.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4cpjaf$hp3@news.mainelink.net> "John E. and Joan M. Lavin" writes:
>You could always show the real symbol of Canada, a map of the world with
>the United States superimposed over Canada and a picture of your culture
>being strangled to death by waves upon waves of American books, movies,
>newspapers, magazines, radio shows and television broadcasts. I think
>that this would be a true repersentation of the real Canada.
That can't be quite the right symbol, since what's happening to
Canadian culture is no different from what's happening to American
culture. Those books, movies, etc. have about the same relation to the
outlook and way of life of actual people in Canada as they do to that
of actual people in the United States.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 9 05:24:18 EST 1996
Article: 6659 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 9 Jan 1996 04:58:27 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <4cte83$fus@panix.com>
References: <4codb8$6ig@panix.com> <4cm8kh$e3@panix.com> <456239784wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <533465356wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <533465356wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>Trying to make [extended families and so on] general in the West would
>require far more than a return to our traiditonal culture.
Quite true, but history is not a series of returns to traditional
culture.
>the tendency has been for groups
>or extended families with such standards to be eroded by exposure to
>liberal values. The successful examples you give (Hasidim, Hutterites)
>have developed _within_ a wider society and in antinomy to it; they
>do not necessarily form a model for possible modules of a wider society
>without their specific religious beliefs.
Liberal values have indeed been extraordinarily powerful and pervasive,
increasingly so as time goes on. The issue to my mind is whether they
will lead us to the End of History, some stable final state from which
no fundamental change in political and moral regime is possible, or
whether their triumph will reveal internal contradictions that make a
continuation of liberal society impossible.
In the latter case the successor form of society will have to be based
on structures capable of resisting liberal values. The values
themselves, I think, will not go away but will exist as a perpetual
possibility in any prosperous and technologically advanced world. So
the successor structures will have to have special characteristics that
make them capable of repelling seductive outside influences.
Structures capable of developing within and in antinomy to some larger
society ought to fit the bill.
There have been a great many efforts to establish structures capable of
resisting liberalism but most (for example the totalitarian state) have
failed. Since a lot of possibilities have been tried, it seems a
reasonable conjecture, at least more reasonable than other specific
conjectures, that the future belongs to the structures that we can now
see have succeeded, especially if they provide a satisfying life to
those who participate in them and are growing steadily and other
structures are tending to shrink.
If that's right, then it doesn't much matter except as to timing
whether the way the new structures will win is by serving as a model to
some larger society or by multiplying, growing, and replacing what is
left of that declining and shrinking society. The mammals, after all,
didn't prevail by serving as a model to the dinosaurs.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jan 9 05:24:20 EST 1996
Article: 6661 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Evidence FOR Racial Equality??
Date: 9 Jan 1996 05:15:33 -0500
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4ctf85$gj4@panix.com>
References: <4coe1n$78f@panix.com> <4cm8kh$e3@panix.com> <233331210wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <48222793wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <48222793wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
> If the U.S. disappeared tomorrow would such technology no
>> longer exist or no longer erode local cultural distinctions and promote
>> a universal culture that emphasizes image, celebrity, sensation, and
>> the rest of it?
>I hate to tell you, but the answer is: in part, yes There would still
>be celebrities, etc. but they would be national or local. Moreover
>the universal drug of rock music might at last start to decline.
Why would the celebrities be national or local? Why wouldn't the
nature of the medium and the process of mass-marketing entertainment
produce some other universal drug? After all, every 14-year-old in the
world will still be able to turn on the tube and watch any performer
anywhere. Promoters would still try to penetrate foreign markets, and
those who are most successful would have the cash to put on the most
dazzling presentation. I always thought the language of music and art
was universal, or at least non-parochial. That's especially true if
>from childhood people are exposed to foreign styles. How would the
decline of U.S. imperialism stop that from happening?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Murder for a jar of red rum!
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.