a material vision of the good

the self-proclaimed "non-elitist" mouthpiece of the east coast elite has always known what i should think politically and culturally ( actualy they routinely confuse fine arts with culture...i am skeptical of anything the label as "culture " )...in that respect they are no different than fox news, msnbc, or breitbart...all final arbiters ( in their own self-image anyway ) of how things should be viewed by the great unwashed american public...they are the cream of the media world...all with a product to sell...ideologically and commerically...and far be it from the non-elitist times to ignore the commercial...today's paper blesed me with...

the new york times "style magazine:women's fashion" issue...with splashy ads from hermes, alexander mcqueen, dior, chanel, , max mara, rolex, fendi...all the big names are here hawking a saleable ethical good for you all to aspire to...

and at fire sale prices...that's $20340 worth of clothing that model is wearing...including those eye catching $18000 trousers...christmas is 125 days away...start saving those pennies you don't blow on $5 packages of bologna in the cold cut aisle...americans laugh at inflation and trust their leaders in the same way the times is "non-elitist"

g.w.f. hegel or 30 april 1975

listen closely all you youngsters and braying trumpists...there is an instructive point or two to be made if you leave behiind your exceptionalism and pay attention...

kabul yesterday ( i believe )...

saigon april 1975...

kabul...

saigon...we have done this before and, rendered stupid by american exceptionalism, will doubltlessly do it again...g.w.f. hegel maintained that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history...i would, in the case of imperial thinking, amend that to all we learn from history is the wrong thing...we simply refine the mistakes of the past into the policy of the present and future because we think we know better when we do not...we are learning what the british and the soviets learned...you do not win in afghanistan...one would have thought the war in viet nam would have brought imperial adventures into question...but empires lie to themselves as well as the rest of the world...all viet nam taught the military was that they needed to control the media and how it presents information more closely so the public doesn't find out how inept it really is ( is where you work a chaotic mess most of the time...all anthropogenic structures are inherently unstable and prone to entorpy...the military, despite its hubris, is the same )...read some history...reflect on the mistakes you have made...amplify them with american exceptionalism...and you might have an epiphany...or you can close you mind and keep making the same stupid mistakes thinking " it'll be different this time"...and, before i go, whose adminstration negotiated a peace deal with the taliban? that's right, donny greenlighted this...and the viet nam withdrawal ( no not the entire war ) was a wholly republican affair...get a grip yahoos.

go gmo ( the times says so )

"you never know what is enough unless you know waht is more than enough"-william blake_______________

i cannot dispute that this gmo tomato has twice the anti-oxidants of ( one supposes ) a comperable volume of blueberries...and i cannot dispute the value of anti-oxidants...up to a a point...they would seem to be a pharmakon to some degree...materials from harvard health and the national center for complemantary and integrative health tell me that large doses of anti-oxidant suplements can exacerbate lung cancer in smokers as well as prostate cancer and a type of stroke...it might have benefited cancer prone mice...humans aren't mice...vitamin c and vitamin e, as well as green tea, all contain anti-oxidants...my question ( which i have not found an answer to yet ) is at what point does the body slough off anti-oxidants in the same way it sloughs off vitamins it cannot use and i can assure you that my body is adept at sloughing off green tea when i drink it ( which is regularly )...so is there an actual point to increasing anti-oxidants by splicing genes from snap dragons into a tomato? humans have been monkeying around with plant genetics for thousands of years by cross breeding plants...could you cross breed a tomato and a snap dragon using just their pollen? my skepticism is aroused here...crossing varies of tomatoes or maize or beans utilizing just their pollen and stamens i will buy...i am willing to wager it dosen't always work either...monsanto splicing in genes from who knows where to make their dense yellow #2 resistant to herbicide ( and that corn ends up in all sorts of processed foods in the supermarket ) is not in the same category in my estimation...this tomato isn't either...jenifer kohn may not be shilling for monsanto...she is shilling for the wholly unnatural...i will be sticking to heirloom seed.

in the pipeline

this was on the unop-ed page ( they retired the phrase op-ed a while ago...no one noticed ) of the new york times today...

ostensibly about a book by mathias malm titled "how to blow up a pipeline" which would seem to be a manifesto ( which no one has in stock so i have not read it just yet ) calling for the environmrentalist movement to be more militant...one should steer mr. malm towards say albert camus or milovan djilas for an assessment of where revolution ( what mr. klein seems to be infering mr. malm is calling for )...leads...mostly it begets napoleons and lenins and stalins and massacres and holodomors at worst...and james "his littlenes" madison and "that damned ass hamilton" at its most benign ( and one should have a thought about how the government " by and for the people" was disposed to deal with the indigenous population...even benign revolutions have their mnassacres...utopia is always just one execution away )...beyond that mr.malm is playing into the hands of those conservatives who have been trying to make "eco-terrorism" a real thing to suppress violently by connecting the anti-technologism of that nazi ( he never recanted...was simply pissed because he did not become the intellectual leader of the third reich and so took his marbles [what there were of them] and went back to his hut in the black forest ) martin heidegger ( and his stooge sartre ) with liberal ecologists...the liberal left as nazis...dear to the neo-con heart as a concept...as to mr. kelin's title for his piece, how does that seem odd? humans are not nearly as bright as the think they are...short attention span...shorter political memory...malleable...open to suggestion if not outright operant conditoning...thoroughly branded and divided agiaist themselves by hegemonic culture...creatures of habit condition by media to consume...

a mantra espoused by retail from brick and mortar to ecommerce...and where does all this stuff come from and how does it get here...well...those fossil fuels mr. malm os on about ( so the reviews say...again i have not read it yet...views may change )...two sides of the same coin, just one form of consumption supporting another? seems likely...a positive feedback loop...so? addicted to oil or addicted to stuff? your call, however is it an addiction? a question i have been asking myself of late is "if there's no self-destructive bahvior involved is it an addiction?" certainly my view is that the species is kiling itself through habitual behaviors...acting without thinking...and i have been thinking...if i do find someone with this book in stock and i order it and have it delivered to may door how much am i contributing to species death? how much has mr. malm contributed by writing such a hot topic book that is flying off the shelves from powell's books to amazon? i am not innocent of consumption...i get to be human too...sometimes i wonder exactly what it is i think i am doing and if it matches reality in any way...maybe part of the time...and as it stands i think i may leave mr. malm's book on the shelf...that many fewer book-miles.

universals

________________ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/juneteenth-federal-holiday.html _____________________________ from the new York times this past Sunday…the gist of the piece is no it cannot if the nation as a whole is going to attempt to understand black experience …and it is also a clear index of the conflict between identity and inclusiveness…in a search for true understanding of their suffering the black community is going to have to surrender a portion of its identity…and like any other group of humans some may find that difficult…we define ourselves as much by what we are not as by what we are and letting go of a piece of identity makes us like the others…in-group bias is not an easy thing to relinquish…it is part of what we are and, no matter how sympathetic we are to the suffering of others or how much we may admire their accomplishment, we still think “our” group is that marginally bit better…yet we are all humans of the same species that sprang form the same cradle in africa ( i had my dna sequenced i am of african origin…my dna has been on a roundabout trip from there…but that is where it started )…why don’t we see that? in-group bias is on donald brown’s list of human universals…it is fairly lengthy and i believe i have provided a link to it before…human universals beyond the obvious biological ones exist despite what some academics may say so why don’t we see the sameness? my thoughts are that there must be human universals that act as impediments to perceiving human universal so i took a look at brown’s list and these are the ones i found that would seem to fit that description… 1. habituation- we all have mental shortcuts we use to do things without much thought…these include stereotyping people 2. territoriality-we all have out “turf” of one sort or another that we are proprietary about and from which we exclude most people. 3. group living-leads to in-group bias which we already covered. 4. social structure-there’s always a hierarchy…always someone above or below…someone to aspire to be or someone to look down on…exclusionary thinking. 5. leaders- basically someone with an agenda that favors them more than you…proponents of the above hierarchy because they are the “above”. 6. coalitions- “us” against them…exclusionary. 7. collective identity- source of in-group bias and identity politics…a bane to inclusiveness. 8. envy- self-evident as a contributor 9. manipulative social relations- see, ”social structure” and “leaders” 10. ethnocentrism- in-group bias as a pharmakon 11. language employed to manipulate others- politics/leaders with an agenda inimical to the interests of the bulk of the polity with an interest in keeping that polity divided and hostile. 12. language used to misinform or mislead- basically the same as the immediate above except it should include corporate entities and their continued efforts to skew our needs to one that can be sold…another source of the divisive “envy” for those of more limited means 13. overestimating objectivity of thought- am i as objective as i think i am? probably not…like it or not we are all stuck behind our own eyes…all of life is relative to us because we are centered where we are…in our heads…no matter how sympathetic it’s still mostly subjective if we are going to get past divisiveness and on to human inclusiveness we would seem to have some work to do on ourselves as a species, myself included…i am not innocent of bias…neither are you…it is part of being human…i never said we were an attractive species.

no particular results

"the pragmatic method, in such cases, is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective pratical consequences...it stands for no particular results, it has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its methods." william james. pragmatism. 1907____________________________ "we do not intend to lecture contries on their internal structure, either in cases like the phillipines at present, or the communist countries. our concern is for foreign policy behavior and we will aid dictatorships if it is in our interest to do so." richard nixon to u n ambassador john scali 13 february 1973__________ just a short tangent before i get to my point dick...we need to have a heart to heart about north viet nam and cambodia and your "foreign policy behavior" towards their "internal structure" during your first term in office...i sense something of a conflict there...been at the gin again? and so the quintesential american philosophy, " if it works towards achieving your 'goals-in-view' then it's an ethical good"...a wholly situational ethic that, as old dick's views on "dictatorships" show, entails no permanent friends, no permanenet enemies ( why you can buy clothes made in viet nam ), only permanent interests ( why you can be a good consumer and buy aforementioned clothes )...so manuel noriega can go from a good friend to a federal prison when he got greedy about drugs...or saddam hussein can go from being a saunch ally fighting a proxy war against the evil iranians to a hanged guy when he got greedy about kuwaiti oil...they both trangressed those "permanent interests" and paid the empire's price...dick was a politican and so had a professional need to lie through this teeth about almost everything...james considered himself an educator and philosopher of sorts...he died in 1910 i believe...before the first world war, much less the rest of that miserable century...i have to wonder what he might ( or might not ) recant in this if he had made it to mid century...situational ethics and "goals-in-view" can have some unpalatable consequences...i suppose that interpretation would have a lot to do with your definiton of "practical".

whosw law? to what purpose?

i saw this graphic in the feed of facebook the other day ( it was near the top…i have learned not to scroll the feed on facebook over much, there is a lot of the good doctor’s “bad noise” there ) and was inclined to think “what law and to whose purpose?”…”rule of law” has always been an iffy proposition dependent on whose particular interest was in control of the government at any one time and there was always dissent from whatever “law” was construed to be and that dissent was, at times, wholly suppressed…a few examples of voter suppression and attempts to frame the debate from the past “243 years”…how about the alien and sedition act of 1798? ostensibly aimed at the French and any other “foreigner” deemed “a threat” david mccullough rather maintains “…the real and obvious intent was to stifle the republican press, and of those arrested and convicted under the law, nearly all were republican editors.”…so old john adams ( who reminded bill maclay of “a monkey recently put into britches”…you should read bill’s journal of the first congress…it is enlightening…elbridge gerry was there…we will be getting to him soon enough ) wasn’t above slamming his political opponents into jail over their opinions…have a look at the way james callender was treated by the federalists…and read some of what jim wrote if you can find it…”the history of the united states for 1796 for instance”…i have a copy…it is a facsimile…the esses are all effs…a nuisance to read…but enlightening as well…defense of “national interests” as a smokescreen for political repression is nothing new…neither is voter suppression…elbridge gerry was in the first congress in the house of representatives…he was also governor of massachucetts and was vice president when he died…he is also the individual for whom gerrymandering is named as he signed legislation enabling the distortion of districts to favor republicans while he was massachucetts governor…in the end i have to wonder if any politician, republican, democrat, or independent is interested in “the rule of law” beyond a law which, in some way, enhances their political prerogative…do you actually trust these people to represent your interests?