Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

someday, there'll be somewhere for leftists to go besides marx. you'd think that these overwhelming geniuses, be they badiou or zizek or whatever, would have had a new idea by now. hardly. so i suppose you think the twentieth century didn't provide enough marxism-related suffering: not enough idiot propaganda and bullet-riddled corpses, eh?  one thing we can comfort ourselves with: the people who really achieve that marxist revolution are always the first to go to show trial. it amounts to self-execution, which is rational in this case. i wish you all the luck in the world.

Reflections on the nature of valor...

 

i find paul krugman irritating, and i have attacked him many times in this blog etc. but somehow he has really pissed off niall ferguson, who has systematically trolled his work, trying to detect and expose every error. actually i hope krugs fires back in kind, for there is nothing quite as intense or amusing as a real war between academic egomaniacs. put them on stage together and i will buy a ticket.

 

 

publishers hate amazon. bookstores, if any, hate amazon. the government of france hates amazon. etc. now, putting it mildly i was an early adopter, and i don't want to know how much i've spent there over the years. everyone always goes all jonathan franzen or nicholson baker or whatever and yearns for the time when one was browsing and making discoveries and talking to book enthusiasts at your local bookstore, if one ever was. but the local bookstore was good for some things and not others. probably a good spot to discover alice munro, say, and find people to enthuse about her with. but how many of them had even a half-decent philosophy section? and how many owners cared about stuff like that? the answer is merely 'not'. more or less they were all fiction heads who thought life was a story or whatever woolly jive people like that do believe. i used to go bookstore to bookstore, never finding the things i needed, or even anything i wanted, or even the very basic classics. mention this or that and they'd just look at you blankly. then i'd give up and maybe special-order it. they'd call me three months later, by which time i was on to something else. the idea that i could order any book in print and it would show up on my doorstep two days later seemed miraculous, and it has been extremely useful to me as a scholar: i can't imagine life without it now, really. 

p.s. what the principles are by which french legislators operate, or what they take to be the scope and limits of their power, are matters incomprehensible. they'll yell 'liberte-with-an-accent!' and then arrest you for wearing the wrong outfit. if i were them, i'd drop their entire political tradition and adopt the british one, har har.

 
Most of us would not think of damaging the United States for our own political benefit, monetary benefit or just for kicks. (Well, there was Crispin's advocacy of BushII over Kerry, but that was probably sunstroke at John Edwards' teeth...) Obviously, Republican Congresscritters, as Molly Ivins used to call them at times, are more malleable. 

 

they're treating the 9-year-old stowaway case like it's a security crisis. i prefer to think of it as fun and amusing.

jay carney, expressing obama's disappointment that boehner would not permit his entire caucus to go to the white house: 'the president wanted to talk to the people who forced this economic crisis on the country.' look can't you stop the partisan reflex for ten goddamn seconds? why don't you at least act as though you do actually want to talk to them and not just rant at them or use them to to score points? right, false equivalences banned. but it's just amazing how autonomic the partisanship is, how impossible it for obama or his opponents to lay it aside even for a single sentence. is there anything in anyone's head at all except the desire to manipulate their listeners? it's all 'framing' and strategies born in communications programs. they focus-grouped the frame of the shutdaown as an economic crisis; now it'll be in every sentence. if i were actually sitting around with barack i'd ask him this: look back on the moment you declared your candidacy for president: what would that person say about the way barack obama conducts himself now?

alright, i'm going to admit that for some time i have been pondering how one might introduce "fiery explosions" - or indeed, explosions of any kind - into the nsa data center: you know, just casually turning over various ideas in my mind. not, of course, that i would actually commit such a crime...unless i could figure out something that would work and leave me alive. indeed, i would say that anyone who is even vaguely an american or a decent human being must have been having such thoughts. but, evidently there's no need: the thing keeps fierily exploding on its own. i think these explosions are little warnings from on high. i probably can't do anything about the absolute end of human freedom, but if there is a god, then he in turn has the nsa under surveillance. and if he is a just god, the whole complex and all its devices and monstrous totalitarian enthusiasts will be thoroughly immolated and sucked into hell, like rihanna in this is the end. 

obviously, the administration can keep open whatever bits of the government it pleases. e.g. chuck hagel recalled the defense department. and though they have suspended many programs that help people, they have preserved all oppressive mechanisms: the military, fbi, our amazing structure of universal surveillance. so let me ask you this: does or does not the budget of the us government have to originate in and spending be authorized by the house of representatives? i propose not at all, and if congress went on strike, the whole thing would just keep right on. obama seems to be shutting down bits in the order in which it makes for the best propaganda, but i don't detect the limits: what can he not spend without authorization, etc? anyway, if you think the constitution has any connection to the way this sucker is actually governed, i say you're wrong. it's like, you know, the soviet constitution: a beautiful model of reason and freedom that had nothing to do with anything in the actual world.

ladar levison, who shut down his secure email provider lavabit - snowden's provider - rather than turn over his encryption keys, is rather heroic.

i've rather neglected martin buber in my philosophical wanderings, though on a number of occasions people who have heard my schtick (esp with regard to metaphysics or ontology) have been all like, "you better go read buber". at any rate, in this rather stunning bit from the third part of i and thou, i recognize my sort of position: 

All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of a human spirit bent back on itself - the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not.

the context is a discussion of the teachings of the buddha, and 'doctrines of immersion' are doctrines according to which we have to more or less annihilate ourselves to achieve an identity with things, or with the world, or with god. buber thinks such views actually presuppose a human spirit trapped in itself, and no human spirit is trapped in itself; it is always in transaction, or it is a series of transactions. for philosophy-heads: this also appears to be an expression of externalism about the mind, or at rate the spirit (whatever that may be, exactly; anyway, it's not much more mysterious than mind).