Listics

Pope-a-dope alert.  The discriminating reader will skip this post. 

Ratzo is a brilliant, cultivated man, who in later life, like some kind of hippie, has changed his name from the harsh "Ratzinger" to the more mellifluous "Benedict," a reminder of catholic culture and fine liqueur.

I was ready to lay this down, but there’s an echo of "So, he was a Nazi… heck, everybody was in those days" floating around the room like a dog-fart that won’t go away.  Somebody let the divine rottweiler our for some air please.  Actually, not everybody was a Nazi in Bavaria.  For sure the Jews and gypsies had a hard time joining the party, and homosexuals and communists were socially disadvantaged.  But even regular old lederhosen and hassenpfeffer dudes could stand aside if they chose to follow their conscience:

There were boys in Traunstein and in the surrounding area who managed
to avoid being in the Hitler Youth. Rupert Berger is the same age as
Ratzinger and was ordained as a priest in the same class and seminary
as Ratzinger in 1951. Berger’s father was sent to a concentration camp
for a month because of his anti-Nazi activities; his son refused to
join the youth organization.

[Berger said] "There were teachers who exerted pressure and also other teachers
who were against the Hitler Youth.  My father said, ‘I give you the
freedom to choose.’  …The majority went. That does not make all of them Nazis … I wouldn’t
say that Ratzinger made a choice. He rather slipped into the Hitler
Youth thing."

My argument isn’t with Ratzo, nor even especially with catholicism.  Rather, the whole cultural morass of deism is what gives me trouble.  I was ferreting around for references to "epistemology" and I came across this thread o’ links…
Epistemology
Certitude - reminding me of Doc’s none too flattering classification of yours truly as a "certidude" a few years ago when the Iraq war had just begun.
Truth - this link is where things got thorny for me, because for some people "truth" seems to be founded in something called "god." 

Every existing thing is true, in that it is the expression of an idea which exists in the mind of God, and is, as it were, the exemplar according to which the thing has been created or fashioned.

Rather than starting with Thomas Aquinas, a man who lacked the experience of the 17th century and times since, these people ought to seriously consider starting with Bertrand Russell.  And perhaps if Ratzinger had been willing to subordinate his own reason to ethical considerations in the thirties and forties, he would have been a better man for it.

yes, yes, I’m making leaps here… this is a blog posting during break time for goodness sakes…

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory,
well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the
Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier."

- Carol Lloyd

Alex Golub shares with us, "Shooting Snowy," a farce of post-modern anthropological proportions… and a good shaggy dog story too.

I think you have to make a distinction between America’s attitude to
communication and involvement with communication before World War I and after World War I. It’s not just that the technology changes, which it does, and it’s not just that America’s hold on communications changes, for example with the relocation of the centre of world film-making to America as a result of World War I.

It’s
also that something happened during World War I and that something is
the involvement with propaganda. The Creel Committee, during World War
I was dominant in the use and development of propaganda in the United
States, and in fact produced a very boastful report about how powerful
their propaganda efforts had been. Now what they did in America of
course, was to produce a new sensitivity to the potential of
propaganda, the manipulation of opinion if you like, to influence the
way in which a society developed.
- Graeme Osborn

Get it straight folks.  The post-postmodern religious frenzy has fed our frenzied flight from reality, encouraged lame dishonesty and the growth of single superpower situational imperialism.  Pomo was dead-dead-dead by the time in 1986 when the New York Times Sunday Magazine was featuring its incomprehensible write-up of deconstructionism at Yale.  Since then, the thing has been all Popo… post-postmodern.  So kill your pomo bullshit before it kills you.  Get a grip on all that is Po-po and let that shit go-go too.  Our only hope is to catch up intellectually and transcend the stunted philosophies that have emerged since the carrying capacity of the planet’s human population was exceeded around 1966.  We have to get in touch with what is happening right now… then… I mean now… at this-that moment.  Slippery little suckers, moments.

By the late 1980s many of those involved with deconstruction could recall having read a few articles in mass-circulation publications that grappled with their work, but they were the same few articles: a feature in Newsweek in 1981, a book review in The New Republic in 1983, and a profile of the "Yale School" of literary criticism in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. Seventeen, then twenty years after it first landed on these shores, The New Republic and the Times Magazine pieces earned "Deconstruction" its first two references in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (between "Decomposition" and "Decorated eggs").

The word "deconstruction" has received considerably more play recently. Indeed, it has managed to follow "existentialism" as one of the few terms to escape the terra incognita of the graduate schools and become a fairly regular visitor to the pages of newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, for example, recently referred, twice in a few days, to the "deconstruction" of the boxer Mike Tyson. But such references don’t do much to increase readers’ understanding.

from:
Deconstruction and the get-real press. (literary theory)
by Stephens, Mitchell

source: Columbia Journalism Review, September 1, 1991.

via: HighBeam Research

COPYRIGHT 1991 Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism

How long has it been since I opened up Wealth Bondage and immersed myself in the learned discourse there?  Too long.

And how long has it been since I’ve confronted the orange jump-suit with the guy in the Big Purple Hat?  I’ve been too long not there too, as I was reminded when I read this Mayosan interview with K!

And how would I have found that interview if I hadn’t been lingering over the number ten new voices pick at Brian Moffatt’s?  And when I read Mayosan’s comment about ten new voices in ten minutes and realized I still had three new voices to find I felt a moment’s insecurity, a bit of queasiness of the kind you might feel when you know somebody has nailed your inner greedball.  Or maybe you’ve never felt that moment of insecurity, being so well armed with self-esteem and all.

So here I am, muttering small talk at the wall.  Anybody seen the jewels and binoculars anywhere?

"…Habermas, defender of whatever can be rescued from the broken illusions of the Enlightenment."

Why does that sound like bullshit to me?

"Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital
revolution. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies
that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes
to organizing information in the digital world. Without trees, how will
we organize college curricula, business org charts, the local library,
and the order of species? How will we organize knowledge itself?"

Score a copy of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 to read David Weinberger’s taxonomy-to-tags piece.

Betty writes about the game she is developing:  "The objective of this game is to collect the most happiness for the least amount of work without going broke."  Her cousin Norm posts today a complete essay by Jonathan Rose, "The Classics in the Slums."  Buried deep in this essay, we find the following homage to Thomas Carlyle:

No doubt Thomas Carlyle was a cranky male supremacist, but for
Elizabeth Bryson (b. 1880), the daughter of an impoverished Dundee
bookkeeper, he offered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the
point of explosion by the fire of words." Carlyle’s "gospel of work" so
inspired her that she was driven to win a university degree and become
a distinguished New Zealand physician.

Another cranky male, although no supremacist, has been taking Carlyle to task in these parts for his unmitigated racism, among other things.  The Carlyle/Emerson bond and the puerility of privileged Brahmin transcendentalism rub Chris the wrong way.  There’s a not so subtle irony here considering that Chris Locke, one of our era’s more profound non-conformists, feels such antipathy for one we might judge his intellectual progenitor.

Emerson can’t be all bad.  He gave Thoreau a place to crash more than once.

By his personal example Thoreau put into practice the Transcendentalist
principles of self-reliance, personal integrity, and spontaneous
intuition. About the uplifting spiritual energy within he wrote,
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
For Thoreau philosophy was not clever logic or formulating a doctrine,
"but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."
He exhorted, "Explore thyself." We must learn to obey
the laws of our own being which will never be in opposition to
a just government. Thoreau’s great innovation is in the ways he
suggested for opposing an unjust government in order to be true
to the higher laws of one’s own being.

Today Dan Gillmor reminds us that Free Speech Belongs to Us All. 

…in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest
of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to
peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of
liberty.

I’ve had some professional training and some higher education (hoo boy was it higher! esp. the part in the sixties~)  but my practice is that of the autodidact.  The sad news is that my memory is shot and my rationality ain’t that grand and I use cheap shot ad hominem debating tactics so all this autodidacticism goes for naught… I am at best a legend in my own mind.  I don’t remember a single line of Rupert Brooke.  The satire of Thomas Love Peacock is lost on me.  When Norm’s uncle loaned me Hersey’s The Child Buyer back in 1960, I read the book and promptly forgot every word. When Betty’s husband loaned me Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions eight or ten years later.  I stashed it and only read it while I was blowing dope.  This is not a course I’d recommend for the serious student.  This is not even a course I’d recommend for someone who simply wants to lead a happy life.  I don’t recall ever returning that book.

Not that I didn’t enjoy it.  The weed I mean… I don’t remember a word of the Kuhn.  But I think I inhaled more deeply and more often than Bill and Hillary and you see where that got us.  I live in this little rat shack on the swamp and they live in the posh totty suburbs not too far from Manhattan.

These days I read all there is to read of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Larry McMurtry… oh and Tom Wolfe, and all the great airport novelists like Grisham and Clancy.  Sometimes I get stuck reading Feynman and recently I’ve been forced to swallow great chunks of theory of mesh wireless networking talk and such, but that’s in hopes of staying employable.

One thing most of these novelists aren’t doing is exercising their rights of free speech very strenuously.  You have to go to bloggers like Chris Locke, Norm Jenson, and Dan Gillmor for that.

I do read a lot of blog posts too I guess.