Listics

Niek Hockx points to a link that links up with Blackwater, the apotheosis of free marketry really.

Artie Shaw died.  Who knew he was 94?  Decline of the licorice stick…

Amy Wohl may be giving Jaron Lanier more credit than he has coming.  Based on what I heard at Accelerating Change, and what I’ve read most recently, I think the lad has stagnated.  The "debate" with Will Wright really wasn’t, and Wright would have eaten poor Jaron alive had they engaged in a clash of ideas.  Fortunately for all present, the exchange was mild and boring, a chance for the audience to bask in the presence of the cultural icons, a chance for the icons to chill and collect (one assumes) a decent honorarium for the chillage.

… and that Helen Keller, what a rabble rouser:

We are not free unless the men who frame and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the people and no other interest. The ballot does not make a free man out of a wage slave. There has never existed a truly free and democratic nation in the world. From time immemorial men have followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of money and of armies. Even while battlefields were piled high with their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have been robbed of the fruits of their labor. They have built palaces and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine of liberty.

Read this for a better understanding of visually dominant cultures.

And then as homework, prepare and present a paper on the importance of standards and why XML is a standard but RSS is not.

Secular humanism is generally a good thing and fundamentalist religion is generally a bad thing.  Humanists are all about opening, broadening, inclusion.  Fundamentalists are about closing, narrowing, exclusion.  Humanists support distinctions without prejudice.  Fundamentalist distinctions create prejudice.

The label of "secular humanist" has some baggage attached to it based on the bad press it gets from true believers.  Much like the invidious distinction that Limbaugh laid on us around the phrase "tax and spend liberalism," secular humanism is, in some quarters, thought to be a bad thing, faithless, a position to be avoided.

For me it is easy to posit a metaphysical context beyond my understanding.  I’m pretty good in three spatial and one temporal dimension.  Beyond that, it starts to get metaphysical.  But so far it hasn’t required a god for me to grasp that there are limits to my sensoria and my understanding.  On the other hand, the concept of god, the joy, the love, the boundless concern and care we can share with each other, these things have a spiritual aspect that I enjoy.

In the United States, we assert a constitutional separation of church and state under the first and fourteenth amendments to the constitution.  There are those that would tear down this wall, people who assert that their biblical beliefs should be taught in public schools, and worse - that information contrary to their beliefs should NOT be taught, or should somehow be qualified as contrary to their precepts.

I think we should respect these people.  I think we should put all their churches’ property on our local property tax rolls and tax their churches’ income, and exercise eminent domain over any holdings that could be used for community purposes and respect their rights to have a say in the way our public schools are run.  They are, after all, citizens, and by putting their church property on the tax rolls they will have a stake in the game.

Here in Madison we have some lovely church properties that we could assess at a fair market value and improve our ability to fund the teaching of evolution, and the public health provision of sexual health care including birth control and abortions.

Nietzsche’s trivial attempt at linguistic equivalence notwithstanding (schlecht and schlicht and the rest of that reductive nonsense based on some 18th century epistemology unframed by linguistic anthropological referents, yet good enough for a gaggle of French Pomos to eat out on for a decade or two after Danny the Red did his thing on the barricades in Paris in 1968), "Good - Evil" is really not the axis or the boundary condition that we want to examine.  "Good - Bad" is good enough.  Juxtaposing simple Good with Evil is overly dramatic, and bespeaks a dark metaphysics even as the originator denies the brighter aspects of theism.

But it’s XMas Eve so let’s share some seasonal pleasantries.  I hope everyone is having a very happy XMas and that you can accept these good wishes whether or not you have theistic leanings (or worship fire for that matter), and if you do "believe" then please accept my good wishes regardless of the name and/or number of the god, gods, godess and/or godesses that you humble yourself before.

And I think it was a nice thing the innkeeper did, freeing up some space in the stable back then so the pregnant woman and her guy would have a place to sleep.  I wonder if they told him about the contractions and how close together they were coming.

But let’s get back to Fred…

…Nietzsche feels that value
judgments are not, in fact, based upon consideration of the useful, but rather
upon the relation of a "ruling class" to a lower, servant class.

Nietzsche is here concerned with the meaning of the pair of words "good"
and "bad"; this pair of words has a different meaning than the pair "good" and
"evil." In the former case, "good" is associated with the concept of the noble
class, and "bad" is associated with the concept of the peasant class. That
this association is historically correct is borne out by the history of
language and the relations between words; for instance, in German the word for
"bad" is schlecht, and the word for "simple" (i.e., peasantlike) is schlicht,
and for a time, these terms were used interchangeably.

from:
Works of Nietzsche: The Genealogy Of Morals: Essay 1
by Nietzsche, Friedrich

source: Monarch Notes, January 1, 1963.

via: HighBeam Research

It’s 1963, the Monarch Notes have just been published, and within a year I’m due  to matriculate at the University of Wisconsin with a host of red diaper babies and New Yorkers who wanted to be at Brandeis or Columbia or some place, but who had also applied to UW as a safety net.  One of the first things I’ll learn will be to avoid the "value judgment."

One of the next things I’ll learn will be that Nietzsche was a fellow who lent force to the arguments of fascism.  Of course I am a big Wagner fan myself.  And it seems like between Nitezsche and Wagner and Bayreuth and the powerful chords and tragic foreshadowing of the entire Wagnerian oeuvre even the Bush family should have seen the downside associated with Hitler, but I digress.

Good and Bad exist as pegs on which to hang value judgments. My preference is for Good, but I can identify if you pick Bad.  There’s usually more money in it.  And Bad often addresses certain appetites that go unfed on a diet of Good.

So I’d like to bring good and bad back into the discussion, value judgments aside.  If I think it’s good and you think it’s good, then it’s probably good.  But if we think it’s good and they think it’s bad, then we need to talk about that with them.  Maybe we’ll find that our framework has been turned upside down and what we thought was good is really bad.  Or maybe - more’s the pity, we’ll find that that we are pretty sure is good doesn’t fit some metaphysical frame of reference that they are working with, so it will be tough to find that common ground of agreement.  These pivotal moments are usually the times when I hope they don’t kill me. 

I’m unlikely to kill them.  But how do they know that?  Really.  (Aw, heck… we’re moving forward to Easter, and we haven’t even busted into the stollen yet).   Jesus who was born that night in Bethlehem lived thirty-three years and his followers have laid out an annual calendar that commemorates all the different parts of his life in a single year.  I wonder if there would have been less damage over the millenia if the church calendars had been less compressed.

So what’s good, and what’s bad… how do we find agreement and how do we move forward advancing the good and reducing the bad?  Tune in for another chapter next week boys and girls.