johnsabotta

(A response to a person who in email who seemed to think II was encouraging racism and lynching by declining to support the One. Reproduced here, for all the good it'll do.)

Your suggestions that I am a racist, or that I would like to blow up
mosques, seem to preclude any meaningful dialogue. I am already
surrounded by Democrat Party agitprop 24-7 and I don't really need any
more by e-mail. But here goes anyway -

You also fail to mention which political party was generally in power
in those states where lynching occurred. Here's a hint - it starts with
a "D". Of course, it's claimed that the Southern Democrats became
racist Republicans and it's true that a Jesse Helms is no more
acceptable with a "R" after his name than a "D". However, racism is a
form of collectivism, just like socialism. In fact, the two have been
combined before (see "National Socialism", or the more fascistic
varients of "feminism") Racism is incompatible with individual
freedom, just like socialism. Just prior to the civil war, a radical
defender of Southern slavery said that the Southern slaveholders were
the only "true socialists" and he thought that slavery was such a
humane institution that it should be extended to include the poor
white masses. The modern inheritors of this ideology are the white
authoritarian liberal establishment, and Obama is their
representative.

The liberal vision is of everyone dependent on the state - which means
enslaved by the state. Universal health care, for example, is only
practical if you control what people eat and how they live. Everything
the State offers comes with a price, and that price is your freedom.
And not only your freedom, but that of everyone else. You walk into a
voting booth and try to take away other people's money and liberties.
This is wrong in itself, but at the same time you forge the chains of
your own servitude.

In a world where a upper class of liberal bureaucrats manage and
regulate and control a mass of dependent clients, and where economic
activity is restricted to better enable political control, Obama is
necessarily the enemy of any real aspirations of any black person to a
better life. The great fear of the Southern slaveocracy was that poor
whites and black slaves would associate with each other and realize
that their common enemy was the white slaveholder. The common enemy of
both the "red-state" white voters and black voters is the authoritarian
liberal who seeks to enslave both of them - for "their own good", of
course. The great tragedy of this final Presidential election is that
the accidental fact of Obama's race obscures this. Of course, the
Democrat Party wants as much racial hatred in this election as
possible, for just this reason. And it is their political line you are
repeating.

Of course, segregation and racism are vile. I live in a city run by
and for the sole benefit of white upper middle class liberals, who
detest and loathe black people, Asians and Jews almost as much as they
detest and loathe working-class and rural whites. The black minority
is barely tolerated in this city only if it keeps quiet and always
votes Democrat. If anybody dares to open a hip hop club in this town
they are quickly harassed and shut down by the police, who are
responsible to our very liberal mayor. If a worthless light rail line
is built, is is planned so as to run right through the, uh, less pale
sections of town, displacing and ruining Asian and Black businesses. I
once had the extreme displeasure of hearing a white liberal former
friend of mine - a Democrat party worker, aide to Democrat bitch Marie
Cantwell - go on at length about the natural supposed inferiority of
black people, how they had to be controlled for their own good, how he
was worried about black kids coming up to Ballard specifically to sell
drugs to his daughter, etc, etc. This person also told me that the
basis of his political philosophy was that "the smart people" should
rule. To hell with that.

The Republican party is a shambling, hopeless wreck of a party, a
party that has fumbled and compromised and betrayed every principle it
ever claimed to stand for. The Democrat Party is something worse. We
stand, literally, on the edge of the abyss. Character is destiny, and
the character of the electorate is truly it's destiny. Driven by fear,
hatred and cowardice, the voters will enthrone Obama, with their hands
spread out to catch all the free money they think will come falling
from the sky. What they will get instead will be something entirely
different. And it will be no more than what they deserve for betraying
the principles of liberty this country was supposedly founded on. I
just wish I didn't have to see it.

A conversation

I desire only peace and niceness. This is also true of my little friend, that
adorable strategic weapon "lung", but she can be unpleasant if crossed.

In fact, let's open the curtains on the theatre of
the imagination and follow our little friend (rubbery, three feet high,
round head, painted-on dot eyes,...) as she walks along with a donut in
one giant, cartoonish hand.

(Note: the character of "Who Cares?" in this skit is a mere figment, a
bagatelle, a fiction, and is not meant to resemble the "real" Who Cares,
noted moral philosopher)


LUNG thinks for a few minutes.



An ominous buzzing sound fills the air



We draw the curtains of the theatre of imagination on the rest of this
increasingly lurid scene and observe that perhaps niceness and goodness
are the best policy after all.

BATTLE OF THE WORLDS (Il Pianeta degli Uomini Spenti - 1961) is directed by Antonio Marguereti (as "Anthony Dawson") and it is set in some beautifully shabby future, where power substations are really spaceship ports, where people wear designer-y futuristic costumes but otherwise obviously nothing has changed since 1962 and where there is a UN World State but it is run by an incompetent but confident Commission staffed by ghosts, who only appear via blurry black and white television transmissions.

Advising the ghost regime is the only scientist in the world, Claude Rains, who grows flowers and scrawls formulae on plant pots in his hothouse. He is the only person in the film who has his own voice - everyone else has someone else's voice. He seems several times more alive than anyone else, and in my opinion may well be a demigod of some kind, although this isn't recognised. He can predict the future and knows hidden knowledge because he is the only person in the future who remembers calculus.

Menacing this vague future is a wandering planet, sending out creepy flying saucers, communicating via the music of the spheres. (Rains specifically references Pythagoras, who no one else seems to have ever heard of)  The wandering planet is shown to be run by nobody at all, the original inhabitants having been "destroyed by radioactivity". The wandering planet's  central artificial intelligence is nothing but a lighting effect, or maybe just a trick of the light, like everything else.

All this is given an eerie haunted quality by the combined electronic noise/Eurojazz score.

It's possible that the time period intended is our own. If true, it is vastly preferable in every respect to our own actual situation.


"Well, there's nothing new. People are born, and others die every day. Business seems as usual. In fact, the world goes on. It remains the same. You haven't missed anything while you've stayed here in your own world."

-from DANZA MACABRE, (1964) directed by Antonio Margheriti.

“And they lived happily ever after,” says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind ”acts dumb” toward the myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man. The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarizes Mut, courage, dividing it dialectically into Untermut, that is, cunning, and Ubermut, high spirits.) The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy."

- Walter Benjamin

Okay. Whatever.

The unfortunate B.K. Marcus risks getting spattered here.

In this essentially trivial dispute, the fat loudmouthed asshole magician is probably wrong and the hateful old pseudo-libertarian, pseudo-Christian theocrat is probably right. Even an argument as inane as "which fucking boring-ass juggler is least obnoxious" has a right answer and a wrong answer. (as the late A. Rand, presently discussing literature, butterflies and amphetamines behind the cypress curtain with Vera and Vladimir, would remind us.)

Even so, they are both dirty swine, and they richly deserve each other. (And if B.K. Marcus, poor fellow, thinks Gary "Everybody Must Get Stoned" North is really any kind of libertarian, he isn't reading very carefully.)

Thanksgiving

For all, for all I thank you:
For the secret pangs of passions,
For the bitterness of tears,
for the poison of the kiss,
For the revenge of enemies
and the calumny of friends;

For my soul's ardor wasted in a desert,
For all the things that have deceived me here.
Just make it so that from now onward
Not for too long I'll keep on thanking you.

Mikhail Lermentov, 1840

(Translation courtesy of Alexei, the Russian Dilettante

"The structure is a full-scale replica of England's famous neolithic Stonehenge. A Quaker pacifist, Hill was mistakenly informed that the original Stonehenge had been used as a sacrificial site, and thus constructed the replica to remind us that ''humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war.'' - Maryhill Museum



S. and I visited that Stonehenge (the one on the Columbia) years ago (after a road trip where we looked at big dams and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. In those days S. dressed in her Tom Wolfe-esque white suit and vest and, I - well, I looked like I always do, which is nothing worth mentioning.

The sun was going down, and when I noticed the plaques I got the creepy feeling that some, at least, of the people mentioned were actually buried somewhere on the grounds, although in fact that is not the case.

Thinking that gave rise to private unspoken and unpleasant speculations on what you might expect to happen if you did bury someone under a replica of Stonehenge, and so on, and so forth.

S. - descendent of Mormon sorcerers and gunfighters, philosophy and mathematics major and former punk rock girl, well versed in matters exoteric and esoteric - was unconcerned about either the living or the dead, however.


( Mr. Ludlow's comments, as reproduced in the Wikipedia article, can only be described as "shabby", considering how well Ludlow - awful journalist and opium addict - was treated by Rockwell and others while in Utah. Prudently, Fitzhugh Ludlow waited until he was well away from Zion, West, before indulging in his nasty mischaracterization. )

( When accused of shooting Lilburn Boggs, former Governor of Missouri, Porter's defense of the alleged assassination attempt was, "He's still alive, ain't he?")

The viewpoint expressed in the following excerpt is one I do not necessarily accept.

Nevertheless, the seemingly backwards peasantry Carlo Levi writes about knew right from wrong, rejected a cruel and unjust war in Ethiopia and displayed kindness towards the persecuted while their betters rejoiced in the dubious glories of Benito Mussolini's Fascism.

In these latter days of the Law, in which I observe supposedly enlightened individuals wallowing in displays of vile racism, dishonest and malign stupidity and moral cowardice - it's not nothing. How could people with such a poor philosophical and political background be better than the shining lights of freedom and liberty on our futuristic World Wide Web? What's gone wrong?

Something, I suppose, for the planners of floating cities, free-state projects and liberty-providing enterprises to think about. Or not. As if it mattered.

"Everyone knows" they said "that the fellows in Rome don't want us to live like human beings. There are hailstorms, landslides, droughts, malaria and...the State. These are inescapable evils; such there always have been and there always will be. They make us kill off our goats, they carry away our furniture, and now they're going to send us to the wars. Such is life!"

To the peasants the State is more distant than heaven and far more of a scourge, because it is always against them. Its political tags and platforms and, indeed, the whole structure of it do not matter...Their only defense against the State and the propaganda of the State is resignation, the same gloomy resignation, alleviated by no hope of paradise, that bows their shoulders under the scourges of nature.

For this reason, quite naturally, they have no conception of a political struggle; they think of it as a personal quarrel among the "fellows in Rome." They were not concerned with the views of the political prisoners who were in compulsory residence among them, or with the motives for their coming. They looked at them kindly and treated them like brothers because they too, for some inexplicable reason, were victims of fate. During the first days of my stay whenever I happened to meet along one of the paths outside the village an old peasant who did not know me, he would stop his donkey to greet me and ask in dialect: "Who are you? Where are you going?" "Just for a walk; I'm a political prisoner," I would answer. "An exile?"(They always said exile instead of prisoner.) Too bad! Someone in Rome must have had it in for you." And he would say no more, but smile at me in a brotherly fashion as he prodded his mount into motion."

...The deities of the State and the city can find no worshipers here on the land, where there is no wall between the world of men and the world of animals and spirits, between the leaves of the trees above and the roots below...

..."Too bad! Someone had it in for you" You, too, are subject to fate. You too, are here because of the power of ill will, because of an evil star; you are tossed hither and yon by the hostile workings of magic. And you too, are a man; you are one of us. Never mind what motives impelled you, politics, legalities or the illusion of reason. Such things as reason or cause and effect, do not exist; there is only an adverse fate, a will for evil, which is the magic power of things. The State is one shape of this fate, like the wind that devours the harvest and the fever that feeds on our blood. There can be no attitude towards fate except patience and silence. Of what use are words? And what can a man do? Nothing.
- from CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, by Carlo Levi

After all, his rights are "sorta up for grabs", are they not?
From one of Mr. Henke's loathesome posts at qando.net, quoting another dirty swine by the name of "Max Borders":

[This] means that the moral status of those outside of our political “rights compact,” is sort of up for grabs. Notions of rights outside of our political regime become a fabrication of foreign policy expedience or PR-speak — and are often necessary and useful ones as in the case of human rights.

(From the Nikolai Getman Collection)

This is one of the few paintings in the collection that depicts an event or circumstance which Getman did not actually witness. It is dedicated to Aleksandr Getman, the artist’s brother, who was executed on December 1, 1934—more than likely having been led down a dimly lit corridor and shot in the back, in a basement where few were likely to hear. Aleksandr Getman was among a group tried as spies and dissidents operating out of Leningrad. All the victims of this trial were later reportedly rehabilitated—that is, had their names and public standing restored. The artist is intent on seeing his brother's name restored officially and publicly. His campaign to thus memorialize his brother has so far been frustrated, however, both by the Soviet government and now by the Russian government.

There is plenty of science about hardwired modules in the brain. For example, there are several books about people with localized brain damage, say because of trauma, where the effect is to take away some weird tiny little ability. Like "The ability to recognize faces", "the ability to notice cheating", etc. Plus we can watch the brain with imaging systems while people think. Plus we can test people and find specific, limited areas of irrationality. - Patri Friedman

We live in an age of evil magic - S. A. Nelson

Evil is real, even if magic is not. By "evil magic", my friend S. refers to coercive magic, any kind of attempt to forcibly destroy a human being's free capacity to choose. This evil desire has a long history. The naive observer, fed on sentimental stories, sees a "love spell" as something frivolous, harmless, even romantic. The truth is quite different:

"... I deposit this binding spell with you, chthonian gods -- Pluto and Kore...who holds the keys to those in Hades, and chthonic spirits (and) gods, and those who suffered an untimely death, boys and maidens, year by year, month by month, day by day, night by night, hour by hour. I adjure you, all spirits in this place, to assist the ghost. Rouse yourself for me, ghost, whoever you are, whether male or female, and go into every place, into every quarter, into every house, and bind Kopria, ... the hair of whose head you have, for Ailourion, ...that she may not submit to vaginal nor anal intercourse, nor gratify another youth or another man except Ailourion only,...and that she may not even be able to eat nor drink nor ever get sleep nor enjoy good health nor have peace in her soul or mind in her desire for Ailourion..." (Part of a spell, or defixio found inscribed on a lead tablet, Egyptian, 2nd to 4th century AD written in demotic Greek. From Traditions of Magic In Late Antiquity

It is obvious enough that love has nothing to do with this sort of spell; it might more accurately be described as a rape spell. The reader is informed that:

The extant recipe calls for the preparation of two voodoo dolls -- of an armed male and a naked female, down on her knees with her hands tied behind her back -- and for the penetration of the female figurine with 13 copper needles, in key points of her body. (One of the other defixiones of this type indeed was found together with a clay female figurine, with the needles still sticking out of her body.) Both the (now lost) figurine and the lead tablet (folded, to judge from the cracks) were deposited in the grave of someone who had died violently or prematurely, so that the restless ghost -- "whoever you are, whether male or female" -- would search for Kopria and "deliver" her into Ailourion's hands. To help the ghost in its task, something intimately connected with the victim -- in the present case, some of Kopria's hair -- was attached to the figurine. The mention of the protagonists' mothers, rather than fathers, is the normal procedure in such instances, presumably because one's mother is known for certain, while one's real father is not.

It is not necessary to actually believe in the efficacy of such a spell to recognize the malign intent, the combination of hatred and ugly desire that anyone would resort to such means must have felt. Writing on lead tablets does not really command "the cthonian gods" and the restless dead to torment a helpless victim until she is driven to submit - but whoever commissioned the work thought it did, and acted on that supposed knowledge. S. A. Nelson points out that the attitude is exactly that of the modern day stalker, who puts all the blame for his rejected advances on his beloved/victim, and who seeks both possession and revenge.

No one in late antiquity who cast such a spell could be described as innocent. But I think that modern day would-be sorcerers can often be described as innocent - fatally innocent, in that they do not understand the full moral implications of the pseudo-scientific magic they espouse. Take "memetics" for example - exactly how does it differ from the theory and practice of defixiones? The proponents of this pseudo-science believe that word-sequences can infect human thought, that these word-sequences can propagate themselves by reprogramming human brains. For "memes" read "spells". Could the "restless dead" do any better?

Memetics denies human choice, human personality in the same way that the defixiones deny or denigrate the possibility of genuine love between two human beings. The significant aspect of memetics is not, however, the crude attempts to denigrate rival opinions as a kind of mental infection, (mostly connected with religious belief) but with the largely unspoken ambition to reprogram the beliefs of others. Under "Memetic engineering" at Wikipedia we find this bland definition:

Memetic Engineering is the process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others.

If not an age of evil magic, then an age of evil would-be magicians. And yet, doesn't it come to the same thing in the end? The intent is the same. I do not believe that human beings can be reprogrammed by "memes", any more than I believe that they can be compelled by "Pluto and Kore and the restless dead." But in 2nd century AD Egypt, people believed in the reality of coercive magic, and the terror and suffering caused by this belief must have been considerable.

Belief in the new pseudo-scientific coercive magic of "memetics" is the same sort of hopeless superstition. Widespread acceptance of devil theories (as David Stove has explicitly called Richard Dawkins' memetics theory) can lead to nothing good.

Patri Friedman is certainly an innocent. The reality of evil seems distant from him, and the darker implications of the fashionable pseudo-science he plays with escape him, because his motivations are not malign. In an Livejournal comments exchange, Friedman defends his belief in magical brain-programming modules (not, in this case, specifically "memetic") by claiming that "we can watch the brain with imaging systems while people think."

Belief in MRI imaging as the key to human consciousness is one of the new higher superstitions, along with personality tests like the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs (both of which have intellectual pedigrees about on the same level as the defixiones).


The true potential for terror and suffering implicit in these pseudo-sciences has not yet, I think, been fully realized. The Myers-Briggs test is an annoyance when seeking employment - but one could argue that any employer stupid enough to hire people on the basis of a test loosely based on the "work" of Carl "I believe in flying saucers" Jung is probably not long for solvency anyway. The Enneagram, that horrible thing, was directly responsible for one of the worst experiences of my life, but that's over and done with, now. These are minor evils, to be sure - although they contribute to the inexorable trend in modern thought, the denigration of the human individual by pigeonholing him into arbitrary and inadequate classification systems. But the MRI superstition is a slightly different matter, using as it does a legitimate clinical tool in the service of pseudo-scientific claptrap. Perhaps a story I heard recently might explain the difference a little more clearly.

I was talking to a friend of mine a few days ago when the subject of insanity happened to come up. I don't know exactly how we got started on this topic, but as we were driving back to Alethea's, he told me a story about someone he'd known a while back, someone who had started to hear voices.

"Nobody knew him very well" my friend said "We think he might have come from Germany, but nobody knew for certain." What was for certain was that he kept hearing the voices in his head, and that they kept telling him to do violent things. He went through the usual routine of therapy, I suppose, but his was one of those cases where nothing seemed to work, and where, finally, the only alternative left was a radical procedure. Since he had no family that anyone knew of, another person who knew him signed off on permission for the therapy.

The therapy, as described by my friend, involved placing the patient in a MRI scanning machine, and identifying areas of his brain that became active (supposedly) when he began hearing voices. Thus identified, these areas of his brain were destroyed with electrical current (or possibly some other procedure).

After this "therapy" the patient returned to the world. "You could tell he was damaged" my friend said "like he'd had a severe brain injury. It was real obvious." A necessary price to pay for the elimination of the voices, a drastic but unavoidable sacrifice, like cutting off a limb swollen with gangrene?

Well, except that within a year, the voices in his head came back anyway. It had all been for nothing. And the voices were bad enough, insistent enough, unbearable enough that the patient decided on his own therapy. This self-administered therapy consisted of plunging a blade into his stomach and disembowelling himself.

"After almost 30 years, Benedict Carey writes in the article linked above,"researchers have not developed any standardized tool for diagnosing or treating psychiatric disorders based on imaging studies." One wonders if the recipient of the benefits of the higher superstition, the benefits of the new "science" of brain imaging, had ever had occasion to read those measured words, or contemplate their meaning, or even to regret what he had exchanged in return for a false promise - as the steel sliced through his intestinal wall. Probably not.

"Damned nonsense - and nonsense that can damn."- G. K. Chesterton.