Time to Secede

[lI1|1!]

time to

[STP]

brilliant, really. even rousseau would be impressed.

 

Rousseau? Eh? Is this some dig on the French Revolution and the resulting Reign of Terror?

 

The way I see it, the Revolution signaled the end of the Ancien Regime by breaking the stranglehold of the Clergy and Monarchy over the People, and saw the consequent rise of a new order along the lines of Montesquieu.

 

Anarchy? Voltaire distrusted democracy as the idiocy of the masses and rather supported the idea of an enligtened depotism.

 

As far as the Reign of Terror, this seems more the prevalence of emotion over rationalism. But as the National Socialists showed, rationalism applied incorrrectly can also be destructive.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2008 by STP

[bradleym]

brilliant, really. even rousseau would be impressed.

 

Rousseau? Eh? Is this some dig on the French Revolution and the resulting Reign of Terror?

 

The way I see it, the Revolution signaled the end of the Ancien Regime by breaking the stranglehold of the Clergy and Monarchy over the People, and saw the consequent rise of a new order along the lines of Montesquieu.

 

Anarchy? Voltaire distrusted democracy as the idiocy of the masses and rather supported the idea of an enligtened depotism.

 

As far as the Reign of Terror, this seems more the prevalence of emotion over rationalism. But as the National Socialists showed, rationalism applied incorrrectly can also be destructive.

 

 

Not at all. I was thinking more of 'state of nature' discussions and the common assumption in the 'aren't we terrible' books and videos that neither cavemen or native americans or any other 'savage' peoples ever imposed their will on the weak, or took something that wasn't theirs. standard old-school hobbes v. locke type of stuff.

 

i do have an interest in the FR, a complex subject that is beyond my powers to sum up in a sentence or two, though I think it had little to do with either Montesquieu, Voltaire or Rousseau. start with this: compare and contrast Lynn Hunt and Francois Furet.

[Fairweather]

i do have an interest in the FR, a complex subject that is beyond my powers to sum up in a sentence or two,

 

Um...they liked the revolution they saw over here, tried it, and let it go horribly wrong? :head in basket emoticon:

 

[STP]

i do have an interest in the FR, a complex subject that is beyond my powers to sum up in a sentence or two, though I think it had little to do with either Montesquieu, Voltaire or Rousseau. start with this: compare and contrast Lynn Hunt and Francois Furet.

 

You're absolutely right, there are historical currents, and more people and more ideas than can be identified solely with those three.

 

Why not use broad brush strokes to depict the Revolution? If you had to sum it up then say, it was a revolt again the excesses of the power establishment. So, in a sense, it's similar to other events such as Luther's Reformation. And that, is what the video and the movie are all about: to break the social ideological restraints that confine your normal way of thinking.

 

Dr. Leary was right. The Internet, as it is, permits someone to go beyond the restrictions of the conditioning imposed by prior education, allowing access to enormous amounts of information and ideas. Sometimes it's the novelty of ideas, other times it's another vector or method that allows ideas to get past your mental censors. And McKenna was right too about our culture being our operating system.

 

But I know, we're not talking about the same thing.

[bradleym]

i do have an interest in the FR, a complex subject that is beyond my powers to sum up in a sentence or two,

 

Um...they liked the revolution they saw over here, tried it, and let it go horribly wrong? :head in basket emoticon:

 

um, no, people were hungry in paris because bread was expensive, the government was broke from supporting the revolt of the american aristocracy, and the french aristocracy and intelligentsia proved less able than their american counterparts at containing class tensions and thus the directions the revolt might take.

 

there. happy?

[bradleym]

i do have an interest in the FR, a complex subject that is beyond my powers to sum up in a sentence or two, though I think it had little to do with either Montesquieu, Voltaire or Rousseau. start with this: compare and contrast Lynn Hunt and Francois Furet.

 

You're absolutely right, there are historical currents, and more people and more ideas than can be identified solely with those three.

 

Why not use broad brush strokes to depict the Revolution? If you had to sum it up then say, it was a revolt again the excesses of the power establishment. So, in a sense, it's similar to other events such as Luther's Reformation. And that, is what the video and the movie are all about: to break the social ideological restraints that confine your normal way of thinking.

 

Dr. Leary was right. The Internet, as it is, permits someone to go beyond the restrictions of the conditioning imposed by prior education, allowing access to enormous amounts of information and ideas. Sometimes it's the novelty of ideas, other times it's another vector or method that allows ideas to get past your mental censors. And McKenna was right too about our culture being our operating system.

 

But I know, we're not talking about the same thing.

 

i have always been uncomfortable with the simultaneous need to generalize coupled with the dangers of generalization, and my reaction to the video stems from its implicit claim: 'The history of the world in one easy step'.

 

and i agree that education ought to be a pathway to critical self-evaluation, but that too often it is a mental strait-jacket or a crutch used to support one's prejudices. to survey the simplistic propaganda that sometimes passes for historical texts, is to despair of ever demonstrating what history really is or could be. i don't think the answer, however, is to replace one form of mental essentialism with another.

 

let me amend my original critique. the video contains an interesting, and perhaps useful, assertion about how things came to be the way they are, but causation is complicated and slippery, so be thoughtful concerning its claims about the ultimate causes and consequences of societal power relations.

[STP]

Nietzsche said, "There are no facts, only interpretation." There's no statement on morality, whether right or wrong only that information becomes propaganda.

[bradleym]

Nietzsche said, "There are no facts, only interpretation." There's no statement on morality, whether right or wrong only that information becomes propaganda.

 

and foucault said 'my narrative oppresses your narrative'

 

and derrida said, wait, what the hell did derrida say?

 

i agree with nietzsche's assertion, btw.

[Dechristo]

One cannot secede until he parts from failure

[rbw1966]

"If at first you dont succeed, keep on sucking till you do succeed"

 

Curly, The Three Stooges

[j_b]

Not at all. I was thinking more of 'state of nature' discussions and the common assumption in the 'aren't we terrible' books and videos that neither cavemen or native americans or any other 'savage' peoples ever imposed their will on the weak, or took something that wasn't theirs. standard old-school hobbes v. locke type of stuff.

 

I am not sure what you meant w.r.t. to Rousseau but he didn't think that primitive people never imposed their will on the weak or never took stuff that wasn't theirs. Sauvage man was 'innocent' insofar whatever he did was for self-preservation by opposition to accumulating wealth or finding rewards/pleasure in diminishing/hurting others. The social contract permitted sauvage man to become an intelligent man but the terms of the contract are so skewed toward the interests of the elite that it is bound to fail.

[Fairweather]

"If at first you dont succeed, keep on sucking till you do succeed"

 

 

Isn't that a quote from GGK's babushka?

[bradleym]

Not at all. I was thinking more of 'state of nature' discussions and the common assumption in the 'aren't we terrible' books and videos that neither cavemen or native americans or any other 'savage' peoples ever imposed their will on the weak, or took something that wasn't theirs. standard old-school hobbes v. locke type of stuff.

 

I am not sure what you meant w.r.t. to Rousseau but he didn't think that primitive people never imposed their will on the weak or never took stuff that wasn't theirs. Sauvage man was 'innocent' insofar whatever he did was for self-preservation by opposition to accumulating wealth or finding rewards/pleasure in diminishing/hurting others. The social contract permitted sauvage man to become an intelligent man but the terms of the contract are so skewed toward the interests of the elite that it is bound to fail.

 

i don't mean to cast any aspersion on the gentle genevan. he just came to mind as a key figure in discussions about how to construct a society, and i think (i could mis-remember) that he proposed (or at least popularized the concept of) the 'noble savage', an idea that was all the rage among the intelligentsia for a while. He was a critic of the implicit 'progress' model that earlier writers in the so-called 'aufklarung' had proposed, and might be traced as a source for the idea expressed in the video that before people owned things, all were better off.

[STP]

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

 

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

 

Rousseau doesn't appear to actually use the term, noble savage. If it is virtue that is referred to when speaking of noble as an adjective, there seems to be a recognition that primitive man didn't necessarily have what we could say is a virtuous society.

 

However, that supposed state of innocence goes all the way back to Genesis prior to the later social changes, good and bad, which were largely fostered by urbanization and its consequent inequality. Time and again that sentiment reappears.

 

[video:youtube]P6IDoxi9QsE

 

The message in the other video is more about statism.

 

 

[j_b]

i don't mean to cast any aspersion on the gentle genevan. he just came to mind as a key figure in discussions about how to construct a society, and i think (i could mis-remember) that he proposed (or at least popularized the concept of) the 'noble savage', an idea that was all the rage among the intelligentsia for a while. He was a critic of the implicit 'progress' model that earlier writers in the so-called 'aufklarung' had proposed, and might be traced as a source for the idea expressed in the video that before people owned things, all were better off.

 

The 'innocent' savage is a more accurate description of Rousseau's thinking (he never uses noble) because he recognized that natural man could do immoral things in order to satisfy his 'true' needs. He especially thought of savage man as free and independent, attributes that according to him were lost in the transition to organized society. Although he makes it clear that trading freedom for some form of enlightenment is a bad deal for the majority of us, he didn't argue for statelessness, or a return to hunting and gathering, but he proposed a democratic republic (direct democracy) or more generally redrawing the social contract to make it more equitable. Thinking about this reminded me that many of Rousseau's ideas regarding the transition to agriculture and private property, are in fact consistent with that of some modern thinkers. For example, Jared Diamond states in "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race": [A]rchaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism,that curse our existence.

 

http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf

[prole]

 

I wasn't sure whether to post this here or in "the Republicans are doomed" thread. Either way, it works.

 

A losing southern strategy

By opposing a bail-out for the US auto industry, Senate Republicans have set their party up for long-term failure

 

 

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, the know-nothing wing of the Republican party (often known as 85% of the GOP) reared its cerebrum-less cranium to lash out at working people in the heartland by opposing the auto bail-out. On many levels, it should be no surprise that the same band of southern atavistic provocateurs who led the xenophobia brigades during the immigration debate – your DeMints (South Carolina), Vitters (Louisiana) and Shelbys (Alabama) – is now engaged in a war against working Americans and industrial capitalism.

 

For ethnic diversity, workers not being relegated to chattel-status and modern economics are hard ideas to grasp if one's mindset most closely mirrors a Little House on the Prairie episode.

 

Yes, for the very small minds of the Republican party's hard right, all roads – or dirt paths if they got their way on infrastructure funding – lead to one thing: self-interest. This is why these very same senators, who just happen to have foreign automakers in their states (quelle coincidence!), came out swinging against a bill to help those born right here in America. It is also why many of the very same people who can throw $700bn sans accountability at a meltdown of the financial markets, can refuse a $14bn loan to the car companies.

 

Let's face it: One industry has unions (the powerful United Auto Workers), which vote two-to-one for the Democratic party, and the other doesn't. One provides huge campaign contributions to the Republican party, the other provided many of the votes that toppled John McCain in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, the three states with the most jobs to lose if the US automakers were to crash.

 

What is astounding, really, is not how obtuse a group of middle-aged white Republican men who ostensibly represent us can be when diagnosing what ails our nation and providing a solution that will benefit the American public. From Iraq to Enron, Katrina to climate change, the thought-process of this clan would seem to provide evidence that they are among the first generation in their families to walk fully upright and not use stone-tipped spears to rustle up some breakfast.

 

What is truly surprising, however, is that even though they wish to act only in their own self-interest whatever the consequences, they are too numb-skulled to even know what that is.

 

Think about this for a second. You are a Republican senator from the south, a region whose relevance in national politics has once again been thrown into question by the fact that President-elect Barack Obama would have secured the election with over 300 electoral votes even if he had lost Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. Additionally, in theory, you'd like people to once again trust you with a congressional majority and the White House. Do you think that's going to happen if you send the economy reeling into a depression, caused by the three million lost jobs you caused when you told the Big Three to go to hell?

 

And then there is the geography. Even though Republicans from the rust belt, such as senators George Voinovich (Ohio), Dick Lugar (Indiana), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) and Kit Bond (Missouri), were smart enough to break with the more extreme elements of their party – which has lately become as regular a necessity as de-shoeing Iraqi reporters before a Bush press conference – if their state economies continue to decline, how do you think it's going to work out for those guys who are all up for re-election in 2010?

 

Oh, and try winning the electoral college by losing Michigan forever, alienating Ohio so that it becomes a solid blue state and pushing Indiana from leaning-Republican to leaning-Democratic. Now you're talking Bush budget math to even try and come up with a number that will approach 270.

 

Finally, putting aside the reality of today's international economy, with Toyota, BMW and other foreign car companies providing American jobs, when in the history of this country has a national party enhanced its standing by protecting foreign manufacturers at the expense of American ones?

 

It would seem, therefore, that the Republican Senate caucus may know too little to qualify as know-nothings.

 

The party with the moral high ground, or the one that is seen as trying to solve regular people's problems, is the one that triumphs in the US. Just try asking Republicans who opposed government intervention in the economy in the 1930s or the second world war in the 1940s – or Democrats who didn't draw a clear enough line between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

 

The Republican party is already going to have a difficult enough time proving itself after a disastrous eight years of Bush-mania that destroyed the party's brand. If they want to listen to a bunch of guys on economic policy who are better suited to stand on street corners and yell at passersby through a bullhorn – if not spend the better part of their days in padded rooms – well, that's their prerogative.

 

But if they do, then forget about these arguments over whether there will be 60 Democratic Senate seats in 2010 or how big a mandate Obama possesses. Instead, Republicans might want to start making plans for permanent tee-off times and Tanqueray brunches while losing their major party status over the next 10-20 years.

--from Guardian 12/18/08

[Peter_Puget]

and then there are modern savages......

 

[video:youtube]

[j_b]

Of course, here comes the red/terrorist-baiting routine from the service goon.

 

But it shouldn't be surprising after all:

The GOP's McCarthy gene