“And so what if he was Muslim?”

Ah, yes, reason, we can has some. Now, with this subject mostly quelled in the mainstream media due to Powell’s strong reasoning skills in this situation, all is well.

—

Oh, if only that were true. Not only has Obama been attacked as though his faith is in question, he has also been attacked as though his politics are in question.

Yes, the conservatives of this country have been bandying about that awful word of hatred. They’re calling Obama a S…
S…..

No, not Satanist, although, I hear Fox News thought McCain could have won the election if he had used that one. (Not to say he won’t win, it’s been a long time since America has had a legitimate election.)

Socialist.

Barack Obama is a socialist and he will bring those pinko commie freaks into the White House!

—

Now, let me take a step back a moment. I’d like to share a film with you. It’s an Encyclopedia Britannica filmstrip from 1946. It’s about a nations path to Despotism. It is positively Foucaultian in nature, and is distressing to watch and realize the people of 1946 in this country were obviously more well informed than our current population. Despotism, of course, being any government where all power is consolidated either in one person or an extremely small group of people. Now, here is said film:

—

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’d like to talk about the Respect Scale, which just so happens to be the first social scale discussed in this short film.

First of all, notice how respect (or the lack thereof) applies not only to race and religion, but also to political party. Strange, how it took until last week for one American to stand up for the Muslim religion, and yet, we have no one defending a certain specific political party from attack in this situation.

While Joe Biden defended comments recently from anchor Barbara West about whether Obama was indeed a Socialist, his best line of defense was a single line: “Is this a joke?”

Honestly, his answer was a good one, because it is utterly a joke to consider someone as centrist (in comparison to liberal socialists in other countries) as Obama to be a socialist. If Obama is the “bright center of the universe” then socialism is Tatooine, to make an un-needed Star Wars reference, but only such an astronomical distance can define such disparity in political ideologies.

However, no one has yet stood up to the country and said: “So what if he is socialist?” Has the Red Scare of the 1950’s returned? Or did it ever really leave?

We “fought communism and won,” or at least that’s how our educators like to frame the collapse of the Soviet Union, even though it truly slowly deflated like a flan in a cupboard, without need for external influence from the United States.

The Red Scare was the patently most absurd political theatre America has been put through (well, up until The War Against Terrorism [TWAT for short]), convincing Americans that socialism was not only anti-religion (which it is not, despite some communist regimes giving religion what-for.), but that the whole political and economic system was entirely dedicated to destroying America and its values. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it? No wonder, considering Donald Rumsfeld was involved in both the communist scare and the war against terrorism.)

The first was easier to instill in the population, pushing through quick legislation to add “In God We Trust” to our currency, to remind our citizens this is a Christian nation (not a Godless Atheist nation, nor apparently a Muslim nation.).

The second was more difficult and positively far more absurd because anyone with an ounce of sense realizes that nations are built from individuals, not from some hive-mind where every citizen of the nation knows that they have a distinct and specific purpose to which they all working toward. America would have had its citizens believe this, that you cannot trust anyone from a Communist nation, and anyone who is willing to consider themselves a socialist is not only a godless heathen but desperately wants to destroy your way of life.

—

What is truly disgusting about all this, to me, as a bastard atheist, is that while we defend a religion that in many nations advocates the death penalty for non-Muslims and will stone to death women who are raped, we are unwilling to defend an economic and political agenda that simply says “Hey maybe since we’re all on this shitty rock spinning through space together we should stop acting like fucking animals and share instead of hoard.”

So, Colin Powell, do me one better, give socialists some respect. Don’t give us more reason to believe we’re one pussy-hair’s width away from falling into full-on Despotism, instead, say what no one else has had the balls to say:

“So what if he is Socialist?”

What does it mean to put information to work? Information is put to work in computer models so that it might be used to predict events. The ability to predict is central to the concept of security. Analysis of information then becomes the production of security. The worldview of security, or making-predictable, recognizes that the movement of life, resources, and information is chaotic, yet it seeks to anticipate the movement of the noise by analyzing noise and patterns in a joint effort to win wars and make profits.

However, there is only so much value one can place on predictive models, and eventually, information bubbles burst.

in a way, this is a way for change.

the change that is an inevitable reaction to the failing of the international market created by the globalization of the last two decades may or may not be good for our ilk.

those who follow the these of illogical post operationalization.

perhaps, anyone who follows any ideals outside mainstream religion or politics.

the biggest question is: what kind era are we opening to?

—

this era is ending with rampant disillusionment. while it began with a few of us, who saw the crippling nature of our society long ago, ranting into the wind with no one paying attention, it is ending with us almost feeling smug and happy to finally watch it crumble.

we (in america especially) live in a society driven by entitlement and creature comfort. days after borrowing 85 billion from the Federal Reserve, AIG was found to be spending that money on golf retreats, facials, massages, and other things i will never have enough money to do in my entire life. while the stocks for companies like google, yahoo, and facebook were tanking, many of their respective members were too busy hanging out in a mansion on the Turkish coastline making drunk and stupid online videos to realize that all the people in their companies were going to be extremely fucking pissed when they got back into the good old u. s. of a.

—

so my question is this:

how do we direct the conversation of this change to focus on what labor is really worth. it seems that while many of these people made their fortunes with hard work, once the fortune was in their hands, they spent their days piddling around wasting money and expecting people who were being paid fuck-all to keep making money for them (surprisingly, Kevin Rose doesn’t spring to mind as he actually seems to still work on his website a good bit on a personal level.).

how do we really make people understand, that even with a great person running a company/corporation/what-have-you, who had great ideas and their ideas spurred this massive profit-producing behemoth; that these people, in their capacity to keep the company afloat, are only worth as much as those who work for them. would any one of these individuals be able to have built their financial empires completely on their own without ever having anyone elses help?

of course not.

in a way, it brings to mind Marx’s critical history of technology. it seems at this point, we need another Marx. what we need is simply a man, who can make us realize that none of us is inherently “better” than anyone else, nor are we inherently “worse.” we all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our successes, our failures, some are big, some are small, and some are things only we as individuals will ever know about but will treasure until our deaths.

—

as i pen this, drowsily, lazily, not even really sure what or why im writing, all i know is that things are changing, there is a shift.
i know that maybe its time for our ideas to truly come to fruition, but how to expound upon such ideas so they will be understood and digested amongst the regular populace?

regardless.

the shift is happening. whether it will result in a new society founded on reason or it will become our worst nightmare of a police state created by the rich and powerful and corrupt, we can only wait to find out.

we can only spend our time waiting lucratively. speaking out, being daring, crazy, and unpredictable. above all else, we must be able to question our own beliefs and change ourselves accordingly.

if we cannot do that, i fear the worst.

—

by the way,
i finished playing Arcanum.

This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study on fruit flies involved placing them on hooks with wires tying them down in a white environment devoid of resources. It turns out that their behavior formed a pattern. specifically, a Lévy distribution. If anyone out there can explain the math on this, that would be great because I’m definitely lacking in that area.

What I don’t understand is that how that implies free will. The scientists quoted in the article seem to be saying that the flies exhibited spontaneous behavior, but how does that jive with being a Lévy distribution?

Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy’s distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals, as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in the flow of e-mails, letters and money, and in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brembs said.

I understand that this is a news article about a scientific study, so it’s going to be an imperfect representation of the study’s findings, but it seems as if these scientists would benefit from a dialog with philosophers, preferably philosophers that I personally find interesting.

I’ll return to this idea later, most likely. I’d like if I could get some dialog going on this before I come back to it though, so… what was I saying? I was distracted while trying to kill a fruit fly. Those little bastards are fast.

“Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.” — Page 5, The Anti-Œdipus

Suppose instead that you had already made up your mind that the intellectual is an impostor, and you just wanted to demonstrate that he or she had nothing important to say. Would you quote a difficult passage out of context? Would you find a short, jargon-laden passage and then leave it up to the reader to make sense of it? Well you could, but that would be intellectually lazy and disingenuous.

That’s exactly what Richard Dawkins did in this ten year old review of Fashionable Nonsense, a book that supposedly “outed” French intellectuals for abusing scientific terminology. You can think of Dawkins’ review as a condensed version of the book. In it he focuses on Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigary, and Jean Baudrillard.

Dawkins apparently takes issue with the Deleuze and Guattari, not for their ideas, because he’s hardly tried to understand them, but for their writing style. In a strange turn, he then decides to quote scientist Peter Medawar, because apparently his style is something to be emulated:

“This calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar’s own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought… ”

That’s elegant and clear? Really? I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. But, that’s the thing about style. It’s like taste. Who cares what you like? It has little to do with intellectual rigor. As for the charge that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari are meaningless unless they can be phrased in an easier to understand language, I would recommend reading Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda.

There you go. There’s your magic bullet, Mr. Dawkins. The same applies to Noam Chomsky (whom I just noticed is erroneously placed in the philosophy section of Wikipedia). Chomsky says here that, “The proponents of ‘theory’ and ‘philosophy’ have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a ’secret’ to me: I’ll be happy to look.” How intellectually lazy can one be? Here, I’ll provide a link to the MIT Library, just for you.

Slavoj Zizek makes a strong case against the over-celebration of Chomsky’s political writings and rejection of theory and philosophy,

Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren’t “the facts” enough?

Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already known. This is what I’ve referred to as “postmodern cynicism.” Let’s take Chomsky’s analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. Ok, a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It’s exactly what I’d expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it’s more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don’t think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don’t think that merely “knowing the facts” can really change people’s perceptions.

But, let’s get back to Richard Dawkins. He makes a few good points in his review. I agree to a point that some “postmodern” writers are full of bull. But that’s no reason to lump them all together. The most audacious accusation that he makes against Deleuze and Guattari is that they abuse scientific concepts. I would argue that it is more accurate to say that they use scientific concepts speculatively, in new contexts, in the hope that they might later become useful. And we all know that a pure scientist like Dawkins would never do anything like that. Oh wait…

I almost forgot about memes.

Speed
The Net
The Matrix
The Lake House

Think about it. The chapter on Speed could be all about Paul Virilio’s theories on the integral accident and dromology.

The Net is about the problem of Google’s monolithic control over all information and the threat of being disappeared.

The Matrix — well that one’s been done to death in philosophy and could be easily plagiarized from Slavoj Zizek.

The Lake House — it’s got Keanu and Sandra Bullock again, so I had to include it, but I’m sure something could be said about time, communication, and information being less constrained by time in the same way that Speed has our bodies being less constrained by space because of transportation but then resulting the potential for accidents and hijacking.

And I bet if I started writing a book on it, I’d find all of these other weird connections with Keanu and Sandra Bullock and I’d eventually go insane and drill a hole in my head. Needless to say, it would be the most ridiculous shit ever.

What is striking about this list is how many of them are really active today in the modern world. We have heavily militarized police forces in American, the EU, China, Russia and Japan [Cop]. We have mega-national corporations who attempt to control the flow of resources. One could specifically reference Monsanto and their attempt to bio-engineer seeds that produce plants with no new seeds, forcing the farming community to purchase all their seeds from Monsanto [Corporate]. With the creation of the blogosphere and less credibility seen in “old media,” bloggers like Alex Jones have brought themselves more credibility and truly do go to great lengths to spread their message [Media]. While we are still only beginning to get the hang of Cybernetics, (we have a few solid experiments.) we definitely have a huge community of “hackers” who constantly produce new tactics to destroy internet barriers [Netrunner]. When it comes to the Solo, the first thing that pops into mind is, of course, Blackwater.

Now we have yet to have any Fixers, Techies, or Nomads in their Cyberpunk defined sense (we have similar things, but not quite close enough.). I think than more than half the list defines us as being in the future. Also, when the book of the game can cause a government raid due to its “dangerous” nature, it shows how far the censorship society has come (from Wikipedia):

“In 1990, in an odd convergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games’s headquarters and confiscated all their computers. This was allegedly because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public’s impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety, which has extended to the book itself as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a tagline on the front cover, which reads “The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service!” Inside, the book provides a summary of the raid and its aftermath.”

Oh, and one more thing.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if Rock and Roll was actually rebellious and revolutionary?

Pre-dating this tumultuous period following 9/11, the Democrats had seemed like a group who actually had strategic plans against the Republicans. Post-9/11, however, things changed quickly and a lot of decisions were made without questioning the long-term outcomes of the ramifications of war in Afghanistan and later, Iraq.

The Democrats suddenly fully backed entering into these wars, fully privatizing them, surely with hopes of this being a profitable windfall for the American people. Not only would American companies be revitalized and producing weaponry, armor, and medicine for these new wars, but we would walk away with a huge stake in the dwindling world oil market.

When folks like myself sit and wonder how the government and many American companies would bankrupt the American people on such a whim, I catch myself wondering what it really must feel like to be in their shoes.

So, I must take Dunbar’s Number into consideration. If I am a rich mogul, or perhaps a US Senator, my outlook on the world is definitively shaped by the world I exist in. There are a finite number of human beings who are “real” to me. If I am in such a position of power, likely all those people who are important to me are also rich, powerful, and have stake in this war. Most of the people involved could stand to profit directly or indirectly, thus I would begin to think “Ah, if this war is profitable for me and everyone I know, then this war must be profitable for America and the world at large.” This is the underlying ideology that is unspoken but speaks greatly of our reliance on Reaganomics even today.

Business and government with only short-term profit goals and a perverse view of “trickle down economics” come from residing in a society where the controlling powers never actually interact with the majority of the American population, let alone experience their way of life or know what it means to live in poverty. Because everyone in their reality is rich and profiting from what they are doing, it seems completely unreasonable to them that people could be doing badly. Those people must just be “lazy” or “unskilled.” Not a surprising view to take considering recent studies showing that, while the rich express more happiness with their lives, they generally take much less time enjoying life with leisure activities. More time spent working and making things happen, scheduling and networking.

The frightening thing is that so many Americans bought into this way of thinking against their own interests. Only now are more people beginning to realize that everything they thought is a sham. While they thought American hegemony was on the increase, it’s been on the decline, with policies like war, privatization, deregulation, etc. have been at once attempts to remain powerful and at the same time partial causes of, or at least accelerators of, the decline.

But these attempts to remain powerful themselves are driven by a delusional ideology produced by Dunbar’s Number. They cannot see past the people they themselves know, and cannot see how many of the new laws they enact make it more and more difficult for the average middle-class American citizen. They feel like they are making huge concessions to the public giving the citizens as much leeway as they do. This twisted sense of entitlement most often comes from this complete lack of understanding the social situations of the middle-class, or the “Other.”

How the middle class came to believe in these same ideas is more confusing. It was likely the consolidation of media with the military industrial complex, with many national media outlets now owned in whole or in part by companies who profit from war. With the media as a veritable propaganda machine for the interests of short-term profit, the fanfare leading up to war makes sense. As television has been (up until more recently) the most relied upon source for Americans to get their information, it is understandable that it had a heavy influence on the anti-intellectualized masses.

Now, as the short-term profits of The War Against Terror lag, we see more media outlets becoming “suspicious” of the war and decrying its social consequences. This only comes as the short-term profits are migrating to a new sector as we find out we got into more of a mess than our military could handle. While we have secured a future of “Oil Partnership” with Iraq, the instability of the region makes it difficult to profit quickly from such investments. As always with Reaganomics, business then turns to a new short-term goal, with intent on making windfall profits as quickly as possible.

—

Now, considering Dunbar’s Number, we also have to stop and realize its influence on the way we view this situation. As struggling middle class Americans, are we jaded against the culture of the rich and powerful because they are things we lack? I tend to think not. The reason I do not consider myself jaded is because I do not want the rich, powerful, elite and highly educated to give up that which they have. What I want is to live in a world where those things are more evenly distributed and we give more people the opportunity to excell in many fields of education and work. Equal opportunity education is probably most important, for while many great minds exist, many of them never achieve a great education due to the impoverished status of their parents. Reliance upon family instead of a greater reliance on society to help itself as a whole renders a caste society where it is more and more unlikely for us to be able to break the bonds of our social class.