Sunday, August 30, 2009

Corroborate, Please

The Jews say, through their Bible, that their God said that The Jews are God's Chosen People, that God intends for the Jews to have this land, that destiny ...

If I arrive at Ellis Island with a book under my arm, and that book, written by my brother, describes the Trump Towers on 57th Street, and says that the God who created the universe loves me and chooses me and intends for me to have the Trump Towers ... should Donald Trump and his lawyers move out, signing all papers over to me? Wouldn't Donald Trump and his lawyers want to meet this God, to question him on his supposed creation of a universe, or his authority to love me, or to give Donald Trump's Towers away?

The Christians say that it's them, Christians, that God loves, that we're no good, but it's OK, because God loves us so much anyway that he finagled a trick against himself whereby we torture him to death, and he just loves us to pieces because of it. Now we can firebomb Dresden, nuke the Japs, napalm little girls in Vietnam, drop bombs on Bagdad ... lie, cheat, and swindle, but God gives us the right to steal from the Mohawk, defrock his priest Ivan Illich, interrupt his messanger pk, arrest him, jail him, railroad him ... but he rewards us with eternal bliss anyway: all we have to do is say that we believe that Jesus loves us.

If some woman traipses all over Times Square saying that I love her, shouldn't someone ask me for corroboration?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Jews say?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Christians say?

No one allows pk to corroborate anything that he says: but how about at Judgment? What if there is a Judgment?

How are the Jews going to control what comes out of God's mouth then? What will the Christians do? Interrupt him? Crucify him again?

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Text / Telephone

Text/ Telephone

Merely thousands of years ago text didn't exist; now it's ubiquitous. (And anything overly familiar maybe hard to think clearly about.) Animals have used sounds for a very long time. Animals have also used visual cues for a very long time. Humans developed speech, modern humans developed complex languages, both natural and artificial. (You mother calling your for supper is using natural language; the salesman talking about hooking your car up to the computer is using artificial language, as is the doctor telling you about your embolism: I here am writing a mixture of both natural and artificial languages.)

Telephone is the name of a game that many scientists are familiar with, and that we all recognize the truth of the moment we hear about it. At a party form the members into a line: so they're organized like numbers, serially: 1, 2, 3 ... The game leader writes a word on a slip of paper, then whispers that word to the person in position 1: at an end of the line: the beginning of the line. Person 1 whispers what he hears to Person 2: and so on and so forth. Person N whispers it to person N+1 until Person Last is reached. Person Last then writes down the word that he hears. Finally the game leader displays the two pieces of paper: 1) the message sent, and 2) the message received. Rarely will the messages match.

Now put those two ideas together: Text + Telephone. Conclusion: there is frequently noise on the phone: the information sent is not always the information received.

Jesus is supposed to have given us advice. The evidence is not clear. Now we're supposed to believe that we have his text: pure, clear, saving! Not likely: except by miracle.

Now, after a lifetime of dealing with text, and criticism, and scholarship, including textual criticism, I jot this little note, touching on an array of problems concerning information.

The other day I mentioned some textual problem to my date. "Well, what does the manuscript say," she asked, in all innocence, her naivete just brimming. That's the problem, exactly. For important documents from the past, we don't have the manuscript. We can't check what the author wrote: not God, not Moses, not Homer, not Sophocles, not Jesus, not Shakespeare ... and even among contemporaries, not necessarily with pk: so many of my manuscripts have been lost, stolen, borrowed and not returned, interfered with (by the FBI among other parties!)



I have a number of things I want to sketch here, and I intend to. Bear with me as the balance of the post develops scrapbook-style.

What pop icon do you remember the first appearance of in your lifetime? When Elvis performed Jail House Rock there was only one version that go a wide hearing. A millennium before Elvis would have been like anyone else: his song could be heard only by those within range of his voice when he's signing it. The mother nursing her baby may have only half-heard it, so too the lovers nudging each other in the dark. But by the 1950s things got mass recorded, mass broadcast ... the public got used to the delusion that there could be one version of something. "Toscanini, now that's Beethoven!" "Nonsense! Wilhelm Furtwenger! Now that's Beethoven!"

In the 1960s we heard the Beatles on the radio. Then we heard them in the movies, and everywhere. Now we hear popular Beatles tunes as "classics": we hear them on the elevator: is that "I Give You All My Love"? Well, it ain't the version from the 1960s. You can follow I don't doubt my point about Elvis and the Beatles. Maybe you follow my point about this or that recorded performance of esteemed classics: such as some symphony by Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mozart. Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to Shakespeare?

Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to the New Testament? How about the Old Testament?

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Male / Female

Male/ Female

Ask the couple coming out of the church if they can tell the difference between right and wrong. Of course they can. They'll also assure you that they can tell god from devil, sacred from profane. Their youngest child standing on two legs will likewise assure you that they can tell not only good guy from bad guy, but man from woman! So when Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis shoot the scenes in drag for Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe sharing the camera time, everybody is shaking with laughter, with disbelief.

We'll come back to that in a moment: show the kindergarteners a still of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Conan, ask them if he's man or woman, all the kids will answer "Man," and answer right away. Even the retard will be only slightly behind the main crest of certainty.

Schwarzenegger

Do the same with the pic of Marilyn from The Seven Year Itch with her dress blown up over her um, er female central.

Marilyn Monrow
They'll all say woman! or female! or dame! or blond! and they'll say it right away. Now show a picture of a robin, ask what kind of a creature it is. They'll all answer "bird" readily enough. OK: in your Arnold, Marilyn sequence, show a picture of Paul Reubens in his Pee-Wee getup. In your robin sequence show an ostrich. The kids will still say "bird," but the answer will come slower. Robin will get a quick crest; ostrich will get a slow crest: fuzzier. The same is true in your Arnold-Marilyn-Reubens sequence if you slip in a picture of Fran Liebowitz. Or Amélie Mauresmo.

Try a picture of world champion South African runner Caster Semenya, the one in the current gender row.


When her performances were mediocre, no one bothered her; when she got better, and got better fast, uncertainty, doubt, hostility blossomed around her. That article offers a sad litany of gender doubt over a series of athletes, all supposedly female. The article just linked tells stories of school athletes who had to have a teacher accompany them to the bathroom to check their genitalia.

Guess what folks, most teachers are not qualified to judge gender even with a gander behind the briefs.

Read Jared Diamond on the subject in his great book Why Is Sex Fun? I'll summarize a fast word, but I mean it, read Diamond, savor the whole argument:
Diamond the physiologist reports that his specialty has decided that the difference between male and female boils down to one thing: testes. If testes are present, even dud testes, undescended, non-functioning: it's a male; no testes: it's a female.

Without the male gonad pumping out male hormones a human body will develop as "female": smooth face, broad hips, pronounced breasts ... With testes, male! but if the testes malfunction, the technically male body will also mature as female! "He" will "be" "male" but will appear to be "female."
The blond knocks your eye out, what a face! what a bod! Get her clothes off, she's got a pleasant face, great boobs, a slender waist, a lovely mons veneris, a darling vulva ... no penis; but look closely, look up inside: there's no vagina! She's a he! Your average teacher, in South Africa or in Queens NY isn't likely to notice the one essential. In an undeveloped male, the testes remain hidden, they never descend into a scrotum. Still, physiologically, scientifically, he's a male.


2009 09 11
Update: A Reuters article just confirmed exactly that result in Semenya's case:... tests had found Semenya had no womb or ovaries, but that she had internal testes, the male sexual organs which produce testosterone, and her levels of the hormone were three times that of a 'normal' female.The report didn't elaborate on the presence or absence of a penis or a vagina. The article reported on a charge of Semenya being a hermaphrodite. But that term remains ambiguous without the specific definition of the physiologists: testes: male!



PS: Don't you just love Conan pictured above, Arnold in his shoulder-length hair? far longer than Marilyn's!


2009 09 12
The latter points in the above relate well to pk points developed for decades (and at the censored Knatz.com since 1995), but under Linguistics: specifically under the fork between natural language and artificial language. In this case, once again, scientists, using artificial languages as well as natural languages (biology, zoology, physiology ... within "English") make clear distinctions (only one distinction is needed: if there are testes, it's male, whether or not the testes are visible or functioning) and the rest of mankind, not rehearsed in physiology, getting heated over ambiguities. Politicials, legislators, lawyers ... may use artificial languages, the law, for example (legal English has its own, separate, history) to generate heat while shedding no light.

Note: I am not automatically and wholly on the side of "science." The South African politician who defended Semenya's trophies by pointing out that she had been accepted in the races as "female" and had won the races makes sense to me. By the physiologists' standards, "she" is male; by the rules of the track her having been accepted as female should not be held against "her." The poor hermaphrodite should not be victimized: the non-scientists should be wailing and gnashing their teeth over their own fuzziness, their emotionalism, their prejudice ...

I believe that mankind would do well to learn a little science, but I try not to confuse my "ought" with something accomplished. I do not want bureaucrats labeled "scientists" to restrict future meaning or discussion. I do not want natural languages controlled, supervised, by experts claiming to represent artificial languages.

On the other hand, if the public doesn't voluntarily smarten up and smarten up fast (by achieving some command of artificial languages like "physiology"), we should not be surprised or complain too loudly when we spin down extinction's drain.

Science / Religion

I have moved this post to my new pkTheo blog.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Religion / Science 8.24

Science/ Religion

Religion and science have one thing in common — a huge thing: they're both thought systems. That is to say they are both human thought systems.
Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
If we ever meet intelligent species from somewhere other than earth (in religion, gods have had intelligence attributed to them among other attributes), from another star system, from another galaxy, from a parallel universe ... or from an N-Orthogonal universe, then we'll have to rethink all such concepts: thought, human, science ... religion ...Religion is a very old thought system. "Very" there is of course relative: the genus Homo is millions of years old. The species has been around for six figures of years; the sub-species has existed for big five figures. Religion doesn't leave lots and lots of hard clear fossils, but there's beaucoup evidence for five figures of years. The Cro-magnon cave paintings show beautiful evidence of religion that's close to twenty-thousand years old. Usual interpretations of the images behold a magical relationship between the imaging and the animals depicted: paint the painting, have a good hunt, once the migrations commence a spring parade right past your cave entrance!

We imagine, seeking evidence, that the hunters were trying to order their world: to their own advantage, with lots of fresh meat. Science tries to leave the magic out of its ordering: but still wants lots of fresh meat, a generous share of scarce resources.

Magical explanations form a big characteristic of religion. Advantage to your home group is another. Here's still another, key to what I'm here aiming at: religion (remember, a thought system!) assumes some nearly magical ability on the part of the faithful: to send or receive messages from the magical realm, for example; to be able to distinguish the holy from the ordinary: Monday is ordinary, the Sabbath is holy ... Science is much more modest in its assumption that sometimes some humans can be responsible some of the time and that that responsibility can be bequeathed to some group for preservation: a university science department, for example. (I'll share that assumption, but only to a very minor extent!) (The decay rate of intellectual integrity should itself be a major focus of science, but don't expect honest cooperation from state-funded institutions.) (And don't expect an Iona-like monastery to receive many tithes from a public.)

But here now is a characteristic distinguishing religion from science that started this ball rolling this morning, stimulating me to begin this post:

Both religion and science try to predict events, but religion repressed new thought in order to insist that it's got it right; whereas science, at least in theory, is supposed to keep doubting, keep testing, to never be sure. (But of course scientists know better by the time they are weaned than funding will not come without a great display of Certainty!) (Tell everybody, while wearing a Doom-sandwich-board, that the sky will fall tomorrow, and somebody may give you a dime; say, Of course we need fresh testing, always, and they'll take their dime back.)



There, I don't think that's bad for a first draft. It makes a couple of points. Many more could be developed at leisure, but I just want to arrive at one of the key points I'd aimed at without wanting to put it in the first sentence. I've just been through a struggle between the General and the Particular: I wanted to make universal generalization, yet get get to a few specific illustrations. Here:

Prediction

The Bible told the Jews what had happened, supposedly: what they wanted to believe was their history. (It's an unusual bit of self-hypnotism because the Jews don't merely flatter themselves in the portrait. Of course this may well have largely been an attempt by their priesthood to control the general population. (Regardless, it established a tendency which I, pk, leap on: blaming priesthoods, with precedent! for not hearing God, for failing to convey messages! Exactly what my life, my history (my mythology,) has been about!)) But then the Jews also slipped in a few imaginings about their future as well: there would a a Judgment, in which the God of the Jews would judge the other nations, the Gentile Goyim, enslaving them for the comfort and convenience of the Jews. Imagine the Babylonian Prime Minister having to buff the toenails of the humblest Jewish extra daughter.

The Christians magnified this tendency big time. The Jews' Genesis was about origins; the Jews' Exodus was about Jewish guilt as well as Jewish Chosen-ness; but Christian Revelation is about what's going to happen to everyone who doesn't swallow Jesus as their magical savior. Hence, Christianity has filled the human world with book-thumping illiterates who are Right, regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ...
(See? Now I'm Christian, in background, if not in specific dogma: and I'm Right! But not "regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ..." On the contrary. Still, the rhetorical style is Christian.)

These days though I follow Prigogine, chastising science, urging us to disabuse ourselves of "scientific" as well as religious Certainty. Quantum Thermo-Dynamics kicks the habitual hubris of Newtonian calculation into the dustbin. (Don't blame Newton! He never said that solving one or two two-body problems justified human arrogance on all possibilities!



Well, Shut Mah Mouth!

Above I "quoted" myself: "Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle." I hope it's obvious that I don't mean that literally. I mean it literarily.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Arrow of Blame

A key reason I don't believe that humans are intelligent or honest enough to survive our own impact on the environment has more to do with viewpoint, with perspective, with psychology than with IQ: no matter what happens, while our minds function, we can blame something external for our misfortunes: The tobacco company made me smoke.

John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"

Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!

Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...
John Collier's Lillith
Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)

Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!

No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!Notice: I don't exempt myself. I don't claim that my administration, had you made me your Stalin, would have been exempt from the laws of the universe: exempt from homeostasis, for example. No: we all try to preserve what we perceive as stability.Human groups don't listen to science either. One primary way we do that is to get some craven bully of an institution (like government) to fund additional delusional activity which we then mislabel science. In no time science will answer to the preference of the ignorant stupid lazy slob majority. We use universities the same way we once used churches: to pretend that we're interested in learning, in free speech, in free inquiry, in intelligence, in imagination ... while in fact we punish, torture and kill manifestations of it. My attempts to testify against my church, against my school, against my family went merely ignored until I actually did something courageous about it: offering to network people cybernetically in 1970, joining Ivan Illich to help lead his "deschooling" movement.Deschooling: I hate that term. I have always hated that term. Illich didn't like that term. Illich didn't invent that term. But we're stuck with it.
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.Illich loves "the church" of Christ-love. (So do I, though I don't call it a church.) We both hate the Church of coercion, of authority, of arrogance: of hubris.
The group did what the group typically does: it shoved me onto a social side-rail, barely able to feed myself, until it found a way to plagiarize my decentralizing tool into another centralized-and-centralizing monopoly for the hierarchical authorities. The government (and government science)'s internet serves not diversity, not freedom, but authority: big corporations can swamp the dot.comers (but the dot.comers were already plagiarizing Christ-Illich-pk! paying no royalties.)

I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.

Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"

Friday, August 07, 2009

Faith

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated
within the circle of the faithful.

Faith was an important subject at Knatz.com (and its sister domains). I'll try to repost the main modules on the subject here at IonaArc, but today I start with a new statement, one just penned:

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated within the circle of the faithful. The falsity of this or that church cannot well be investigated by that church. Harder to see for moderns is that secular institutions block out the light as surely as any stone age temple.

American Democracy, the American Republic ... schools ... are our church: blinding, dumb making, incompatible with intelligence, with optimal learning. That's why there always has to be more than one church, more than one god, more than one epistemology, more than one science, more than one philosophy, always a metaN to metaM.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Advertising: Three Types

One of my favorite jokes in Bedazzled came when Peter Cook's Satan was issuing juvenile mischief to random folk passing him and Dudley Moore, the love-sick burger-flipper about to be tricked into selling his soul in new bit of juvenile Satanic mischief. Moore tells his long-time stage partner that his evil is really stupid. Satan confesses that he agrees: "The Seven Deadly Sins?" drawls Peter Cook: "I though them up in a single afternoon: the only thing I've invented since the Twentieth Century though is advertising!" The audience I was amid gave a good roar, me roaring in its midst. Unlike the bulk of my follows however I've written (and posted) some sharp comments on a smorgasbord of advertising evils. Today I regroup and synthesize:

First I assure you: I am not against advertising per se. I am against one modern degenerate form of it.

We need to distinguish among at least three different kinds of advertising.

  • 1: Information: Identificaion / Location
    The whale makes a sound that more than a few other creatures of the sea recognize as a statement of identity (and of location): I am a male sperm whale, basking around the surface of my summer waters, approximately such and such latitude by such and such longitude (and I sure wouldn't mind running into an accommodating female).
    The elders place a crown on the head of the individual they believe (or hope to convince others) is magical, a useful tool to the people (and the elders). Those seeing the crown understand: that individual is the group's king: a symbol of the enduring qualities of their culture.
    Hi, My name is Paul. I'm a writer, teacher ... sometimes lover ...

    Those example advertising as simple declaration of identity and location. Here's a fourth example, a commercial example: Sol's Stationary, We sell office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234.

    I am as much for Sol's Stationary being able to say who he is, what he does, where he's located, and when he's open for business as I am for the whale to be able to declare himself ... or a yard-full of lightning bugs to flash chemical luminescence on a summer evening.

  • 2: Misinformation: Misidentificaion / Mislocation
    The Hidatsa sneaks up on the Mandan camp making a sound he hopes will be mistaken for the call of a screech owl.
    Sol's Stationary says Sol's Stationary in all the ads, implying that what Sol sells is stationary. and though Sol does sell statinoary, some, just enough to maintain the pretense, his real product is cocaine.
    Hi. I'm a priest. See my robe? I sell masses, hear confessions ... (But what I really do is have my eye on your wife, your daughter, your son ...)

    Those example advertising as false advertising, declarations for the purpose of deceiving. I believe that it's a waste of time to tell a biosphere as full of misidentification and of identification that messages should be truthful. I wouldn't mind living in a society experimenting with honesty as long as the experiment were very cautious, ready to pull back into familiar dishonest at a moment's notice: risking that a moment might be far too slow. The thorough conservative wouldn't dare experiment with ANYTHING! In any case, both kinds of advertising are familiar: and both predate the birth of human beings: by more eons than we know how to count accurately.

  • Caveat:
    Don't assume that distiguishing Identification from Misidentification is easy. More on that later.

    But now we humans have introduced a third kind of advertising. First we'd have to identify it, then try to date it. There might be precursors in nature: study is too immature to tell. But here:

  • 3: Irrelevance Confusion by Association:
    Sol's Stationary says "office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234: but also adds a carefully edited digital portrait of Brad Pitt: shaking water off his hat in Legends of the Fall, smiling, a few blond hairs loose in the sunlight. Sol has had liver-spots for a decade now, on the best day of his life he didn't look anything like the Brad Pitt. Sol is sending a signal confusing himself and his service with something he doesn't possess and that has nothing to do with the service of selling stationary. It's precisely like when the Lucifer of legend offered to trade knowledge of good and evil with Eve (and Adam). Did Lucifer possess what he was offering in trade? Really? Wasn't that supposed to be God's province?



  • Aiyaiyai, I just realized: I posted a reflection of advertising 2005 01 09 called The News as Advertising. I then edited it, moving it to Knatz.com. So far so good: but then I deleted it from Iona Arc! Now it's gone! I'm afraid I did that with dozens of posts, trusting the internet even though it's plagiarized from my work with Ivan Illich (and Jesus Christ)!

    Now I know to restore it. I'll remount it immediately.

    And more coming in this one too.