We humans evolved to think fast. In human terms, we do, it works (or seems to, so far). The corollary is that we don't always think well. Philosophy, especially the division of philosophy called science, helps. Still, it's a mess. Nearly all humans can think, after a fashion; far from all humans are adept at philosophy; very few humans, including those dressed in white coats and called by their employers"scientists," have an accurate idea of what science is: and even when we do, there are still limits to human intelligence that even genius doesn't automatically overcome. I say all that to remind us that Gregory Bateson told us that psychologists have said that the human mind is incapable of maintaining Korzybski's distinction between "map" and "territory." Korzybski said that we commonly confuse the Name with the Thing — Bateson says that psychologists say that we will continue to confuse the Name with the Thing, and the Menu with the Meal ... the Map with the Territory.
I've been re-emphasizing all this recently as part of Macroinformation, my study of complex Information. I subsume all or nearly all under semiotics, insisting that there isn't anything that we know, think, believe, process ... that isn't symbol or sign: from photons hitting the retina, to synapses firing, to saying, "That is a tree." We fast thinkers look through the telescope and say, "I see a star": when what we "see" is "light" which our culture interprets (in the English language) as a "star." We fast thinkers reify our common perceptions, rapidly forgetting, if we ever noticed, that all we have are signs, symbols, ideas: we have no direct, non-symbolic contact with ... anything: and certainly not with anything we should call Reality, or the Universe ...
No matter what we think, qualify it: it's human thought. And if we say, "God thinks it," or "The President says it": well, it's still human thought: thought by symbols, expressed by symbols. In other words ... rather, in the words I started with, nearly everything with us is "map"; though we routinely imagine we are dealing with "territory."
OK, that pk has been saying, again and again, since 1979: online since 1995. I review it, restating it here, to say something new, original with me this morning: modern culture, already liable to map / territory confusions, is dedicated to additionally confusing Generic with Proprietary: and the confusion is deliberately induced by our ... um, shall I say it? ... owners? (But of course our owners, giant multinational corporations for the most part, are themselves owned by the culture, the ghastly, ever more monolithic, culture.)
"Tissue" means something thin, flexible, of next-to-no-substance, disposable. The modern marketplace, with a cultural mandate to make everything-the-same, sells paper tissues in a box. The company manufacturing them calls itself Kleenex. Good, fine. What's neither good nor fine is what the company does next: it tries to get us, the buying public, to confuse the thing we've been taught to need, a "tissue," with a particular brand name of tissue: Kleenex. So: we'll no longer want a drink; we'll want a soda; we'll no longer want a soda, we'll want a cola; we'll no longer want a cola, we'll want a Coke. We'll no longer want a computer, we'll want a PC. We'll no longer want a graphic user interface, we'll want Windows. See? Apple had hoped we'd want Mac.
But that's just the beginning. When I can I'll go on with other deep difficulties:
Culture is rigged to substitute custom for nature: clothing for example. We'll defend the custom As Though it were in our genes!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Invisible Audience
Once upon a time the thief left fingerprints without knowing there could be such a thing as fingerprints. How many people realize that we sometimes leave footprints even though we can sometimes see our footprints? Now that we know about fingerprints, some thieves wipe surfaces they're aware they touched hoping to erase their fingerprints: but what traces do we leave that we yet have no science for?
The Jews imagined God walking in the garden and calling for Adam while Adam hides from God, ashamed. Primitive Adam imagines that if God can't see him the way he Adam sees, then God won't know where he is. But the Jews imagined God knowing what Adam was doing even when God couldn't "see" him. This and the other sect of Protestants imagine that God "saw" Adam eating the fruit before Adam ate the fruit, even before Adam existed.
We drop napalm on little girls. If we keep the press away, no photographers, we imagine that we can do anything: and no one will know!
How do we know that everything we do isn't on TV at Aldeberan?
Why hasn't Jesus come back to do what he promised? Maybe he has: and we didn't notice. Maybe he can't. Maybe he never meant to. Maybe he did mean to but God had other plans. ... Or maybe our running around like dogs that don't feel the leash has entered its third millennium of hit reality show around Betelguese. The sponsors won't allow anything to interfere.
Imagine that you're an actor on the stage. Imagine that you're in the middle of "To be or not to be." Can you see the audience? The light is low, but there's a spot light on you. The lights in the theater are dim, but they're not at zero. Can you see through your own glare to see all those dim faces out there? Do you know which ones are looking at you? which ones are asleep, or necking, or bored? How can you even try to see while you're concentrating on your lines? Maybe you don't have the words memorized perfectly yet. But even if you have them as perfectly as Burbage would once have had them, so well you could paraphrase and Sweet Will might not mind, might not even notice? You're still concentrating on the meaning! Who could multi-task so skillfully that they could act, and watch, and contemplate ... all at the same time? even if they're already a genius? even if they're already a double- or triple-genius?
We don't know who sees us. We don't know what they think. If we see, it's like veiled. My name-source Paul may have been full of shit on faith, but he had that through a glass darkly part just right. The mouse doesn't know that the owl sees it, though the mouse is keenly aware that there are predators. Parents try to control their children with threats of bogymen, but we may be leaving more traces than we know (or fewer!) regardless of what the parents mean.
The Jews imagined God walking in the garden and calling for Adam while Adam hides from God, ashamed. Primitive Adam imagines that if God can't see him the way he Adam sees, then God won't know where he is. But the Jews imagined God knowing what Adam was doing even when God couldn't "see" him. This and the other sect of Protestants imagine that God "saw" Adam eating the fruit before Adam ate the fruit, even before Adam existed.
We drop napalm on little girls. If we keep the press away, no photographers, we imagine that we can do anything: and no one will know!
How do we know that everything we do isn't on TV at Aldeberan?
Why hasn't Jesus come back to do what he promised? Maybe he has: and we didn't notice. Maybe he can't. Maybe he never meant to. Maybe he did mean to but God had other plans. ... Or maybe our running around like dogs that don't feel the leash has entered its third millennium of hit reality show around Betelguese. The sponsors won't allow anything to interfere.
Imagine that you're an actor on the stage. Imagine that you're in the middle of "To be or not to be." Can you see the audience? The light is low, but there's a spot light on you. The lights in the theater are dim, but they're not at zero. Can you see through your own glare to see all those dim faces out there? Do you know which ones are looking at you? which ones are asleep, or necking, or bored? How can you even try to see while you're concentrating on your lines? Maybe you don't have the words memorized perfectly yet. But even if you have them as perfectly as Burbage would once have had them, so well you could paraphrase and Sweet Will might not mind, might not even notice? You're still concentrating on the meaning! Who could multi-task so skillfully that they could act, and watch, and contemplate ... all at the same time? even if they're already a genius? even if they're already a double- or triple-genius?
We don't know who sees us. We don't know what they think. If we see, it's like veiled. My name-source Paul may have been full of shit on faith, but he had that through a glass darkly part just right. The mouse doesn't know that the owl sees it, though the mouse is keenly aware that there are predators. Parents try to control their children with threats of bogymen, but we may be leaving more traces than we know (or fewer!) regardless of what the parents mean.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Competent Theology
The previous post referred to the common belief that God is competent to know the truth. I was raised to believe that with no doubt. At the same time I was raised to be aware of some basis for our beliefs: Thomas saw the nail holes in the resurrected Jesus' hands ... Unfortunately for the common brand of theological epistemology I also became aware of other, more careful, more imaginative, more cautious epistemologies: to whit, science (and to philosophy not beholden to stone age theologies): the evidence must be evident to a group, any individual must be allowed to falsify the creed, experiments must be repeatable ...
So the mass audience trusts God's judgment: if God says the Jews really own the Canaanites' land, then the Jews must really own it: after all, it's really God's land anyway, isn't it? it's really God's everything. But shouldn't God be able to show us some evidence? (And no matter how much evidence God shows, what makes human audiences competent to judge the authenticity of evidence?)
Crazy Horse and his people had been living in the shadow of the Black Hills, at the Black Hills time of year, for longer than any Lakota could remember: how did their land and their sacred Black Hills suddenly belong to Washington DC and to the generals DC sent after Crazy Horse defeated Custer?
We should believe God's Judgment because God created the world! How do we know that? Evidence suggests that the universe came into being way longer ago than ten billion years. (How were "years" measured six billion years before there was an earth? How credible is God's claim to have made it six thousand years ago when it was already fourteen billion years old? Why should we trust the beliefs of any congregation of illiterate mis-readers of group fiction?)
If God says that Matthew Arnold was really the hero and George Washington the goat, does it suddenly become true? Should Matthew Arnold believe it? Should George Washington? Should Martha Washington?
When God tells us these things, will be be "telling" us? with words? in what language? why should we believe that we are competent to understand God no matter what language he addresses us in?
When the federal judge repeated the FBI's lies about me I knew that the federal judge was wrong, that he was a fool as well as a moron (or was he merely another bald-faced liar?)
Fools and morons are always asking me if I believe in God. Why can't any of them ever understand my simple answer: Never mind my relationship with God (It's personal, it's profound, it's direct ...); understand this: it's man I don't believe in! It's human institutions I don't trust.
Never mind how trustworthy I believe my own judgment to be: it's my mistrust of YOUR judgment that's relevant here.
So the mass audience trusts God's judgment: if God says the Jews really own the Canaanites' land, then the Jews must really own it: after all, it's really God's land anyway, isn't it? it's really God's everything. But shouldn't God be able to show us some evidence? (And no matter how much evidence God shows, what makes human audiences competent to judge the authenticity of evidence?)
Crazy Horse and his people had been living in the shadow of the Black Hills, at the Black Hills time of year, for longer than any Lakota could remember: how did their land and their sacred Black Hills suddenly belong to Washington DC and to the generals DC sent after Crazy Horse defeated Custer?
We should believe God's Judgment because God created the world! How do we know that? Evidence suggests that the universe came into being way longer ago than ten billion years. (How were "years" measured six billion years before there was an earth? How credible is God's claim to have made it six thousand years ago when it was already fourteen billion years old? Why should we trust the beliefs of any congregation of illiterate mis-readers of group fiction?)
If God says that Matthew Arnold was really the hero and George Washington the goat, does it suddenly become true? Should Matthew Arnold believe it? Should George Washington? Should Martha Washington?
When God tells us these things, will be be "telling" us? with words? in what language? why should we believe that we are competent to understand God no matter what language he addresses us in?
When the federal judge repeated the FBI's lies about me I knew that the federal judge was wrong, that he was a fool as well as a moron (or was he merely another bald-faced liar?)
Fools and morons are always asking me if I believe in God. Why can't any of them ever understand my simple answer: Never mind my relationship with God (It's personal, it's profound, it's direct ...); understand this: it's man I don't believe in! It's human institutions I don't trust.
Never mind how trustworthy I believe my own judgment to be: it's my mistrust of YOUR judgment that's relevant here.
Judgment
Christians are raised to hope for justice at Judgment Day. We're raised to believe that God is competent enough to know the truth. The older I get though the more trouble I have, the further I have to bend over backwards, to imagine any justice that could follow from history. We occupy, we rule, land stolen from others: from natives, from other countries, other cultures, and in the case of Sutter (among others), even from other "white" European settlers. What's God going to do with us? How could the Mohawk be compensated for the loss of "New York" state? for their near genocide? How would God compensate the Sabine men killed so the Romans could rape their Sabine women?
Knatz.com had a number of answers, more than one imagining on the subject. Here follows this morning's new draft on the subject:
Catholics succeed in scaring the bejesus out of children with threats of hellfire: hellfire following Judgment. God will judge. God will judge children who don't behave. Notice: churches routinely appeal to the self-regulation of the already-over-regulated: children, women, slaves ...
The Jews failed to scare the massagan out of those they were trying to impress: other people out-competing, out-cheating, out-hustling the Jews in the area of the world over-developed and over-crowded the longest. The Bible imagined the Jews' God judging the "nations": bullying those the Jews envied on behalf of the Jews: Today you steal my lunch money: tomorrow my big brother, my big friend, my big father, God, MY God, the owner of the universe, will make you lick my balls, make you eat my turds ... You watch out, God will give me Your lunch money.
Neither Catholics or Jews listen to me much when I imagine god judging the judges: Hitler and his judges, Stalin and his judges, Nixon-Bush and their judges: the judges who presided while my god-inspired fiction wasn't published, while my god-inspired scholarship was interrupted, while my Jesus-inspired public network was degraded, then plagiarized, while my outrage-inspired satires were censored: barred from the internet stolen from Jesus, Illich, and me. But that's nothing: Protestants absolutely never understood anything I said (that is, they understood it so instantly, saw where it was going, that they interrupted me, thinking that then it couldn't go there, that god couldn't make it go there.
Wait a minute, step back for a second: there's a fundamental, un-resolvable problem here. God, however you spell it, is so ambiguous a term, that the second you say it, you've confused and misled everybody. When I was a kid God was palmed onto us as "the truth." That's the main thing that god still is to me: the essence of things, the truth: not Newton's model of gravity, not Einstein's, not the word gravity, but the thing gravity: gravity in the actual universe; not in our pathology of misunderstandings, interruptions, and lies. But, simultaneously, when I was a kid and didn't know any better, God was a magician, Jesus was a magician: a worker of miracles. Now I repudiate magic and all magicians, there being no true examples that I can discover with anything like objectivity.
But, damn it, it's hard to give up hope of a big brother who'll fight your battles for you, and win: all for you, no payment necessary, cheap thanks more than enough. On the other hand, if you grow up at all, even 1%, then it's impossible to give up the idea of the truth: the idea that if we poison the earth, then keeping false records about the environment, refusing to understand what the scientists have tried to tell us, that therefore the poison won't be poisonous.
No. Bateson said it: God is not mocked: meaning, the poison is still poison, no matter what lies we tell, no matter how false our record keeping: no matter what we censor, who we crucify.
Here though is a problem I've always had, and still have, a little bit, with the idea of justice: divine judgment. If the Pope is supposed to be infallible, it's God the Catholics really imagine as infallible, isn't it? If God judges it so, it will be so ... right? These days I have trouble imagining anything infallible, I don't even want an infallible god. Be that as it may, put that aside for a moment.
The Jews' God had a bunch of commandments about giving God a monopoly on our admiration, but then he added something about not stealing. Now that's a commandment that almost any civilization will endorse, or at least pretend to endorse, there being no civilizations that aren't based on theft in the first place: didn't we subtract farmland from wilderness to have civilization in the first place: isn't theft what civilization is? (But can you imagine a caveman who wouldn't steal? Could you imagine a monkey that wouldn't grab the candy?
Back teaching, my office-mate told a joke that remains a favorite of mine: I quote how I'd already repeated it at Knatz.com:The English toff sees an ancient farmer in his ancient Irish field. "If you could have anything you wanted, anything in the world, what would it be."
The old peasant fixes the aristo with his eye.
"Judgment," he says. With venom. I'm with the old Irish peasant, that's what I've long wanted: judgment. But what I want to see judged isn't the child, isn't the disobedient girl, or the uppity wog; I want to see what God does with General Custer! with General Motors!
Illich told a story of an old Mexican peasant who say every day in front of his shack. A road was built, right over the spot where he sat. The old man still sat there. One day along comes an American in his car and runs the old guy over. The driver was upset, but blamed the guy sitting in his old spot in front of his old shack. He was "asking for it," sitting in "the road." That's what I want to see: I want to see that driver judged. And with him I want to see the road-builders judged. But not by the God who gives the Canaanites land to the Jews! I want to see the judgment made by the actual god, the actual truth of things, by the actual universe.
Unfortunately, that is the judgment that we see, constantly, every day: the truth. But we don't see the truth, we see only the lies we tell ourselves: The Lakota land is ours, God gave it to us. We were able to take it, so it's ours. And the poison we've poisoned everything with isn't poison: it's our halo, our crown.
I'd written an awful lot about Judgment in my fiction, in my novels, in my diary, and at Knatz.com. The fed censored my writing against artificial vertical human hierarchies. My family let my internet accounts lapse while I was in jail. My host destroyed all my data: five domains, evaporated, 3,000 files, 2,500 of them text files: whole chapters of books, whole books! Books otherwise hard to find! Chapters otherwise unpublished! I'll try to get it back up. Some of the materials on judgment I'll try to add as a special section of my PaulKnatz blog. Meantime this file forecasts some of that old material: here, at IonaArc, my original blog: a tiny supplement to the huge Knatz.com; since, its replacement.
But here's one detail repeated here and now: I suspect that this universe is merely a petri dish in which god lets this and that type of germ fight it out. What god learns from our petri dish and from other petri dishes, goes into other, ever-more-creative universes: any of which may surprise, may go wrong. Life, evolution, is not infallible: and has no point. But neither is it as stupid as we pretend.
The following post, Competent Theology, will develop related branches of this theme.
I really need to gather all my K.-related comments on the concept of Judgment and post them to this blog. Here a new note meantime:
Will Judgment Day commence when God is ready? or will God (and the world) have to wait while Marie Typhoid (and her court) decides what to wear?
Knatz.com had a number of answers, more than one imagining on the subject. Here follows this morning's new draft on the subject:
Catholics succeed in scaring the bejesus out of children with threats of hellfire: hellfire following Judgment. God will judge. God will judge children who don't behave. Notice: churches routinely appeal to the self-regulation of the already-over-regulated: children, women, slaves ...
The Jews failed to scare the massagan out of those they were trying to impress: other people out-competing, out-cheating, out-hustling the Jews in the area of the world over-developed and over-crowded the longest. The Bible imagined the Jews' God judging the "nations": bullying those the Jews envied on behalf of the Jews: Today you steal my lunch money: tomorrow my big brother, my big friend, my big father, God, MY God, the owner of the universe, will make you lick my balls, make you eat my turds ... You watch out, God will give me Your lunch money.
Neither Catholics or Jews listen to me much when I imagine god judging the judges: Hitler and his judges, Stalin and his judges, Nixon-Bush and their judges: the judges who presided while my god-inspired fiction wasn't published, while my god-inspired scholarship was interrupted, while my Jesus-inspired public network was degraded, then plagiarized, while my outrage-inspired satires were censored: barred from the internet stolen from Jesus, Illich, and me. But that's nothing: Protestants absolutely never understood anything I said (that is, they understood it so instantly, saw where it was going, that they interrupted me, thinking that then it couldn't go there, that god couldn't make it go there.
Wait a minute, step back for a second: there's a fundamental, un-resolvable problem here. God, however you spell it, is so ambiguous a term, that the second you say it, you've confused and misled everybody. When I was a kid God was palmed onto us as "the truth." That's the main thing that god still is to me: the essence of things, the truth: not Newton's model of gravity, not Einstein's, not the word gravity, but the thing gravity: gravity in the actual universe; not in our pathology of misunderstandings, interruptions, and lies. But, simultaneously, when I was a kid and didn't know any better, God was a magician, Jesus was a magician: a worker of miracles. Now I repudiate magic and all magicians, there being no true examples that I can discover with anything like objectivity.
But, damn it, it's hard to give up hope of a big brother who'll fight your battles for you, and win: all for you, no payment necessary, cheap thanks more than enough. On the other hand, if you grow up at all, even 1%, then it's impossible to give up the idea of the truth: the idea that if we poison the earth, then keeping false records about the environment, refusing to understand what the scientists have tried to tell us, that therefore the poison won't be poisonous.
No. Bateson said it: God is not mocked: meaning, the poison is still poison, no matter what lies we tell, no matter how false our record keeping: no matter what we censor, who we crucify.
Here though is a problem I've always had, and still have, a little bit, with the idea of justice: divine judgment. If the Pope is supposed to be infallible, it's God the Catholics really imagine as infallible, isn't it? If God judges it so, it will be so ... right? These days I have trouble imagining anything infallible, I don't even want an infallible god. Be that as it may, put that aside for a moment.
The Jews' God had a bunch of commandments about giving God a monopoly on our admiration, but then he added something about not stealing. Now that's a commandment that almost any civilization will endorse, or at least pretend to endorse, there being no civilizations that aren't based on theft in the first place: didn't we subtract farmland from wilderness to have civilization in the first place: isn't theft what civilization is? (But can you imagine a caveman who wouldn't steal? Could you imagine a monkey that wouldn't grab the candy?
Back teaching, my office-mate told a joke that remains a favorite of mine: I quote how I'd already repeated it at Knatz.com:
The old peasant fixes the aristo with his eye.
"Judgment," he says. With venom.
Illich told a story of an old Mexican peasant who say every day in front of his shack. A road was built, right over the spot where he sat. The old man still sat there. One day along comes an American in his car and runs the old guy over. The driver was upset, but blamed the guy sitting in his old spot in front of his old shack. He was "asking for it," sitting in "the road." That's what I want to see: I want to see that driver judged. And with him I want to see the road-builders judged. But not by the God who gives the Canaanites land to the Jews! I want to see the judgment made by the actual god, the actual truth of things, by the actual universe.
Unfortunately, that is the judgment that we see, constantly, every day: the truth. But we don't see the truth, we see only the lies we tell ourselves: The Lakota land is ours, God gave it to us. We were able to take it, so it's ours. And the poison we've poisoned everything with isn't poison: it's our halo, our crown.
I'd written an awful lot about Judgment in my fiction, in my novels, in my diary, and at Knatz.com. The fed censored my writing against artificial vertical human hierarchies. My family let my internet accounts lapse while I was in jail. My host destroyed all my data: five domains, evaporated, 3,000 files, 2,500 of them text files: whole chapters of books, whole books! Books otherwise hard to find! Chapters otherwise unpublished! I'll try to get it back up. Some of the materials on judgment I'll try to add as a special section of my PaulKnatz blog. Meantime this file forecasts some of that old material: here, at IonaArc, my original blog: a tiny supplement to the huge Knatz.com; since, its replacement.
But here's one detail repeated here and now: I suspect that this universe is merely a petri dish in which god lets this and that type of germ fight it out. What god learns from our petri dish and from other petri dishes, goes into other, ever-more-creative universes: any of which may surprise, may go wrong. Life, evolution, is not infallible: and has no point. But neither is it as stupid as we pretend.
The following post, Competent Theology, will develop related branches of this theme.
I really need to gather all my K.-related comments on the concept of Judgment and post them to this blog. Here a new note meantime:
Will Judgment Day commence when God is ready? or will God (and the world) have to wait while Marie Typhoid (and her court) decides what to wear?
By "Marie Typhoid" I mean to suggest Christian overtones, overtones of Marie Antoinette, and Typhoid Mary of US fame.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Miss California Fired?
An internet headline today says that Miss California was fired. Excuse me, isn't that like moving the "Brooklyn" Dodgers to California? The public thinks that a baseball team represents Brooklyn, that the team belongs to the city, that the team is a part of the city ... No, no. The team was a privately owned business. It could do whatever the culture would let it get away with — and apparently that was a great deal: including moving to another continental coast. Now Californians are encouraged to believe that "Miss California" is somehow of and for California. No, her image is owned by a private enterprise: the girl given the title, and the perks that come with it, must conform to what the privately owned business expects: California and its citizens, the world and its citizens be damned.
Once upon a time in the kleptocracy we call "England" the people believed that what they called the Commons was owned in common by all "Englishmen": "men" in that case also meant the women and children "belonging" to the men as well. In other words, if there was a sheep grazing on the Commons, that sheep was common property. Then all at once the "Commons" turned out to belong to this or that friend of the king. Suddenly your ordinary Scotsman discovered that this and that familiar part of Scotland belonged to some Englishman.
Whoever owns the LA Dodgers, or whoever owns Miss California, had better watch out: some kleptocrats may decide she belongs to Ted Turner, or to Bill Gates, or to god-help-us, The Donald.
Once upon a time it was easy: everything belonged to God. Of course the trouble with God was that he belonged to the Jews. No: then he belonged to the Emperor Constantine. No: then he belonged to the Catholic Church. ... Then God belonged to the Puritans. Now God belongs to any fundamentalist who's illiterate enough and loud enough.
I think we're going to find out too late that none of its belongs to any of us. 'Cause we'll all be dead: of terminal hebetude.
Once upon a time in the kleptocracy we call "England" the people believed that what they called the Commons was owned in common by all "Englishmen": "men" in that case also meant the women and children "belonging" to the men as well. In other words, if there was a sheep grazing on the Commons, that sheep was common property. Then all at once the "Commons" turned out to belong to this or that friend of the king. Suddenly your ordinary Scotsman discovered that this and that familiar part of Scotland belonged to some Englishman.
Whoever owns the LA Dodgers, or whoever owns Miss California, had better watch out: some kleptocrats may decide she belongs to Ted Turner, or to Bill Gates, or to god-help-us, The Donald.
Once upon a time it was easy: everything belonged to God. Of course the trouble with God was that he belonged to the Jews. No: then he belonged to the Emperor Constantine. No: then he belonged to the Catholic Church. ... Then God belonged to the Puritans. Now God belongs to any fundamentalist who's illiterate enough and loud enough.
I think we're going to find out too late that none of its belongs to any of us. 'Cause we'll all be dead: of terminal hebetude.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Trouble in Sentiens' Pleroma
The other day I noticed that I'd made my usual points about the trouble Galileo got into with the Church and the universities over his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Years ago Knatz.com and this blog established a post or two on common pk symbols: god, Jesus ... Galileo, Abelard ... My Galileo point also jibes with important points made thus far principally at my Macroinformation blog. Gregory Bateson distinguished between the universe of Pleroma, the physical universe, and Creatura, his name for the universe of life. I extend his point to distinguish between Creatura and his sub-universe Sentiens, the universe of consciousness, of intelligence, of self-awareness.
Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!
People like facts to be flattering, not true.
Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!
People like facts to be flattering, not true.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
God vs. Nature
The Bible has God tell Adam to go forth and multiply. The trouble is Adam was already going forth and multiplying all over the place, and had been for two million years before God created him. Nature, to continue with personifications, already had expansion, colonialism, a characteristic typical of species: an environment fills with one set of creatures, things change, and another set takes over. Nature though has developed creatures capable of questioning old imperatives: should we just multiply, mindlessly? Or should we pay attention to results and actually try to survive? maybe by not multiplying quite so blindly.
Humans developed intelligence. We're not the first, maybe we're not the last. But we humans did develop intelligence conspicuously. And civilization makes a big deal of human intelligence. Except that civilized man, the only humans who get much attention in the press, are precisely the ones so slow to pick up on results!
Stonewall it, said more than one presidential administration: as more than one kingdom had said it before.
Catch-22 had Yossarian working on the wound he found on Snowden. The trouble was, while Yossarian was lavishing all his attention of that wound, Snowden's guts were falling out of a different wound in his back!
Humans developed intelligence. We're not the first, maybe we're not the last. But we humans did develop intelligence conspicuously. And civilization makes a big deal of human intelligence. Except that civilized man, the only humans who get much attention in the press, are precisely the ones so slow to pick up on results!
Stonewall it, said more than one presidential administration: as more than one kingdom had said it before.
Catch-22 had Yossarian working on the wound he found on Snowden. The trouble was, while Yossarian was lavishing all his attention of that wound, Snowden's guts were falling out of a different wound in his back!
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Cliff's Edge
I remember Bucky Fuller saying that civilization was right on the edge of a cliff: in a position to get better footing and save ourselves or to lose our footing and perish. (That was 1968 or so. He was speaking at Colby College in Maine where I was an instructor in the English department.) Bucky added that civilization had been seen to be on the edge of a cliff before. I saw all that to be true. But then Bucky added a point that really wowed me: he said that mankind was routinely on the edge of a cliff. It's not that we're imagining dangers: a little kid with a bogey man to worry about; the dangers are real, and it's mankind's signature trick to find a new threshold of danger as soon as the previous problems are solved.
New Threshold of Danger
So far we've been adequate to the task. And we've been lucky. It wasn't entirely luck: our not following other species march of oblivion relates to our abilities. But it wasn't entirely skill: a great deal of engineer's "redundancy" came with the environments we've come wrapped in. If we polluted that stream we found another stream; if we exhausted that resource, we found another resource. Plus ça change ...
There's nothing new about an oddball seeing danger and some priest of some church shouting him down to the flock:
Don't worry about a little sin. Buy me dinner and I'll see that God forgives you.
Don't listen to Galileo telling you that Jupiter has moons; listen to your church's denials, to the denials of your university professors ...
Don't pay any attention to your experience of the government's hand in your pocket, ignore the school board kidnapping and brainwashing your children; listen to the school ... and the government ... and the press ... and big business ... when all join hands and tell you, You're Free!!!
No. I think the cliff will win. Soon.
New Threshold of Danger
So far we've been adequate to the task. And we've been lucky. It wasn't entirely luck: our not following other species march of oblivion relates to our abilities. But it wasn't entirely skill: a great deal of engineer's "redundancy" came with the environments we've come wrapped in. If we polluted that stream we found another stream; if we exhausted that resource, we found another resource. Plus ça change ...
There's nothing new about an oddball seeing danger and some priest of some church shouting him down to the flock:
Don't worry about a little sin. Buy me dinner and I'll see that God forgives you.
Don't listen to Galileo telling you that Jupiter has moons; listen to your church's denials, to the denials of your university professors ...
Don't pay any attention to your experience of the government's hand in your pocket, ignore the school board kidnapping and brainwashing your children; listen to the school ... and the government ... and the press ... and big business ... when all join hands and tell you, You're Free!!!
No. I think the cliff will win. Soon.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Society & Communication
Society & Communication
We are a social species, have elaborate communications tools. Obviously we have language, signs, assorted media. Even a stranger amid a different language group has ways to communicate "I am hungry," "I am thirsty," "I'm horny," "I need a latrine ..." Those points don't need me to elaborate them. And some other odd points about communication have already been made publicly by this and that scientist, by this and that social theorist, in this and that field.
For example:
The original purpose of language was for the male to steady the female while convincing her that she should risk her life in child birth by allowing him to copulate with her.
The original purpose of language was to lie, to deceive ..."Who goes?"
"Friend," while preparing the knife.
The original purpose of mass communications was social control.
...
What I bring here today are refinements on explanations more kin to those last on my list than first. In brief: I experience both personally and from "history" that humans, social man, are open to some types of communications, but closed to many others. Communications that we are open to are much in evidence, are much discussed, are no secret; but we are not aware and don't want to be make aware of communications that we are closed to: Galileo's contemporaries did not want to hear that the planet Jupiter had moons: they'd believed that the earth was the only body with satellites. Finding that satellites were common was a demotion for our faith in our uniqueness. (People still don't want to acknowledge how common "uniqueness" is!) Typically, we refused to learn what we had learned, except after a struggle.
Fortunately, the major religion of the west tells the situation both in the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians: God talked to Adam, Adam didn't listen; Moses talked to the Jews, the Jews didn't listen ... Jesus tried to bring new messages from God, the Jews' high temple, supposedly devoted to this God, didn't listen ... In "fact," all the secular authorities, Roman and Jewish, ganged up, in violation of their own laws, to torture God to death ...
(The trouble is, this literature is closed to intelligent discussion: unless prescribed misinterpretations of the documents in question are subscribed to: you have to pretend that this fabulous complex, contradictory literature, is literally true, and pretend it in the face of the evidence (and lack thereof).)
Any one of Galileo's predecessors could have made a good living endorsing any of the Church's preposterous claims about itself; god help the poor slob who tried to tell any truth not of standard prescription. Today we have universities, departments of science, of history, newspapers, scholarly journals ... a zillion scholars with tenure ... but the situation is the same. Actually, the situation may be worse. Today's "Church," the secular state, has its hands deeper into public resources than any church of old ever had. With federal funding of universities, and of science, and of history ... you can pretty well guarantee that there can be no science, no history ... no real universities.
Our authorities are convenient for certain interests in the short run but are driving us toward extinction in the long run: a long run that may end abruptly at any minute. Once a would-be authority has actual authority, then it's not hard to tell the robot sheeple that they have free speech, or that they're intelligent, or literate, or the best and the brightest ... But a people could be those things only if they were alert to the tricks of false authorities: and humble about their own fallibility.
(How did Christians ever come to be so blind to their own theory of Original Sin? We believe in it only when we also believe that a little superstition neutralizes it!)
In 2006 I was arrested for complaining (over decades) that the kleptocray had stolen its egregious internet by perverting the voluntary public networking designed by Ivan Illich and offered by me in 1970. In 2007 the federal court censored my AgainstHierarchy.org — but my host deleted all of the 3,000 data files, 2,500 of them text, destroying my five domains in their entirety: art, biography, science, philosophy, information theory-and-fact, networking theory-and-fact ...
The papers mentioned only that a local terrorist had been arrested. No mention was made of censorship. Children are still told that they have free speech by a still compulsory school system. And now, released, horny, alone, when I attend a senior social, I'm expected to join in the Pledge of Allegiance, where the US claims to be "under God"! My fellows can't read my accounts of things online, but all can search for the government's concoction of lies: the FBI quoting my actual words but totally changing the meaning with their editing. (Give Leni Riefenstahl the editing room and she could make Hitler look good; give the kleptocrats the editing room, the Church, the US, the FBI ... and they can make saints, god, and scientists look bad. Look bad to morons, that is. Unfortunately, that's all we've got more than a dozen of.)
2010 11 10 Knatz.com referred to Galileo a great deal, so do my blogs, but it astonishes me to realize today that there's a major reason why I so sympathize with, identify with, and admire Galileo that I haven't mentioned. The Church inherited a traditional cosmology: anthropo-centric. Galileo saw through his telescope, firm evidence, that Jupiter had satellites. Conventional wisdom held that to be impossible. Church and academe tag-teamed him, threatened him with torture. Fine, happens all the time. Genius, sainthood, inspiration aren't as rare as we pretend. Jesus said lets love one another, we crucified him. Fine, that's our nature. But: here's the thing, the thing that puts Galileo and pk on the same page, just as pk and Jesus are on the same page: the Church continued to use Galileo's star charts while they persecuted him!
See? If the Yahoos kill the god, so what? They'll just fail sooner. Good. But they don't just kill the god! They kill the god and then steal what the murdered god was offering!
The retrograde society beat up on me because I wanted to take Jesus down off the cross. The retrograde society refused to understand a thing I tried to teach it about literature, about Shakespeare, about information ... Then the retrograde society rejected my offer of a cheap internet in 1970. But then almost immediately that society was supporting people who offered dating services: the dating services coming after my offer of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., but the dating services were offering only a fraction of what FLEX offered while charging vastly more than FLEX asked for in average user cost.
If Winchester offers a better rifle, hunters don't have to adopt it. They can hunt rabbits with a rock. But it's wrong to starve Winchester and then plagiarize his improvements. We rejected Jesus: good for us, now we're damned. We shouldn't knock him down, kill him, and steal his salvation! That's exactly what we try to do. (Of course it won't work. We can steal an illusion of salvation, but not real salvation: real salvation can come only from our learning what's required, and our changing our behavior.) The Church wanted both worlds. It wanted the old cosmology, but also wanted the new profits brought by more accurate navigation: based on more accurate observation, deeper thinking, based on Galileo.
The US stomped on me for tying to offer the public a tool to get around compulsion, around government interference in the family, around compulsory schooling, restricted learning, and the preposterous semantic error of diplomas. Fine. Let the Yahoos die, and die quickly. But then the US stole my internet except for the soul of it! My internet was intended to make us more convivial, better Christians (whatever our religion); the US internet now has stronger censorship leverage than ever. How dare they steal my offering but pervert the result?
Fortunately, Judgment will not be run by the US, or the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors ... the priests; Judgment will be run by the Truth.
In Schindler's List the Nazis are marching Jews around the concentration camp while doing a bit of construction. A Jewess tells the Nazis how they should do their project better, introduces herself as an engineer. "Shoot her," says Amon Goeth. The Nazis obey, the woman is dead. What should we do, the workers ask mon Goeth what they should do. "Do whatever the Jew said," he answers. (I told the story at pkKlep.)
It isn't just Jesus ... Galileo, Illich ... pk. The exact illustration even got into the movies!
We are a social species, have elaborate communications tools. Obviously we have language, signs, assorted media. Even a stranger amid a different language group has ways to communicate "I am hungry," "I am thirsty," "I'm horny," "I need a latrine ..." Those points don't need me to elaborate them. And some other odd points about communication have already been made publicly by this and that scientist, by this and that social theorist, in this and that field.
For example:
"Friend," while preparing the knife.
What I bring here today are refinements on explanations more kin to those last on my list than first. In brief: I experience both personally and from "history" that humans, social man, are open to some types of communications, but closed to many others. Communications that we are open to are much in evidence, are much discussed, are no secret; but we are not aware and don't want to be make aware of communications that we are closed to: Galileo's contemporaries did not want to hear that the planet Jupiter had moons: they'd believed that the earth was the only body with satellites. Finding that satellites were common was a demotion for our faith in our uniqueness. (People still don't want to acknowledge how common "uniqueness" is!) Typically, we refused to learn what we had learned, except after a struggle.
Fortunately, the major religion of the west tells the situation both in the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians: God talked to Adam, Adam didn't listen; Moses talked to the Jews, the Jews didn't listen ... Jesus tried to bring new messages from God, the Jews' high temple, supposedly devoted to this God, didn't listen ... In "fact," all the secular authorities, Roman and Jewish, ganged up, in violation of their own laws, to torture God to death ...
(The trouble is, this literature is closed to intelligent discussion: unless prescribed misinterpretations of the documents in question are subscribed to: you have to pretend that this fabulous complex, contradictory literature, is literally true, and pretend it in the face of the evidence (and lack thereof).)
Any one of Galileo's predecessors could have made a good living endorsing any of the Church's preposterous claims about itself; god help the poor slob who tried to tell any truth not of standard prescription. Today we have universities, departments of science, of history, newspapers, scholarly journals ... a zillion scholars with tenure ... but the situation is the same. Actually, the situation may be worse. Today's "Church," the secular state, has its hands deeper into public resources than any church of old ever had. With federal funding of universities, and of science, and of history ... you can pretty well guarantee that there can be no science, no history ... no real universities.
Our authorities are convenient for certain interests in the short run but are driving us toward extinction in the long run: a long run that may end abruptly at any minute. Once a would-be authority has actual authority, then it's not hard to tell the robot sheeple that they have free speech, or that they're intelligent, or literate, or the best and the brightest ... But a people could be those things only if they were alert to the tricks of false authorities: and humble about their own fallibility.
(How did Christians ever come to be so blind to their own theory of Original Sin? We believe in it only when we also believe that a little superstition neutralizes it!)
In 2006 I was arrested for complaining (over decades) that the kleptocray had stolen its egregious internet by perverting the voluntary public networking designed by Ivan Illich and offered by me in 1970. In 2007 the federal court censored my AgainstHierarchy.org — but my host deleted all of the 3,000 data files, 2,500 of them text, destroying my five domains in their entirety: art, biography, science, philosophy, information theory-and-fact, networking theory-and-fact ...
The papers mentioned only that a local terrorist had been arrested. No mention was made of censorship. Children are still told that they have free speech by a still compulsory school system. And now, released, horny, alone, when I attend a senior social, I'm expected to join in the Pledge of Allegiance, where the US claims to be "under God"! My fellows can't read my accounts of things online, but all can search for the government's concoction of lies: the FBI quoting my actual words but totally changing the meaning with their editing. (Give Leni Riefenstahl the editing room and she could make Hitler look good; give the kleptocrats the editing room, the Church, the US, the FBI ... and they can make saints, god, and scientists look bad. Look bad to morons, that is. Unfortunately, that's all we've got more than a dozen of.)
2010 11 10 Knatz.com referred to Galileo a great deal, so do my blogs, but it astonishes me to realize today that there's a major reason why I so sympathize with, identify with, and admire Galileo that I haven't mentioned. The Church inherited a traditional cosmology: anthropo-centric. Galileo saw through his telescope, firm evidence, that Jupiter had satellites. Conventional wisdom held that to be impossible. Church and academe tag-teamed him, threatened him with torture. Fine, happens all the time. Genius, sainthood, inspiration aren't as rare as we pretend. Jesus said lets love one another, we crucified him. Fine, that's our nature. But: here's the thing, the thing that puts Galileo and pk on the same page, just as pk and Jesus are on the same page: the Church continued to use Galileo's star charts while they persecuted him!
See? If the Yahoos kill the god, so what? They'll just fail sooner. Good. But they don't just kill the god! They kill the god and then steal what the murdered god was offering!
The retrograde society beat up on me because I wanted to take Jesus down off the cross. The retrograde society refused to understand a thing I tried to teach it about literature, about Shakespeare, about information ... Then the retrograde society rejected my offer of a cheap internet in 1970. But then almost immediately that society was supporting people who offered dating services: the dating services coming after my offer of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., but the dating services were offering only a fraction of what FLEX offered while charging vastly more than FLEX asked for in average user cost.
If Winchester offers a better rifle, hunters don't have to adopt it. They can hunt rabbits with a rock. But it's wrong to starve Winchester and then plagiarize his improvements. We rejected Jesus: good for us, now we're damned. We shouldn't knock him down, kill him, and steal his salvation! That's exactly what we try to do. (Of course it won't work. We can steal an illusion of salvation, but not real salvation: real salvation can come only from our learning what's required, and our changing our behavior.) The Church wanted both worlds. It wanted the old cosmology, but also wanted the new profits brought by more accurate navigation: based on more accurate observation, deeper thinking, based on Galileo.
The US stomped on me for tying to offer the public a tool to get around compulsion, around government interference in the family, around compulsory schooling, restricted learning, and the preposterous semantic error of diplomas. Fine. Let the Yahoos die, and die quickly. But then the US stole my internet except for the soul of it! My internet was intended to make us more convivial, better Christians (whatever our religion); the US internet now has stronger censorship leverage than ever. How dare they steal my offering but pervert the result?
Fortunately, Judgment will not be run by the US, or the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors ... the priests; Judgment will be run by the Truth.
In Schindler's List the Nazis are marching Jews around the concentration camp while doing a bit of construction. A Jewess tells the Nazis how they should do their project better, introduces herself as an engineer. "Shoot her," says Amon Goeth. The Nazis obey, the woman is dead. What should we do, the workers ask mon Goeth what they should do. "Do whatever the Jew said," he answers. (I told the story at pkKlep.)
It isn't just Jesus ... Galileo, Illich ... pk. The exact illustration even got into the movies!
Monday, March 30, 2009
No Container for Truth
The truth is too corrosive for the foibles of any human institution for that institution and its allied institutions to repeat let alone preserve. Evolution can and has produced individuals, would-be saviors, who can semiotically model the truth, but the model will not transport. It's like the physicist's plasma: we can (theoretically) make it (in very small quantities) but we can't hold it. Like plasma, the truth has no container: except art, and art can always be interpreted away.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Freedom
Knatz.com (and its ancestor, and its spin-offs) had a zillion modules on freedom, thus far none of them reposted to pk blogs. Before I get to it I have a series of things to add that I don't remember yet saying at K. I'll sketch a few reminders to myself, teasers for you, here.
Freedom
You can't be more free in this universe, on this earth, than CroMagnon man was. Did he talk about freedom? Or do we just start obsessing about it after we've lost nearly all that we ever had?
These days, to me, freedom is what comes with "nature": that is, a biosphere not mucked about with by several (and more) billion humans, all talking, talking, talking.
The aborning United States used "freedom of religion" as a sibboleth. The framers meant that the deists wouldn't put the Presbyterians in jail, or the Baptists, or the Methodists once they came along. They certainly did not mean that anyone could think or say anything they wanted about cosmology, theology ... this or that god ... Imagine Hawking set in front of Benjamin Franklin, two great "scientists," but from different eras. I can't imagine either letting the other get a word in (of course I'm first imagining Hawking as actually able to talk, without all that machinery, without that whole infrastructure of computers and programmers ...)
My son tells me that in France they care far more about freedom from religion than any freedom of religion. The Church has a visible presence in France, but is quite without power: would a contemporary Frenchman tolerate the Church if it started reassaming power? (Only if the Frenchman retained to power he now has: to dissent, to mock ...)
What I want is freedom from government.
Freedom of Speech
What good is it if no one understands what you say? if the institutions that manage our lives from birth (and before birth, before conception!) are illiterate? without imagination? are incapable of listening? and too full of themselves to realize that they are ... all of the above?
Maybe actually Franklin and Hawking would get along just dandy. Both were extraordinary men. But: Swift shows us Gulliver helpless among the Lilliputians, then later, just as helpless back in London, trying to explain Lilliput to Englishmen. The Gulliver of the narrative just went along with everything; the Gulliver trying to be a messenger gave up and went and lived, miserable, in the stable. At least in our Christian story we put Jesus out of his misery while he was still in his prime, before he had to waste any more words on us?
Prayer
Humans imagine that they can talk competently with gods, that gods came communicate with them: us, the humans.
Why don't religious meetings begin with a prayer:Oh, God:
If we are in any way misrepresenting you, send us a sign, right now. Burn me, claiming to be your priest, for example, right now.
Burn the congregation, right now, if they are making me say and do things against my will.
...
Freedom
You can't be more free in this universe, on this earth, than CroMagnon man was. Did he talk about freedom? Or do we just start obsessing about it after we've lost nearly all that we ever had?
These days, to me, freedom is what comes with "nature": that is, a biosphere not mucked about with by several (and more) billion humans, all talking, talking, talking.
The aborning United States used "freedom of religion" as a sibboleth. The framers meant that the deists wouldn't put the Presbyterians in jail, or the Baptists, or the Methodists once they came along. They certainly did not mean that anyone could think or say anything they wanted about cosmology, theology ... this or that god ... Imagine Hawking set in front of Benjamin Franklin, two great "scientists," but from different eras. I can't imagine either letting the other get a word in (of course I'm first imagining Hawking as actually able to talk, without all that machinery, without that whole infrastructure of computers and programmers ...)
My son tells me that in France they care far more about freedom from religion than any freedom of religion. The Church has a visible presence in France, but is quite without power: would a contemporary Frenchman tolerate the Church if it started reassaming power? (Only if the Frenchman retained to power he now has: to dissent, to mock ...)
What I want is freedom from government.
Freedom of Speech
What good is it if no one understands what you say? if the institutions that manage our lives from birth (and before birth, before conception!) are illiterate? without imagination? are incapable of listening? and too full of themselves to realize that they are ... all of the above?
Maybe actually Franklin and Hawking would get along just dandy. Both were extraordinary men. But: Swift shows us Gulliver helpless among the Lilliputians, then later, just as helpless back in London, trying to explain Lilliput to Englishmen. The Gulliver of the narrative just went along with everything; the Gulliver trying to be a messenger gave up and went and lived, miserable, in the stable. At least in our Christian story we put Jesus out of his misery while he was still in his prime, before he had to waste any more words on us?
Prayer
Humans imagine that they can talk competently with gods, that gods came communicate with them: us, the humans.
Why don't religious meetings begin with a prayer:
If we are in any way misrepresenting you, send us a sign, right now. Burn me, claiming to be your priest, for example, right now.
Burn the congregation, right now, if they are making me say and do things against my will.
...
Monday, March 16, 2009
Divine Love
Should Jesus on the cross love those who are crucifying him?
The Christian answer is that he does: because he's not human,
he's superhuman, divine.
He's God! and God is Love. God, because of the crucifixion, forgives us!
Don't try to understand it: it's a mystery.
OK. I believed all that as a kid, even as a young man,
at least I tried to believe it.
I sometimes try to believe it at seventy, after being betrayed all my life, defrauded, blackballed, denied the rights claimed to be common across the culture ...
But there's one thing I refuse to respect this sort of Christian divinity for:Should Jesus love and forgive the Christians, no matter how many times they claim they love Jesus, no matter how many candles they burn, no matter how many doorbells they ring, no matter how much money they donate,
if they're still torturing and silencing and interrupting and misrepresenting God(-and Jesus)'s subsequent messages and messengers? There's Jesus on the cross. He loves and forgives the soldiers tormenting him. He loves and forgives the soldier who stuck a spear in his side: so the Jews wouldn't have to be embarrassed to be torturing their Messiah after their Sabbath commenced with sundown. Fine.
Now:Should Jesus forgive the Pope who puts a contract out on Martin Luther?
should Jesus forgive the Pope (or the professors) who threatened Galileo with torture for jeopardizing their (the Church's and Universities' ridiculous ignorant contradicted-by-observation model of the universe?
should Jesus forgive the Church for defrocking Ivan Illich, its greatest priest?
Should Jesus forgive the United States for censoring pk when it was Jesus-Illich's convivial humanity pk was working for?
should Jesus forgive the United States for telling children compelled to attend school that they have free speech while filling the jails with the silenced? such as pk? One last question:Should Jesus forgive the churches who keep no record of claims made by the congregation that God "spoke" to them? I think Jesus should forgive the churches exactly as much as he forgives the schools for allowing no notice, keeping no records, of non-standard ideas that emerge from the non-tenured portion of the school: the instructors, the students.
The Christian answer is that he does: because he's not human,
he's superhuman, divine.
He's God! and God is Love. God, because of the crucifixion, forgives us!
Don't try to understand it: it's a mystery.
OK. I believed all that as a kid, even as a young man,
at least I tried to believe it.
I sometimes try to believe it at seventy, after being betrayed all my life, defrauded, blackballed, denied the rights claimed to be common across the culture ...
But there's one thing I refuse to respect this sort of Christian divinity for:
if they're still torturing and silencing and interrupting and misrepresenting God(-and Jesus)'s subsequent messages and messengers?
Now:
should Jesus forgive the Pope (or the professors) who threatened Galileo with torture for jeopardizing their (the Church's and Universities' ridiculous ignorant contradicted-by-observation model of the universe?
should Jesus forgive the Church for defrocking Ivan Illich, its greatest priest?
Should Jesus forgive the United States for censoring pk when it was Jesus-Illich's convivial humanity pk was working for?
should Jesus forgive the United States for telling children compelled to attend school that they have free speech while filling the jails with the silenced? such as pk?
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Stotting in Civilized Man
The gazelle on the savanna senses a predator. The gazelle is built for speed, and for leaping obstacles. So is the predator: both pray and predator co-evolve together, there's no such thing as one species, independent of others, independent of an ecology. The behaviors relate by a complex "tree" that only science can begin to simplify while mapping with any accuracy. Anyway, what does the gazelle do? The gazelle stops munching, pricks its ears, sniffs the wind ...
And if the gazelle sniffs lion , or sees so much as a claw, or a paw, or a haunch of lion, why it runs like hell in another direction, right? No. Not quite. Commonly, just before running, the gazelle will hop up and down a couple of times: then run like hell.
What? It is crazy? A human male will jump off a cliff to impress his buddies, though the behavior, as any biologist can explain to us, is actually intended to impress the female: to get her to lie down and open her legs: so that the guy can get off: that is, mix his genes with hers, make a new guy who will jump off cliffs, or a girl that will still convey his courage to a subsequent male offspring. And so on. But ruminants have no investment in courage — courage is for social predators: they, ruminants, survive, or try to, by running away, by being quick, fast, alert, agile ... What could possibly "cause" crazy, wasteful jumping in place to allow a whole class of species to still be doing it and still be alive?
Jared Diamond explains: combining his brilliance with the wisdom of his disciplines: biology, zoology, physiology:Ruminant species have learned over eons that wasting a moment or two can actually gain in survival chances. The lion sees the gazelle, sees that the gazelle sees the lion, sees the gazelle waste time, energy, movement, not running away ... and the gazelle may "cause" the lion to pause, and think, Well, if that gazelle is so confident it can escape me that it wastes time showing off, maybe it can escape me and I'm wasting my time chasing it.
Some gazelles will get caught, become lion-lunch, but enough other gazelles discourage the lion that the species benefits: all ruminants benefit: for now. (Never assume that what aided survival yesterday will aid survival tomorrow.) OK, that's stotting, also known as pronking: in ruminants: as explained by contemporary zoological sciences (and paraphrased by pk). I mention it not only because I think it's neat, but because I find all sorts of analogies in it beyond the one that Jared Diamond mentioned it to develop: specifically, Diamond introduced stotting and its scientific "explanation" additionally to explain human behaviors that at first glance seem wasteful, stupid, dangerous: such as substance abuse — drugs, alcohol ... (Apparently paleo-evidence supports a theory that humans have been drug-chewing drunks for a very long time now.) But back to the gazelles: the stotting gazelle is telling the predator, Don't waste your time, I'm too fast for you; the human is telling her candidate bed-partner, Look at me: I'm such a great specimen of Homo sapiens that I can drink myself stupid and still have men buy me furs, a Mercedes, and send my kid to Exeter, while the male is trying to convey analogous advertising lies.
The strategy obviously has pitfalls. A lot of gazelles have become hors d'oeuvres for a lot of predators; a lot of human drunks and junkies have wrapped themselves around a tree whether or not they impressed the girl.
OK. Jared Diamond's extension of stotting as an explanation for substance abuse is brilliant, profound: but pk says it doesn't stop there. It may not explain everything, but it sure can be used to shed light on other otherwise incomprehensible behaviors: like why civilized man has devoted 99 calories to ignoring over-population, global warming ... any number of concepts intended to make us wake up and take stock to every one calorie devoted to understanding and responding to the danger.
How about civilized man making life impossible for anyone who doesn't go along with the idea of a God who'll bail us out no matter how drunk, stupid, or depraved we become ... All we have to do is say, "I believe," and light a cheap candle, the quarter going not to God, but to some priest? Isn't that like stotting? Isn't that a way of saying, Existence so favors us humans, the cream of life, the point of everything, that we don't have to be alert, or agile, or truthful, or speedy ... and mostly, we don't have to be honest: with ourselves ... about anything.God is such a sap: he'll buy any horse-shit we feed him, he loves us so. (And if he weren't, we'd get ourselves a different god: pronto! What other explanation could there possibly be for civilized many tolerating a governmental hand in its pocket to fund thugs with guns called cops, illiterates displacing thinkers in pens called schools ... If anyone tries to point it out, as I did, his university can interrupt him, postpone his advancement, make it impossible for make a living (without jettisoning all plans, hopes, investments) ... Finally I was arrested, given a kangaroo trial ... censored, wanted off restoring destroyed information to the internet: stolen from me, Illich (... Jesus) in the first place!
Is civilization a form of stotting?
Look God, We don't have to be smart. We can dance on the edge. You'll bail us out, you won't let us fall. (And if you do, the US will bail our ass!)
And if the gazelle sniffs lion , or sees so much as a claw, or a paw, or a haunch of lion, why it runs like hell in another direction, right? No. Not quite. Commonly, just before running, the gazelle will hop up and down a couple of times: then run like hell.
What? It is crazy? A human male will jump off a cliff to impress his buddies, though the behavior, as any biologist can explain to us, is actually intended to impress the female: to get her to lie down and open her legs: so that the guy can get off: that is, mix his genes with hers, make a new guy who will jump off cliffs, or a girl that will still convey his courage to a subsequent male offspring. And so on. But ruminants have no investment in courage — courage is for social predators: they, ruminants, survive, or try to, by running away, by being quick, fast, alert, agile ... What could possibly "cause" crazy, wasteful jumping in place to allow a whole class of species to still be doing it and still be alive?
Jared Diamond explains: combining his brilliance with the wisdom of his disciplines: biology, zoology, physiology:
Some gazelles will get caught, become lion-lunch, but enough other gazelles discourage the lion that the species benefits: all ruminants benefit: for now.
The strategy obviously has pitfalls. A lot of gazelles have become hors d'oeuvres for a lot of predators; a lot of human drunks and junkies have wrapped themselves around a tree whether or not they impressed the girl.
OK. Jared Diamond's extension of stotting as an explanation for substance abuse is brilliant, profound: but pk says it doesn't stop there. It may not explain everything, but it sure can be used to shed light on other otherwise incomprehensible behaviors: like why civilized man has devoted 99 calories to ignoring over-population, global warming ... any number of concepts intended to make us wake up and take stock to every one calorie devoted to understanding and responding to the danger.
How about civilized man making life impossible for anyone who doesn't go along with the idea of a God who'll bail us out no matter how drunk, stupid, or depraved we become ... All we have to do is say, "I believe," and light a cheap candle, the quarter going not to God, but to some priest? Isn't that like stotting? Isn't that a way of saying, Existence so favors us humans, the cream of life, the point of everything, that we don't have to be alert, or agile, or truthful, or speedy ... and mostly, we don't have to be honest: with ourselves ... about anything.
Is civilization a form of stotting?
Look God, We don't have to be smart. We can dance on the edge. You'll bail us out, you won't let us fall. (And if you do, the US will bail our ass!)
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Free Will
I want to develop a piece on free will in which I largely ignore the question of whether man has free will, concentrating instead on whether religious man would allow God free will.
The Bible presents a series of obligations for God. The story of the Flood has God saying that he won't do it again. Really, no matter what we do, if everyone smokes crack and has a crack baby, God still won't get pissed off and drown us all as he did in Noah's day, or turn us all into pilars of salt as he did for Lot's wife?
The Jews' Bible tells the Jews that God will judge the nations, after which God will enslave everybody except the Jews, all for the sake of the Jews. The Bible promised that God will do this for the Jews No Matter What the Jews Do In The Meantime!!!
Christians say that the Bible promises this and that: so many Jehavah's Witnesses in heaven. At Judgment will God have any say in the matter?
I won't respect any god until the religious would shit a brick rather than allow him to get a word in edgewise.
But you know what? I don't think my god is going to say anything at Judgment. I don't think any humans are going to say anything either. I think we're all going to be dead, and that god won't need any speech.
The Bible presents a series of obligations for God. The story of the Flood has God saying that he won't do it again. Really, no matter what we do, if everyone smokes crack and has a crack baby, God still won't get pissed off and drown us all as he did in Noah's day, or turn us all into pilars of salt as he did for Lot's wife?
The Jews' Bible tells the Jews that God will judge the nations, after which God will enslave everybody except the Jews, all for the sake of the Jews. The Bible promised that God will do this for the Jews No Matter What the Jews Do In The Meantime!!!
Christians say that the Bible promises this and that: so many Jehavah's Witnesses in heaven. At Judgment will God have any say in the matter?
I won't respect any god until the religious would shit a brick rather than allow him to get a word in edgewise.
But you know what? I don't think my god is going to say anything at Judgment. I don't think any humans are going to say anything either. I think we're all going to be dead, and that god won't need any speech.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Brutal Music
Today's StraightDope reports:
I've heard and read stories about musicians, specifically hand drummers, pissing blood after playing a particularly tough or long set. The great Armando Peraza, Santana's longtime bongo and conga player, told an interviewer: "Playing percussion for Carlos you had to be able to play hard, non-stop for sometimes up to three straight hours, and play loud enough to be heard over the electric instruments. A lot of times I played so hard that I would piss blood after the shows. Santana gigs were an endurance test of the highest order." What would the connection be here? Can blood really get into the urine through this kind of physical exertion?--James
Cecil replies:
Music is a brutal business, James: String and keyboard players can suffer from focal dystonia. Saxophone and clarinet players develop disorders of the temporomandibular joint. At least one guitarist, Terry Balsamo of the metal act Evanescence, apparently gave himself a stroke by head-banging onstage. And hand drummers risk rhabdomyolysis, the disorder you refer to. Typically it's not blood they're seeing in their urine, though — it's muscle.
Rhabdomyolysis occurs when muscle cells are damaged to the extent that they break down in the body, releasing into the bloodstream several substances, including a protein called myoglobin that’s excreted in the urine (if you're lucky) and imparts the reddish brown color.
The condition is sometimes called "crush injury syndrome." Some of the first recorded cases were seen during the London blitz in World War II, resulting from the battering people took when they were trapped inside collapsing buildings. It's also found in the victims of earthquakes — after the 1988 Armenian quake more than 1,000 cases were reported — and auto accidents. Some less typical cases have evidently been caused by lightning, centrifugal pilot training, CPR compressions, riding a mechanical bull, being attacked by a wolf, and taking advice from goons.
For more, see:
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2848/can-playing-the-bongos-make-you-piss-blood
I've heard and read stories about musicians, specifically hand drummers, pissing blood after playing a particularly tough or long set. The great Armando Peraza, Santana's longtime bongo and conga player, told an interviewer: "Playing percussion for Carlos you had to be able to play hard, non-stop for sometimes up to three straight hours, and play loud enough to be heard over the electric instruments. A lot of times I played so hard that I would piss blood after the shows. Santana gigs were an endurance test of the highest order." What would the connection be here? Can blood really get into the urine through this kind of physical exertion?--James
Cecil replies:
Music is a brutal business, James: String and keyboard players can suffer from focal dystonia. Saxophone and clarinet players develop disorders of the temporomandibular joint. At least one guitarist, Terry Balsamo of the metal act Evanescence, apparently gave himself a stroke by head-banging onstage. And hand drummers risk rhabdomyolysis, the disorder you refer to. Typically it's not blood they're seeing in their urine, though — it's muscle.
Rhabdomyolysis occurs when muscle cells are damaged to the extent that they break down in the body, releasing into the bloodstream several substances, including a protein called myoglobin that’s excreted in the urine (if you're lucky) and imparts the reddish brown color.
The condition is sometimes called "crush injury syndrome." Some of the first recorded cases were seen during the London blitz in World War II, resulting from the battering people took when they were trapped inside collapsing buildings. It's also found in the victims of earthquakes — after the 1988 Armenian quake more than 1,000 cases were reported — and auto accidents. Some less typical cases have evidently been caused by lightning, centrifugal pilot training, CPR compressions, riding a mechanical bull, being attacked by a wolf, and taking advice from goons.
For more, see:
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2848/can-playing-the-bongos-make-you-piss-blood
Fascism
Politics reduces to two contrasting simplicities. If you believe in liberty then you must be in essence an anarchist. If you believe that the group has a right to rule in individual, then the steps to becoming a fascist are all but inevitable.
The US gives a monopoly to the post office: fascism.
If I were a "caveman" I don't imagine these distinctions would bother me. As it is, I have zero confidence in civilization. Fascism oppresses me from all sides.
More will follow as I can make time.
The US gives a monopoly to the post office: fascism.
If I were a "caveman" I don't imagine these distinctions would bother me. As it is, I have zero confidence in civilization. Fascism oppresses me from all sides.
More will follow as I can make time.
Hypocrisy
Every kid in Sunday School looks down on hypocrites, despite knowing somehow that all adults are hypocrites. I had extra talents, extra seriousness (and a meta-sense of humor, of mockery): I still looked down on hypocrites as I grew up. But what what I really hate is secular hypocrisy: institutions that pretend to serve freedom but actually create mono-culture.
Most of all I hate the sheeple pledging allegiance, droning about "liberty and justice for all": while the FBI arrests philosophers on any pretext they can concoct, while the cops bust the heads of dissidents.
Of course the press doesn't report such things: abroad, yes, but seldom at home. Even if a reporter were capable of seeing what's before his eyes, sponsors would punish any organ that let slip more than some fraction of truth.
More will come after I rescue another few dozen Knatz.com classics to these damn 2D blogs.
Most of all I hate the sheeple pledging allegiance, droning about "liberty and justice for all": while the FBI arrests philosophers on any pretext they can concoct, while the cops bust the heads of dissidents.
Of course the press doesn't report such things: abroad, yes, but seldom at home. Even if a reporter were capable of seeing what's before his eyes, sponsors would punish any organ that let slip more than some fraction of truth.
More will come after I rescue another few dozen Knatz.com classics to these damn 2D blogs.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Group Fiction
More than one module in pk domains offered Jesus as an example of group fiction. My theory of macroinformation argues that all complex information is data interpreted. Shakespeare, were he among us, would have a priviledged position in interpreting Hamlet, but no matter what he said, I, and you too, could still have our own interpretation. I for one have watched famous authors revise their interpretation of their own play upon hearing my interpretation (Edward Albee with his Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, for example).
But no, the fundamentalists don't want that. They want the world to be black and white, true and false, with authorities right, the truth answerable to them! (That might be grand where the fundamentalists not always so wrong, so retrograde, so stupid, so ignorant ... about EVERYTHING!)Bill Maher, on Christianity:They make it up as they go along! I've already been cheated, defrauded, unpublished, interrupted, misrepresented, bankrupted ... blackballed ... arrested, censored; but I'm still talking: or trying to talk. The ill will of the religious fundamentalists though will pale compared to the ire of secular gullibles when I say that, similarly, our concepts of "freedom" and "democracy" and "education" are also group fictions.
Thinking of Horus, of Mithras, of other pre-Christian born-of-a-virgin martyred-then-resurrected god-saviors, it occurs to me, I shouldn't just be talking about group fiction, I should be talking about group plagiarism.
Oh but then we're all kleptocrats: we don't just steal land, steal women, steal gold, steal labor; we steal stories, religions, saviors, gods ... We steal ideas, we steal superstitions. Not even our stupidity is original.
But no, the fundamentalists don't want that. They want the world to be black and white, true and false, with authorities right, the truth answerable to them! (That might be grand where the fundamentalists not always so wrong, so retrograde, so stupid, so ignorant ... about EVERYTHING!)
2009 06 07
Thinking of Horus, of Mithras, of other pre-Christian born-of-a-virgin martyred-then-resurrected god-saviors, it occurs to me, I shouldn't just be talking about group fiction, I should be talking about group plagiarism.
Oh but then we're all kleptocrats: we don't just steal land, steal women, steal gold, steal labor; we steal stories, religions, saviors, gods ... We steal ideas, we steal superstitions. Not even our stupidity is original.
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