Siberia is a region of Asia which has come to symbolize a wilderness far from civilization where Big Brother can exile dissidents. Stalin can send messages into Siberia; the exiled cannot send messages out. Indeed the exiled can barely communicate among themselves. Starved and tortured, an exile can barely communicate within himself. The English have an expression that the nonconformist has been "put in Coventry": same thing, though without the Stalinist extreme of the late Soviet. (Americans don't have quite so handy a term for it that I can think of. We have "sold down the river": but that references individuals who were slaves in the first place, no one cares how well they can communicate.)
Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)
Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.
In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)
Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:
In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)
But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."
What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?
How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?
When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.
Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."
I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.
Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Angels
Is there anything more absurd in human society than the belief that a god can communicate with a human culture, directly, one-on-one, the communication successful in reaching the entire cultural group? Yes: the idea that a god can use an intermediary, a messenger, an "angel," and get the same results.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Grab the Redhead
Escorting a cute red head back to our table I found the aisle blocked by a single wide body. I skipped holding her chair that time and let her go around by herself. But the guy turned out to have been lying in ambush. He grabbed Red and squeezed her.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Monday, October 19, 2009
K. Conundrums
This section of posts will parallel my K. Symbols section, spread around Iona Arc over the past several years (while concentrated at the censored Knatz.com in the Teaching area.) The pk conundrums are minor K. symbols, long salted around K.: here I merely repeat and summarize:
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?Cosmologists imagine a universe which came into existence roughly fourteen billion years ago in which the earth and our sun came into existence as "the solar system" around four point six billion years ago.
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years." How can you have a mile when there's no earth?Same problems Certainly you can have time, you can have units of time. You can have extension, dimension ... units of "length," "width," "depth," "duration" ... but I don't see us having "years" or "miles" prior to having a solar system. In fact I don't see it prior to English being spoken: specifically modern English: My English!
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years."
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
Homo Sapiens Moronsis
I know it's silly to think that names describe the thing named. Is Prudence prudent? Is Honest John, the used car dealer, honest? is Faith faithful? How tricky can Tricky Dick be relied on to be?
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat
"And God said," according to the Latin Bible by which Christians interpreted the Jewish sacred tradition, "Fiat lux." That's a lot of languages, a lot of mythology, and a lot of iron age, bronze age, cosmology/theology we pass through before we get to the English interpretation of King James's scholars:
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:Money emerges from a human market place, then specialized organs of the market such as banks invent bank notes to substitute for horses, cowrie shells ... or gold: then government emerges from the welter of the market with its specialized organs (conceive "market" roughly as property, products, vendors, buyers, public, banks) takes over and, "borrowing" substitute "money" from the banks, issues its own money-notes. The governments next step in "borrowing" everything is to subtract the gold from the money: leaving government with all the property, all of the gold, all of the land, all of the resources ... and the public and the banks and the vendors with a lot of paper: fiat money.
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value. Here today I wish to make notes for further development extending the metaphor of fiat-this and that to other preposterous contemporary fiats, especially hidden fiats: fiats not examined in the over-developed but school-addled forebrain of over-populated Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Let there be light.
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Kingdom of God
One important difference between earth and the Kingdom of God, certainly at least as I imagine it, is that on earth the reigning kleptocrats don't have to listen to the charges their victims make against them. The Christians may get to accuse Caesar, but not to his face. Hitler's bureaucrats can refuse to grant an audience to the rabbis: especially once the rabbis are jammed together with all the other Jews, minus their geld and their gold teeth, into the concentration camps. Nixon, prior to his resignation (and seldom after it), did not have to sit still for the world's litany of his crimes.
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
CommunicationN
The possibilities of success for a message vary with the number of communicants involved. There are several meta-levels – quantum leaps as it were – involved.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Religion
Religion reflects human imagination concerning the cosmos. Organized religion restricts human imagination concerning the cosmos.
I yesterday started pkTheo, a theology blog. The above statement is duplicated there, related posts are being moved there.
My post on CommunicationN will say more on the same theme before I add more here.
My current thinking emphasizes the difference between individual and group. The proposition that there is a God who speaks to a Moses (or a Jesus) (or a pk) does not necessitate any proposition that that God therefore speaks to the Jews (or to the Christians) (or to Americans).
Every Christian faction believes that they've got God right (says Bart Ehrman). I say that those factions are wrong: so they put me in Siberia, ignore-while-censoring my theo-cosmologies. I am sustained by imagining a Judgment in which God merely shows people their actual behavior – as distinct from their wishful image. Not in eternity! Time itself is infinite. Merely after we're extinct will suffice.
And I iterate my point from my one article actually published, long ago in 1971, that universities (and all socially-compelled Western schools) derive from Christian monasteries: not thought fettered only by truth; no: thought control.
The orthodox don't listen to the heterodox, will break all their own rules to avoid hearing. Universities have as much academic freedom as monasteries have philosophical tolerance: the same amount of "free speech" that Americans have in a media-ruled market: where the media depend on advertising revenue, and advertising revenue depends entirely upon Pollyanna.
2009 11 16
I yesterday started pkTheo, a theology blog. The above statement is duplicated there, related posts are being moved there.
My post on CommunicationN will say more on the same theme before I add more here.
2009 10 26
My current thinking emphasizes the difference between individual and group. The proposition that there is a God who speaks to a Moses (or a Jesus) (or a pk) does not necessitate any proposition that that God therefore speaks to the Jews (or to the Christians) (or to Americans).
Every Christian faction believes that they've got God right (says Bart Ehrman). I say that those factions are wrong: so they put me in Siberia, ignore-while-censoring my theo-cosmologies. I am sustained by imagining a Judgment in which God merely shows people their actual behavior – as distinct from their wishful image. Not in eternity! Time itself is infinite. Merely after we're extinct will suffice.
And I iterate my point from my one article actually published, long ago in 1971, that universities (and all socially-compelled Western schools) derive from Christian monasteries: not thought fettered only by truth; no: thought control.
The orthodox don't listen to the heterodox, will break all their own rules to avoid hearing. Universities have as much academic freedom as monasteries have philosophical tolerance: the same amount of "free speech" that Americans have in a media-ruled market: where the media depend on advertising revenue, and advertising revenue depends entirely upon Pollyanna.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sport
I love sports. I love to ski, and to fish, and to play tennis; but that's not what I'm talking about when I say I love sports — I mean spectator sports: seventy thousand people filling Yankee Stadium and screaming at Joe Dimaggio, I mean a nation glued to the radio late at night, my sister and I eavesdropping from the top of the stairs, as Joe Louis pummels Max Schmelling, the whole world paying attention, I mean hundreds of millions of people transfixed in front of their TV as Michael Jordon, aging, wounded, goes up for the winning J as time runs down.
I love who good writing about sports is swiftly immortalized; while good writing about theology, cosmology, homeostasis, information, kleptocracy ... must pass a gauntlet of pummeling morons: elders opposed by nature to improved theories, unwilling to pass hypotheses that make them nervous: elders from church, from universities, publishing houses, network executives, answerable to pharmaceutical companies, to big tobacco, to Chrysler and GM ... to the BOD, to the alumni ...
The screaming about Babe Ruth was encouraged once it passed a certain number of decibels. The screaming about Josh Gibson was muffled before it ever approached those decibels. Still, despite Gibson, despite Cassius Clay getting persecuted as Muhammad Ali, what I love about sports is, spectator sports, is thatSports are where the society actually allows the map to sort of fit the territory; unlike politics, business, religion ... the competition is sort of fair, the playing field is sort of level, the judges are sort of honest ... The rules actually make some effort at clarity ...
Today's sports news has an unusual item: Serena was playing Kim Clijsters in a semi-final at the US Open. I cite what I just emailed my son, bk:Serena vs in the US semi
Serena already had a warning, abusing her racket against the post.
In match game against her, she faults, then throws in a foot fault, bring up match point against her. So she screams and threatens the line judge. The line judge does according to the theoretical instructions, report the abuse to the umpire --every one had heard it, but the ump isn't allowed to officialy hear it till it comes through chanels, and the ump awards a penalty point to the receiver. and Clijsters wins the match.
a warning plus a penalty = a point against.
Serena said that foot faults hadn't been called against her all season. Note she didn't say that she hadn't foot faulted. You can't win at that level if you don't almost foot fault, sometimes actually foot faulting.
I was in Madison Sq Garden decades back, Rod Laver playing.
A foot fault was called against the Rocket at an important point late in the match.
Rod spoke up, was heard in the back rows. Oh, no, Shut up, Rod, I thought.
But Rocket said, "How many of those have you called tonight, Ref?"
and the place roared. with delight.
Rocket resumed serving, and won, of course.
Serena offered to shove the ball down the lineswoman's throat.
Tennis would be a different game if official Tennis had penalized Jimmy Connors or John Mac by suspending them when they were still 14 years old.
And really socking it to them when they were "adult" pros.
The great Jack Krammer was announcing radio for a big match decades ago, Mac or someone was carrying on, and Krammer's cohort in the booth said too bad these punks don't have smooth tempers like you, Jack, and Kramer said, No, no, he had a terrible temper.
Huh? We never saw it.
Jack said, Maybe you never saw, because past age 12 I was careful to hide it.
He'd been having a tantrum on court. The officials were indulging him, not exercising the rules. His father came down from the stands, approached the umpire. The umpire announced the match for Krammer's opponent: Jack's own corner, his own FATHER! volunteered him as DisQ!
I love who good writing about sports is swiftly immortalized; while good writing about theology, cosmology, homeostasis, information, kleptocracy ... must pass a gauntlet of pummeling morons: elders opposed by nature to improved theories, unwilling to pass hypotheses that make them nervous: elders from church, from universities, publishing houses, network executives, answerable to pharmaceutical companies, to big tobacco, to Chrysler and GM ... to the BOD, to the alumni ...
The screaming about Babe Ruth was encouraged once it passed a certain number of decibels. The screaming about Josh Gibson was muffled before it ever approached those decibels. Still, despite Gibson, despite Cassius Clay getting persecuted as Muhammad Ali, what I love about sports is, spectator sports, is that
Today's sports news has an unusual item: Serena was playing Kim Clijsters in a semi-final at the US Open. I cite what I just emailed my son, bk:
Serena already had a warning, abusing her racket against the post.
In match game against her, she faults, then throws in a foot fault, bring up match point against her. So she screams and threatens the line judge. The line judge does according to the theoretical instructions, report the abuse to the umpire --every one had heard it, but the ump isn't allowed to officialy hear it till it comes through chanels, and the ump awards a penalty point to the receiver. and Clijsters wins the match.
a warning plus a penalty = a point against.
Serena said that foot faults hadn't been called against her all season. Note she didn't say that she hadn't foot faulted. You can't win at that level if you don't almost foot fault, sometimes actually foot faulting.
I was in Madison Sq Garden decades back, Rod Laver playing.
A foot fault was called against the Rocket at an important point late in the match.
Rod spoke up, was heard in the back rows. Oh, no, Shut up, Rod, I thought.
But Rocket said, "How many of those have you called tonight, Ref?"
and the place roared. with delight.
Rocket resumed serving, and won, of course.
Serena offered to shove the ball down the lineswoman's throat.
Tennis would be a different game if official Tennis had penalized Jimmy Connors or John Mac by suspending them when they were still 14 years old.
And really socking it to them when they were "adult" pros.
The great Jack Krammer was announcing radio for a big match decades ago, Mac or someone was carrying on, and Krammer's cohort in the booth said too bad these punks don't have smooth tempers like you, Jack, and Kramer said, No, no, he had a terrible temper.
Huh? We never saw it.
Jack said, Maybe you never saw, because past age 12 I was careful to hide it.
He'd been having a tantrum on court. The officials were indulging him, not exercising the rules. His father came down from the stands, approached the umpire. The umpire announced the match for Krammer's opponent: Jack's own corner, his own FATHER! volunteered him as DisQ!
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?
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.
Do the same with the pic of Marilyn from The Seven Year Itch with her dress blown up over her um, er female central.
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:
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."
2009 09 11
Update: A Reuters article just confirmed exactly that result in Semenya's case: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.
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!
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
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 ...
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!"
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 ...
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Mind Snatchers (moved)
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
moved from Knatz.com to IonaArc to pKnatz blog.
moved from Knatz.com to IonaArc to pKnatz blog.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Stuck
Stop the World I Want To Get Off was such a great title, it resonated with many of us. It has too many words for a good title by normal standards, and it requires much too much thought on the part of the public. Still, only retards will fail to grasp the impossibility of its demand. The phrase confuses "planet earth" and "world": the physical universe (Pleroma) is being confused with the social universe (Creatura / Sentiens (Pathologica)). Humans have no way at present (thank goodness) to "stop" the earth's spin or to much alter its ellipse around our star: and the mega-culture is hell bent on maintaining (and increasing) its momentum: no individual has yet been able to stop "Madison Avenue," or "America," or nationalism, or imperialism ... or faith-in-fuzzy-mindedness ... And if we could "stop the world," how would we "get off"? What would we get off onto? Is the solar system a trolley stop? Could we hop to the moon? to Mars? To a Macdonald's Asteroid? To a Hyatt Asteroid? To Planet PangoPango?
No. But the title is clear just the same: we're steeped in our culture, we're bound to our planet, but it's too much, it's killing us, it's driving us crazy ... there are far too many absurdities in our culture.
Every week at my Senior Center that specific manifestation of my culture demands that I stand with the group and Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. I have to pretend I'm murmuring the lies with the group: "one nation, under God, with liberty, and justice ..." How is the society that censors and imprisons God's messengers "under God"? The United States was founded by atheists; where did this lie come from? What liberty? We are all forced to go to school ... What justice? being tortured into pleading guilty so I'm on record as a confessed felon? And as I stand there, doing what I must do in order not to be returned to prison, so I can try again to offer my testimonies, my analyses over the internet, having been deprived from doing so to my society, to my family, to the college classes and reading public the culture has divorced me from ...
Then we sing God Bless America: and as its familiar lyrics round to a close my bully enemies stand close behind me and stage whisper to the back of my skull, "America: Love It, Or Leave It!"
Further, a friend I'm fond of dancing with, especially line-dances, interrupted a point I was trying to make to her by saying, "I know one thing: if anybody doesn't like it they can leave." Is Joyce (or are the bullies) in touch with my parole board? Can their innocence overrule the fed in preventing me from so much as leaving this specific federal district? I can't cross from Highlands County into Hardee County let along move to Brazil.
But why should I leave the territory of my birth? How does "my" country no longer belong to me? Why do rights belong exclusively to the kleptocrats, to the thieves? I want the kleptocrats to restore nature, and then drop dead: leaving me alone! (It would be nice if they restored nature, and also recompensed me for the things that have been stolen from me, plagiarized from me, sabotaged in front of me ... just before dropping dead.)
But none of what we wish for is how things work.
Ponder this analogy: The drunk is ruining his liver. The pot smoker is ruining his brain (so his mind will erode, and erode ...) The drunk's heart might not want to be contaminated by the drunk's ruined liver: but the heart can't jump ship. Neither can the lungs. Imagine the smoker's liver getting away from the smoker's lungs by jumping out of the body. How would the liver live without the drunk? Unless the liver just happens to jump when there's a medical staff there to put it into some scifi life-support system!
No, I'm stuck being a Christian, being an American, being human: or at least being among humans: my new species, my potential species, sabotaged, blockaded, poisoned.
Under God indeed.
No. But the title is clear just the same: we're steeped in our culture, we're bound to our planet, but it's too much, it's killing us, it's driving us crazy ... there are far too many absurdities in our culture.
Every week at my Senior Center that specific manifestation of my culture demands that I stand with the group and Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. I have to pretend I'm murmuring the lies with the group: "one nation, under God, with liberty, and justice ..." How is the society that censors and imprisons God's messengers "under God"? The United States was founded by atheists; where did this lie come from? What liberty? We are all forced to go to school ... What justice? being tortured into pleading guilty so I'm on record as a confessed felon? And as I stand there, doing what I must do in order not to be returned to prison, so I can try again to offer my testimonies, my analyses over the internet, having been deprived from doing so to my society, to my family, to the college classes and reading public the culture has divorced me from ...
Then we sing God Bless America: and as its familiar lyrics round to a close my bully enemies stand close behind me and stage whisper to the back of my skull, "America: Love It, Or Leave It!"
Further, a friend I'm fond of dancing with, especially line-dances, interrupted a point I was trying to make to her by saying, "I know one thing: if anybody doesn't like it they can leave." Is Joyce (or are the bullies) in touch with my parole board? Can their innocence overrule the fed in preventing me from so much as leaving this specific federal district? I can't cross from Highlands County into Hardee County let along move to Brazil.
But why should I leave the territory of my birth? How does "my" country no longer belong to me? Why do rights belong exclusively to the kleptocrats, to the thieves? I want the kleptocrats to restore nature, and then drop dead: leaving me alone! (It would be nice if they restored nature, and also recompensed me for the things that have been stolen from me, plagiarized from me, sabotaged in front of me ... just before dropping dead.)
But none of what we wish for is how things work.
Ponder this analogy: The drunk is ruining his liver. The pot smoker is ruining his brain (so his mind will erode, and erode ...) The drunk's heart might not want to be contaminated by the drunk's ruined liver: but the heart can't jump ship. Neither can the lungs. Imagine the smoker's liver getting away from the smoker's lungs by jumping out of the body. How would the liver live without the drunk? Unless the liver just happens to jump when there's a medical staff there to put it into some scifi life-support system!
No, I'm stuck being a Christian, being an American, being human: or at least being among humans: my new species, my potential species, sabotaged, blockaded, poisoned.
Under God indeed.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Map / Territory : Generic / Brand
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!
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!
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!
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