I love this book

[rgraham666]

Free

Today's entry.

FREE The most over-used term in modern politics. Evoked by everyone to mean anything. Samuel Johnson once spoke of patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. Evocations of what is free and of freedom have now overtaken patriotism.

This has led to a limitless series of oxymorons which have somehow become respectable: free air miles; free trade; the twinning of free men and free markets when history has shown that free markets do best under sophisticated dictatorships and chafe under the limitations imposed by democracy (see: CAPITALISM); free love; free glasses at the gas station; free offers and in general a free ride.

The problem with the word "free" is that it has two contradictory meanings. One refers to political freedom or liberty and has an ethical value. The other refers to an imaginary state of being in which there is no effort and no cost. Freedom is thus confused with the gambler's idea that you can get something for nothing. That is why Johnson's scoundrels are attracted to it. See: DICTATORSHIP OF VOCABULARY.

 

[rgraham666]

Today's entry. One of my favourites.

LEFT VERSUS RIGHT The result of an unfortunate seating arrangement.

In October 1789 the Paris mob, led by women, walked to Versailles, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to town with them. The Assembly had no choice but to follow. Louis was put in his gilded cage, the Tuileries Palace. The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. The need to board and exercise a large number of horses had imposed a particular sort of structure. That shape in turn imposed a semi-circular seating plan on the carpenters brought in to do the emergency conversion.

It naturally followed that those who hated each other the most sat as far away from each other as possible, to the extreme right and left of the podium. Thus the needs of horses helped create our idea of irreconcilable political opposites. Had architecture permitted this semi-circle to complete itself, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries would have found themselves quite naturally sitting together. See: NEO-CONSERVATIVE.

 

[rgraham666]

Snicker. An especially appropriate entry today.

MORAL CRUSADE Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys.

Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god. in military terms, a diversionary tactic.

 

[Guest]

Snicker. An especially appropriate entry today.

Quite.

 

[rgraham666]

I haven't posted to this one for a while.

Here's one of my favourite entries in the whole book.

Marxist The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior management of large, usually transnational corporations. The only serious Marxist thinkers are neo-conservative.

Marxism is primarily an analysis of how society works - or rather, how it must work. This dialectic is based on the struggle of the classes and the battle of the unregulated marketplace in which the strongest win. It is a marketplace which cannot be tempered, according to Marx. It must and will run free and so function as a battleground between those who have power and those who don’t. The marketplace will seek to maximize profits even if this is to the disadvantage of most. Profits and power are the truth of the economic struggle and economic determinism will decide the social structure.

Most functioning Marxists stopped believing this sort of stuff by the end of the Second World War. They had come around to the ideology of stable bureaucratic management. In that they resembled the technocrats of Western government and corporate bureaucracies.

But these Western corporate managers and their academic acolytes were in fact thrown into a state of confusion by the collapse of 1929. It seemed as if the pure capitalist analysis, of which they were the official inheritors, had failed. An unrestricted marketplace had not led to ongoing growth and prosperity, but to total economic collapse. The ideology of a natural and general equilibrium produced by competition had been given its chance and had self destructed for all to see and suffer the consequences.

A good thirty five years passed before the corporate leadership were able to erase from their own memory and that of the public this failure. They then rediscovered with a virginal enthusiasm the virtues of the unregulated market.

This time they were supported by an intellectually sophisticated explanation for the dialectic provided by a group of economists at the Chicago School. They were able to dispense with the idea that public institutions could achieve social stability, protect the weak or encourage a wider distribution of wealth. Their new argument would have done Marx proud. It was not that they did not wish to help the weak or promote fairness. It was the natural rules of the marketplace - the dialectic - which made the class struggle inevitable.

The only disagreement between the neo-conservatives and Marx is over who wins the battle in the end. This is a small detail. Far more important is their agreement that society must function as a wide-open struggle.

Some people are surprised that Marxism should have reemerged on the right. However, ideas, once launched, become public property. And they often appear in several guises before discovering their true form.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I looked at it. It seems like a handbook for navel-gazers.

 

[rgraham666]

The fact that it upsets you so, Jimmy Bob, is a point in its favour.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

It's not troubling, it's simply some deep thinker's imaginings about things he has no experience of. Like many of our virgins, here, writing erotica.

 

[Guest]

It's not troubling, it's simply some deep thinker's imaginings about things he has no experience of. Like many of our virgins, here, writing erotica.

Buck up li'l soldier.

You'll lose yours someday.

 

[trysail]

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is possible.

If you don't believe that the management of American corporations has been exponentially improved over the last twenty-five years, you are woefully ignorant of what once prevailed. Techniques such as just-in-time inventory management, automated order entry, realtime supply and replenishment systems, market value accounting, capital budgeting and allocation are among the many improvements (not to mention the Internet and on-line shopping) that have produced quantum increases in productivity, returns on capital, and consumer choice. All of this has resulted in an indisputable reduction of consumer cost.

Do you seriously believe that today's automobiles aren't light years better than those of 1983 in terms of fit, finish, and reliability? Twenty-five years ago, the computing power that sits on your desk or lap would have required an expenditure of $1,000,000 and a dedicated room.

 

[rgraham666]

It's not troubling, it's simply some deep thinker's imaginings about things he has no experience of. Like many of our virgins, here, writing erotica.

Snerk.

Check out his bio. Especially download his CV. It's a career just to read about it.

And I'll hold to my original hypothesis. His writing unnerves you. That's why you won't deal with it in anything other than a dismissive manner.

 

[Stella_Omega]

this sounds eerily familiar:

Whether it reveals the dictatorship of the proletariat or the virtues of privatization, truth is ideology. Not their truths, our élites say. They are simply delivering the inevitable conclusions of facts rationally organized. Absolutism is the weakness of others. Our élites have the good fortune to simply be right.

BWAAHHH!

 

[Weird Harold]

Do you seriously believe that today's automobiles aren't light years better than those of 1983 in terms of fit, finish, and reliability?

Sure they're light years better than 1983, but they're still light-years behind 1954-1959 especially in terms of reliability (and repairability.)

 

[rgraham666]

Sure they're light years better than 1983, but they're still light-years behind 1954-1959 especially in terms of reliability (and repairability.)

Which is very rational of them. Ongoing revenue stream and all that.

 

[trysail]

Sure they're light years better than 1983, but they're still light-years behind 1954-1959 especially in terms of reliability (and repairability.)

Of course new cars are impossible to repair; that's because of all the micro-electronics and pollution crapola- it's a bunch of goddamn spaghetti under the hood nowadays. I wish to god I still had my 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. It cost $2,874 brand new and gave me fourteen years of absolutely reliable operation. There wasn't anything on that car I couldn't fix myself. Dead battery? Just push it 'til I found a slight hill, roll it down, and jump-start her. I'd still have that car if the bad guys in Filthy hadn't swiped it.

Nonetheless, even the stuff that Detroit sells these days is vastly improved over the crap they were peddling between 1960-1990. If and when I ever buy a new car again, I will definitely consider them. They've come a long, long way.

 

[rgraham666]

Today's entry.

ECONOMICS The romance of truth through measurement.

An understanding of the value of economics can best be established by using its own methods. Draw up a list of the major economic problems that have struck the West over the last quarter-century. Determine the dominant strand of advice offered in each case by the community of economists. Calcualte how many times this advice was followed. (More often than not it was.) Finally, add up the number of times this advice solved the problem.

The answer seems to be zero. Consistent failure based on expert methodlogy suggests that the central assumptions must have been faulty, rather in the way that sophisticated calculations based on the assumption that the world was flat tended to come out wrong.

 

[rgraham666]

This entry has been popping into my mind a lot over the last few days. I think it has to do with all the discussion about Romney quitting and the related subjects that event has engendered.

IDEOLOGY Tendentious arguments which advance an world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.

A god who intervenes in human affairs through spokesmen who generally call themselves priests; a king who implements instructions received from God; a predestined class war which requires representatives of a particular class to take power; a corporatist structure of experts who implement truth through fact-based conclusions; a racial unit which because of its blood-ties has a destiny as revealed by nationalist leaders; a world market which, whether anyone likes it or not, will determine the shape of every human life, as interpreted by corporate executives - all these and many more are ideologies.

Followers are caught up in the naive obsessions of these movements. This combination ensures failure and is prone to violence. That's why the decent intentions of The Communist Manifesto end up in gulags and murder. Or the market-place's promise of prosperity in the exploitation of cheap, often child, labour.

There are big ideologies and little ones. They come in international, national and local shapes. Some require skyscapers, others circumcision. Like fiction they are dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief, because God only appears in private and before his official spokespeople, class leaders themselves decide the content and pecking order of classes, experts choose their fact judiciously, blood-ties aren't pure and the passive acceptance of a deterministic market means denying 2,500 years of Western civilization from Athens and Rome through the Renaissance to the creation of middle class democracies.

Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.

I love this book.

 

[rgraham666]

*bump* for a friend.

 

[keeblercrumb]

So Rob....What do you feel about this book?



_KC

 

[rgraham666]

An especially apt entry today.

ECONOMICS The romance of truth through measurement.

An understanding of the value of economics can best be established by using its own methods. Draw up a list of the large economic problems to have struck the West over the last quarter century. Determine the dominant strand of advice offered in each case by the community of economists. Calculate how many times this advice was followed. (More often than not it was.) Finally, add up the number of times this advice solved the problem.

The answer seems to be zero. Consistent failure based on expert methodology suggests that the central assumptions must be faulty, rather in the way sophisticated calculations based upon the assumption the world was flat tended to come out wrong. However streams of economists are on record protesting that they weren't listened to enough. That the recommended interest rate or money supply or tariff policy was not followed to its absolute conclusion.

This "science" of economics seems to be based upon a non-scientific and non-mathematical assumption that economic forces are the expression of a natural truth. To interfere with them is to create an unnatural situation. The creation and enforcement of standards of production are, for example, viewed as an artificial limitation of reality. Even economists in favour of these standards see them as necessary and justifiable deformations of economic truth.

Economic truth has replaced such earlier truths as an all-powerful God, and a natural Social Contract. Economics are the new religious core of public policy. But what evidence has been produced to prove this natural right of primacy over other values, methods and activities?

The answer usually given is that economic activity determines the success or failure of a society. It follows that economists are the priests whose necessary expertise will make it possible to maximize the value of this activity. But economic activity is less a cause than an effect - of geographical and climatic necessity, of family and wider social structures, the balance between freedom and order, the ability of the society to unleash the imagination, and the weakness or strength of its neighbours. If anything, the importance given to economics over the last quarter-century has interfered with prosperity. The more we concentrate on it, the less money we make.

 

[rgraham666]

Today's entry.

HOLY TRINITY - POST-CHRISTIAN So far Nietzsche has been wrong about God. We have not managed to become Him in His place. Instead we have replaced God with a yet more abstract divinity based on pure rational power.

Reason rose out of the generous humanist promise of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by climbing over the bodies of humanism's other constituent elements – common sense, intuition, creativity, memory and ethics. These elements, which by limiting reason make it positive, were not simply struck dead. They were converted into the enemy of the new divinity.

In their place a post-Christian Holy Trinity was installed. Organization or structure replaced the Father, technology replaced the Son and the Holy Ghost gave way to information. The new priesthood was made up of technocrats. As the etymology of the word "technocrat" indicates, from the beginning they were to be specialists in power. Masters of structure. Modern courtiers. They would control technology as if it were a natural extension of themselves, which it is not. And they would stand guard over information, each specialist category dispensing its special knowledge as it saw fit.

This is the underlying truth of our society. There are other factors. Complications. Reasons for optimism. But this is our basic religion.