Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
2/6/13
Triadic Philosophy Commentary - End Binary Wars
5/28/12
This is the Century when We Need to Consider Ending War
Not as Some Utopian Fantasy but as Sane Means of Avoiding Global Suicide
Before Jericho (ca. 7500 B.C.) to Afghanistan and other places where war continues to rage, the causes have been many but the conduct has crossed every line of demarcation
But there is some possibility hope now the notion of moral evolution. Especially when combined with impressive evidence that the alternative is universal suicide.
I do not anticipate war on anything like the scale of past wars. I do anticipate struggles where the end is less than lethal. And incidents like that of the Norway killer.
But the lines of demarcation are ending. The world is melding. A democratic and spiritual global revolution is afoot. So let's not be too quick to give up hope.
War has to end sometime. It may as well be now. War is tacky. War is also hell. There are other ways to fight.
My Kindle Store Books
War is said to be a cross-cultural universal that has no remedies.
Before Jericho (ca. 7500 B.C.) to Afghanistan and other places where war continues to rage, the causes have been many but the conduct has crossed every line of demarcation
Few have held out hope of altering the grim trajectory of war.
But there is some possibility hope now the notion of moral evolution. Especially when combined with impressive evidence that the alternative is universal suicide.
Let This Be a Memorial to War and Let War Rest in Peace - Free Verse
Let this be a memorial to war
Let war rest in peace
And all its crimes with it
And never walk the face of earth again
Let war be buried here and now
Defense become defense
And be the new doctrine of
Whatever word we use
When we stop saying war
5/26/12
We Are Already Doomed to Future Nuke Meltdowns
Nuke Regulators' Cozy Industry Ties - The Daily Beast: "Here's something to think about as Japan continues working to fix its stricken reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now criticized as being extremely close to the industry, routinely postponing requiring maintenance until crises develop, and even then usually delivering only a slap on the wrist. The agency puts up with violations, says critic David Lochbaum, because "Otherwise, nearly all the U.S. reactors would have to shut down.""
What else is new under our fading sun? This is the sort of thing that reinforces self-creep, the phenomenon of withdrawal from participation in anything.
Nuclear plants are a lethal time bomb. Nuclear plants have no place in a new world of sustainability and enhanced living. Nuclear plants are not economically viable. The countries that say no to nuclear will build toward a sustainable energy future. Nuclear plants are the signature of an era of destruction.
My Kindle Store Books
What else is new under our fading sun? This is the sort of thing that reinforces self-creep, the phenomenon of withdrawal from participation in anything.
Jonathan's Wake - a Personal Reflection
Jonathan's Wake was a Movement Whose Aim was Largely Misunderstood Because of the Massive Discontents of the Late 1960s. The Aim is the Same Now as Then
Here is part of a small collection designed to recall a time when some of us engaged in direct action to achieve renewal and reform of mainline Protestant churches in the United States. The specific effort that I helped create was called Jonathan's Wake. I am tagging items Jonathan's Wake and will put what I have found up as time permits.
This item was posted by Richard L.York.
Jonathan's Wake Stirs Late Awakening
I remember Dick along with Steve Richardson, Tony Nugent and other members of the Berkeley Free Church from Detroit and a later trip I made to Berkeley. This group was in some respect the most visible part of the Jonathan's Wake aggregation that showed up at the Hotel Tuller in Detroit in December, 1969, and turned the National Council of Churches' General Assembly at Cobo Hall into a confrontational event whose resonance continues to be felt.
I suppose the main feeling would be a growing sense that we were onto something and a parallel knowledge that there was vastly more resistance to change in the denominations than we believed at the time. One of the most interesting indicators of this resistance was a simple study I did soon after Detroit for my friend Bob Lynn when he was at the Lilly Endowment.
I wrote every head of the major denominations and asked if they thought there would be church union within 10 years. All said yes save one. The one was correct. And his reason was correct. This correspondence is archived here.
I also have noted Jonathan's Wake in a more personal way in the page My Books.
My sense then and now is that the participants in Jonathan's Wake not only combined different styles, but also differing agendas. These generally overlapped to the point that there was general support for most of the actions and objectives.
More
More
More on Berkeley Free Church
ADDENDUM
I will confine the following to my own specific memories of a reparations struggle which began in the spring of 1969 and culminated in an extended demonstration at a General Assembly of the National Council of Churches at Cobo Hall in Detroit in December of that year. As far as I can find, this small but important effort to change the course of ecumenism in mainline American Protestantism has been forgotten or repressed or simply lost.
When my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary, held a symposium on reparations recently, there was no mention of this incident. Today the mainline denominations, who were at the time involved in negotiations to unify under the banner of the Consultation on Church Union, are each plying an autonomous course. I think their palpable resistance to change in 1969 prefigured their current, predictable decline in numbers and influence.
I was a Presbyterian delegate to the Consultation on Church Union and joined others in Atlanta in the spring of 1969 to discuss uniting the mainline denominations. At the meeting, Oscar McCloud, a classmate from Union, suggested he and I hold a public meeting to discuss issues of mutual concern, by which we meant how all this unity talk related to racial justice.
At that meeting I, spontaneously proposed that the Black community seek reparations from the white denominations. And that the white denominations pay them. I had, prior to this time, concluded that the then-large endowments of the various churches were a liability in terms of achieving church union and that they ought to be given away. And I had by that time written The Grass Roots Church in which I proposed a radical restructuring of churches at the local level, a restructuring that assumed the effective replacement of denominational by ecumenical structures.
The immediate reaction to this proposal was a speech by a Black clergyman named Mance Jackson, saying that I as a white person was not qualified to be proposing an agenda for Black persons. I felt I was being hung out to dry. No one rose to my defense. I thought Jackson's logic was understandable in terms of the anger of the time, but nonsensical in terms of the actual issue under discussion.
A week later in Detroit, Jim Forman made national headlines by proposing exactly what I had proposed the week before. Here s Google's page referencing Jim Forman and the Reparations Struggle of 1969.
On April 26, 1969, in Detroit, Michigan, Forman presented the Black Manifesto at the National Black Economic Development Conference. Sponsored by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations, the conference adopted a manifesto that demanded Protestant and Jewish organizations pay $500 million in reparations to the African American community. In his speech, Forman called upon blacks to join in a black-socialist-led armed struggle to overthrow the United States government.
A month later, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand that the congregation pay reparations for the past damage inflicted upon people of color by white America. According to Larry Neal in The Black Seventies, this act not only made national front-page news, but marked "one of the high points of nonviolent action" during the conservative years of U.S. president Richard M. Nixon's administration.
SOURCE
The only existing references to my efforts are my own short biography at the Civil Rights Veterans site and what I have posted here.
After the Forman move, which was highly publicized, I decided to keep organizing my own effort to achieve church unity via the transfer of resources from the denominations, to be used as reparations as Forman proposed.
My main impulse was two-fold:
1. To prepare the way for a viable ecumenism and
2. To forward the cause of racial justice.
Since I was then living in Stockbridge, MA, where Jonathan Edwards had been an exile, I decided to call the little movement I organized Jonathan's Wake.
In the fall of 1969, I announced that a movement called Jonathan's Wake would go to Detroit in Devember to the National Council of Churches General Assembly in Cobo Hall to press an agenda for church renewal and ecumenism that would involve the transfer of endowments from the denominations to the Black Economic Development Conference for use in achieving justice in impoverished Black communities.
With the help of a friend, Fred Lord, and the support of my colleague of many years, Will Campbell, we showed up in Detroit with a contingent of from 50 to 100 persons, depending on how you counted other groups that were sympathetic. We headquartered in the Hotel Tuller downtown. It was a more reasonable place to stay than the Pontchartrain Hotel where most of the church delegates were housed.
We had considerable publicity at the time. But it soon became apparent to me that very few really understood the purpose or reasoning I was pushing. I really did see the financial wealth of the individual denominations as the main reason they would cling to their identities and avoid true local ecumenical engagement.
But most people had other agendas, the most prominent being opposition to the Vietnam War. This helps explain why my own opposition to Johnson and the Vietnam War was based in large part on the war's preemption of the promise of the 1960s, the beloved community and the visions of Dr. King.
The Jonathan's Wake protest turned out not to be a reasoned effort to get the church folk to consider the implications of their denominational finances for ecumenism, but a series of dramatic interventions on the floor of the meeting.
The most dramatic was the action of folk from California who poured something like blood on the rostrum. I did not see it but it grabbed the attention.
Finally, we managed to propose a condition that came to a vote, far from what I had sought. It had to do with not asking the state (police) to intervene in church disputes. The measure passed on a majority vote and was defeated when William Thompson, head of the Presbyterian group, won a two-thirds vote on a point of order.
At this point I considered everything lost, the concept, the effort to sway the denominations, and most likely my own future as a person concerned with renewing the church. I ran through the hall yelling Crucify me now.
Here is a sonnet I wrote recounting this a few years ago:
When I ran crying crucify me now
Across the floor of Detroit's Cobo Hall
Excessive legalism took a bow
Denominations sidestepped one more call
None dared say Jesus complex but the thought
Could not have been too far from many minds
But all it was was me just feeling caught
Like one condemned when time finally unwinds
I think I cared about a unity
That no one wanted and few want today
I think I cared about a harmony
Whose price few have the least desire to pay
I'm twice the age that Christ was when he died
Still railing at the temple he defied
Immediately after, I ended up consoling a young woman who came up in tears and said she understood for the first time that denominations were the problem. That is as close to understanding why I was there as anything.
In retrospect, reparations as a legal or moral issue was secondary to my concern for church renewal. If I had to judge now, I would say that some equivalence to reparations is always required in the face of continuing injustices toward one group by another. It really amounts to figuring out when both sides can agree that things are square.
In retrospect, my caring about church union and ecumenism has transformed into the religionless Christianity that I think Bonhoeffer prefigured without exactly embracing. It goes without saying that I would love to see the churches take seriously the understandings in mu book "The Grass Roots Church", even now. But I have few illusions that the denominations, battered by predictable attrition and ongoing internal culture wars, will willingly cede even a radically shrinking power.
Who is killing the church? Might it be G-d?
I see the unfolding Obama era as a chance to forge and develop a secular spirituality based partly on the implementation of his non-proselytizing notion of local ministries sponsored under religious auspices. This could be huge and that would make Barack the achiever of a renewal that churches were unwilling or unable to bring about by decisive acts of their own.
This item was posted by Richard L.York.
Jonathan's Wake Stirs Late Awakening
I remember Dick along with Steve Richardson, Tony Nugent and other members of the Berkeley Free Church from Detroit and a later trip I made to Berkeley. This group was in some respect the most visible part of the Jonathan's Wake aggregation that showed up at the Hotel Tuller in Detroit in December, 1969, and turned the National Council of Churches' General Assembly at Cobo Hall into a confrontational event whose resonance continues to be felt.
I suppose the main feeling would be a growing sense that we were onto something and a parallel knowledge that there was vastly more resistance to change in the denominations than we believed at the time. One of the most interesting indicators of this resistance was a simple study I did soon after Detroit for my friend Bob Lynn when he was at the Lilly Endowment.
I wrote every head of the major denominations and asked if they thought there would be church union within 10 years. All said yes save one. The one was correct. And his reason was correct. This correspondence is archived here.
I also have noted Jonathan's Wake in a more personal way in the page My Books.
My sense then and now is that the participants in Jonathan's Wake not only combined different styles, but also differing agendas. These generally overlapped to the point that there was general support for most of the actions and objectives.
More
More
More on Berkeley Free Church
ADDENDUM
I will confine the following to my own specific memories of a reparations struggle which began in the spring of 1969 and culminated in an extended demonstration at a General Assembly of the National Council of Churches at Cobo Hall in Detroit in December of that year. As far as I can find, this small but important effort to change the course of ecumenism in mainline American Protestantism has been forgotten or repressed or simply lost.
When my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary, held a symposium on reparations recently, there was no mention of this incident. Today the mainline denominations, who were at the time involved in negotiations to unify under the banner of the Consultation on Church Union, are each plying an autonomous course. I think their palpable resistance to change in 1969 prefigured their current, predictable decline in numbers and influence.
I was a Presbyterian delegate to the Consultation on Church Union and joined others in Atlanta in the spring of 1969 to discuss uniting the mainline denominations. At the meeting, Oscar McCloud, a classmate from Union, suggested he and I hold a public meeting to discuss issues of mutual concern, by which we meant how all this unity talk related to racial justice.
At that meeting I, spontaneously proposed that the Black community seek reparations from the white denominations. And that the white denominations pay them. I had, prior to this time, concluded that the then-large endowments of the various churches were a liability in terms of achieving church union and that they ought to be given away. And I had by that time written The Grass Roots Church in which I proposed a radical restructuring of churches at the local level, a restructuring that assumed the effective replacement of denominational by ecumenical structures.
The immediate reaction to this proposal was a speech by a Black clergyman named Mance Jackson, saying that I as a white person was not qualified to be proposing an agenda for Black persons. I felt I was being hung out to dry. No one rose to my defense. I thought Jackson's logic was understandable in terms of the anger of the time, but nonsensical in terms of the actual issue under discussion.
A week later in Detroit, Jim Forman made national headlines by proposing exactly what I had proposed the week before. Here s Google's page referencing Jim Forman and the Reparations Struggle of 1969.
On April 26, 1969, in Detroit, Michigan, Forman presented the Black Manifesto at the National Black Economic Development Conference. Sponsored by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations, the conference adopted a manifesto that demanded Protestant and Jewish organizations pay $500 million in reparations to the African American community. In his speech, Forman called upon blacks to join in a black-socialist-led armed struggle to overthrow the United States government.
A month later, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand that the congregation pay reparations for the past damage inflicted upon people of color by white America. According to Larry Neal in The Black Seventies, this act not only made national front-page news, but marked "one of the high points of nonviolent action" during the conservative years of U.S. president Richard M. Nixon's administration.
SOURCE
The only existing references to my efforts are my own short biography at the Civil Rights Veterans site and what I have posted here.
After the Forman move, which was highly publicized, I decided to keep organizing my own effort to achieve church unity via the transfer of resources from the denominations, to be used as reparations as Forman proposed.
My main impulse was two-fold:
1. To prepare the way for a viable ecumenism and
2. To forward the cause of racial justice.
Since I was then living in Stockbridge, MA, where Jonathan Edwards had been an exile, I decided to call the little movement I organized Jonathan's Wake.
In the fall of 1969, I announced that a movement called Jonathan's Wake would go to Detroit in Devember to the National Council of Churches General Assembly in Cobo Hall to press an agenda for church renewal and ecumenism that would involve the transfer of endowments from the denominations to the Black Economic Development Conference for use in achieving justice in impoverished Black communities.
With the help of a friend, Fred Lord, and the support of my colleague of many years, Will Campbell, we showed up in Detroit with a contingent of from 50 to 100 persons, depending on how you counted other groups that were sympathetic. We headquartered in the Hotel Tuller downtown. It was a more reasonable place to stay than the Pontchartrain Hotel where most of the church delegates were housed.
We had considerable publicity at the time. But it soon became apparent to me that very few really understood the purpose or reasoning I was pushing. I really did see the financial wealth of the individual denominations as the main reason they would cling to their identities and avoid true local ecumenical engagement.
But most people had other agendas, the most prominent being opposition to the Vietnam War. This helps explain why my own opposition to Johnson and the Vietnam War was based in large part on the war's preemption of the promise of the 1960s, the beloved community and the visions of Dr. King.
The Jonathan's Wake protest turned out not to be a reasoned effort to get the church folk to consider the implications of their denominational finances for ecumenism, but a series of dramatic interventions on the floor of the meeting.
The most dramatic was the action of folk from California who poured something like blood on the rostrum. I did not see it but it grabbed the attention.
Finally, we managed to propose a condition that came to a vote, far from what I had sought. It had to do with not asking the state (police) to intervene in church disputes. The measure passed on a majority vote and was defeated when William Thompson, head of the Presbyterian group, won a two-thirds vote on a point of order.
At this point I considered everything lost, the concept, the effort to sway the denominations, and most likely my own future as a person concerned with renewing the church. I ran through the hall yelling Crucify me now.
Here is a sonnet I wrote recounting this a few years ago:
When I ran crying crucify me now
Across the floor of Detroit's Cobo Hall
Excessive legalism took a bow
Denominations sidestepped one more call
None dared say Jesus complex but the thought
Could not have been too far from many minds
But all it was was me just feeling caught
Like one condemned when time finally unwinds
I think I cared about a unity
That no one wanted and few want today
I think I cared about a harmony
Whose price few have the least desire to pay
I'm twice the age that Christ was when he died
Still railing at the temple he defied
Immediately after, I ended up consoling a young woman who came up in tears and said she understood for the first time that denominations were the problem. That is as close to understanding why I was there as anything.
In retrospect, reparations as a legal or moral issue was secondary to my concern for church renewal. If I had to judge now, I would say that some equivalence to reparations is always required in the face of continuing injustices toward one group by another. It really amounts to figuring out when both sides can agree that things are square.
In retrospect, my caring about church union and ecumenism has transformed into the religionless Christianity that I think Bonhoeffer prefigured without exactly embracing. It goes without saying that I would love to see the churches take seriously the understandings in mu book "The Grass Roots Church", even now. But I have few illusions that the denominations, battered by predictable attrition and ongoing internal culture wars, will willingly cede even a radically shrinking power.
Who is killing the church? Might it be G-d?
I see the unfolding Obama era as a chance to forge and develop a secular spirituality based partly on the implementation of his non-proselytizing notion of local ministries sponsored under religious auspices. This could be huge and that would make Barack the achiever of a renewal that churches were unwilling or unable to bring about by decisive acts of their own.
An Approach to Torture that Goes Past the Question of Whether it Works
When I am dissatisfied with search results I have to dig and dig and dig. If your objective is to find some reliable information about torture, be my guest. Here are some helpful starting points.
A pragmaticist argument will link the metaphysical and logical to the scientifically demonstrable. One might argue that when the metaphysical and logical are ranged squarely against torture and the scientific observations are generally but not always in apparent agreement, the benefit of the doubt - or the abduction - should be that torture indeed does not work. And that if there are exceptions they are not worth the other results of engaging in torture as a national policy.
Here is the most celebrated modern text on the subject.
My Thoughts Are Free: MARK TWAIN ON TORTURE: "'I will tell you nothing more than I have told you; no, not even if you tear the limbs from my body. And even if in my pain I did say something otherwise, I would always say afterward that it was the torture that spoke and not I.'"
Move to the realm of observation.
When there is no unanimity, this does not mean that torture is a good idea. It means that in absolutely every case it cannot be shown that torture will not work. At which point the argument becomes, given the preponderance of evidence that torture does not work, it makes little sense to practice it as if in every case it did work, which is false.
And it calls investigation and proof of when a respectful effort to extract information has been efficacious. Such evidence is mounting.
Neuroscience:Torture Doesn't Work and Here's Why - Newsweek: "Shane O'Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin explains in a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciencecalled 'Torturing the Brain,' 'the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or 'enhanced' interrogation.'"
Torture is not too swift in the battle to win people's hearts and minds.
Robert Fisk: Torture does not work, as history shows - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent: "Grafton's conclusion is unanswerable. Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA's 'waterboarding' did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him."
We may well end terror by talking respectfully with the opposition in the wake of the death of Bin Laden.
Would that we were also on the verge of framing an effective argument to end the rampant militarism that hobbles the US in the effort to achieve social equity and overcome environmental challenges.
Ex-Interrogator: Torture Doesn't Work: "'It's extremely ineffective, and it's counterproductive to what we're trying to accomplish,' he told reporters. 'When we torture somebody, it hardens their resolve,' Alexander explained. 'The information that you get is unreliable ... And even if you do get reliable information, you're able to stop a terrorist attack, Al-Qaeda's then going to use the fact that we torture people to recruit new members.' Alexander says torture techniques used in Iraq consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence and that methods outlined in the US Army Field Manual, which rest on confidence building, consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to critical information"
Market forces may inspire investment in communities that are post automobile
The actual risks of continued reliance
on cars and oil include wars
death to oceans
and vehicle deaths
and injuries
worldwide
It is anticipated that these vehicle deaths
will be the fifth leading cause of all dying
in the year 2020 around the whole world
There will be more oil deaths than HIV/AIDS deaths
by 2020 the UN concludes
The oil and car businesses can show reductions in deaths
but these do nothing to vitiate the assumptions of the UN
The most at risk are not the most well-to-do
As knowledge of the actual risks are understood
the oil and car response will be to do anything legal or not
to maintain the precedence of oil as a fuel
and of the private car as the lead product of the auto industry
1 The world has clearly accepted oil and car
as the self evident basis of all planning.
2 The brute reality is resistance of the economy
to the pressures created by this commitment
Not only will oil eventually run out
It will become more expensive as populations mount
and competition to buy it increases
3
Market forces
may inspire investment in communities
that are post automobile
5/25/12
Thorstein Veblen is happily to be found on the Web.
+
Thorstein Veblen is happily to be found on the Web. Thorstein Veblen was the most acerbic and salient economist of our history. That's an opinion. Once fashionable, Thorstein Veblen has stood the test of time and emerged a true prophet of consumer culture and its huge internal contradictions.
Here's a selection of sites that provide access to the thought this most stringent analyst of American (Western) culture and economics. Veblen's thought, like Nietzsche's, remains relevant to the present and future. It calls out for attention.
The Web is the future of words, of texts, of discourse. This page is a sample of the sorts of guideposts I find useful.
In general I have been subjective in my selection of Thorstein Veblem gems, delving deep into search results. I try not to feature sites that require downloads, or registration. I ignore sites that are too busy and seem hard to use.
I have not closed selections to critics of Thorstein Veblen. Please leave a comment if you wish to suggest a link or flag a non-working link.
I have placed the initial few sentences of each work linked to below to give a flavor of Thorstein Veblen's style and focus.
The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance in these class differences is the distinction maintained between the employments proper to the several classes. The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honour attaches.
In his exposition of the term "capital" Professor Böhm-Bawerk briefly touches on the wages-fund doctrine, so far as to reject summarily the proposition that the means of subsistence of productive laborers is drawn from the capital of the community, although, from the point of view of the employer, these "real wages" are to be regarded as drawn from his private capital. With the distinction which the discussion establishes between social capital and private capital, this position is, of course, in itself perfectly consistent.
M.G. de Lapouge recently said, "Anthropology is destined to revolutionise the political and the social sciences as radically as bacteriology has revolutionised the science of medicine." In so far as he speaks of economics, the eminent anthropologist is not alone in his conviction that the science stands in need of rehabilitation.
In the accepted economic theories the ground of ownership is commonly conceived to be the productive labor of the owner. This is taken, without reflection or question, to be the legitimate basis of property; he who has produced a useful thing should
possess and enjoy it.
It is one of the commonplaces of the received economic theory that work is irksome. Many a discussion proceeds on this axiom that, so far as regards economic matters, men desire above all things to get the goods produced by labor and to avoid the labor
by which the goods are produced.
It seems altogether probable that in the primitive groups of mankind, when the race first took to a systematic use of tools and so emerged upon the properly human plane of life, there was but the very slightest beginning of a system of status, with little of invidious distinction between classes and little of a corresponding division of employments.
In an earlier paper the view has been expressed that the economics handed down by the great writers of a past generation is substantially a taxonomic science. A view of much the same purport, so far as concerns the point here immediately in question, is presented in an admirably lucid and cogent way by Professor Clark in a recent number of this journal.
ADAM SMITH'S animistic bent asserts itself more plainly and more effectually in the general trend and aim of his discussion than in the details of theory ... Both in the Theory of the Moral Sentiments and in the Wealth of Nations there are many passages that testify to his abiding conviction that there is a wholesome trend in the natural course of things, and the characteristically optimistic tone in which he speaks for natural liberty is but an expression of this conviction. An extreme resort to this animistic ground occurs in his plea for freedom of investment.
IN what has already been said, it has appeared that the changes which have supervened in the preconceptions of the earlier economists constitute a somewhat orderly succession. The feature of chief interest in this development has been a gradual change in the received grounds of finality to which the successive generations of economists have brought their theoretical output, on which they have been content to rest their conclusions, and beyond which they have not been moved to push their analysis of events or their scrutiny of phenomena.
The system of doctrines worked out by Marx is characterized by a certain boldness of conception and a great logical consistency. Taken in detail, the constituent elements of the system are neither novel nor iconoclastic, nor does Marx at any point claim
to have discovered previously hidden facts or to have invented recondite formulations of facts already known; but the system as a whole has an air of originality and initiative such as is rarely met with among the sciences that deal with any phase of
human culture.
Marx worked out his system of theory in the main during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. He came to the work from the standpoint given him by his early training in German thought, such as the most advanced and aggressive German thinking was through the middle period of the century, and he added to this German standpoint the further premises given him by an exceptionally close contact with and alert observation of the English situation.
The Nature of Capital and Income is of that class of books that have kept the guild of theoretical economists content to do nothing toward "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" during the past quarter of a century. Of this class Mr Fisher's work is of the best -- thoughtful, painstaking, sagacious, exhaustive, lucid, and tenaciously logical. What it lacks is the breath of life; and this lack it shares with the many theoretical productions of the Austrian diversion as well as of the economists of more strictly classical antecedents.
There is less novelty, either in the course of the argument or in the results achieved, in the Rate of Interest than in Mr Fisher's earlier volume on the Nature of Capital and Income. Substantially the whole of it lies within the accustomed lines of that marginal-utility school of economics for which its author has so often and so convincingly spoken.
The limitations of the marginal-utility economics are sharp and characteristic. It is from first to last a doctrine of value,and in point of form and method it is a theory of valuation.
It is something more than a dozen years since the following observations on American academic life were first assembled in written form. In the meantime changes of one kind and another have occurred, although not such as to alter the course of policy
which has guided American universities.
As is true of any other point of view that may be characteristic of any other period of history, so also the modern point of view is a matter of habit. It is common to the modern civilised peoples only in so far as these peoples have come through substantially the same historical experience and have thereby acquired substantially the same habits of thought and have fallen into somewhat the same prevalent frame of mind.
It is now something like a year since this book was written.And much of its argument is in the nature of forecast which has in great part been overtaken by the recipitate run of events during these past months.
Thorstein Veblen is to economics what Jonathan Swift is to English literature: a master of the art of satire. Is is essential to effective satire that its message be ambiguous: the reader should never be sure whether the author is absolutely serious or just pulling his or her leg
Thorstein Veblen ... was arguably the most original and penetrating economist and social critic that the United States has produced" (Rick Tilman, Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963; Princeton: Princeton UP., 1992, p. ix.). He was one of the first academics to examine the complex relationship between consumption and wealth in society.
Thorstein Veblen was odd man out in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American economics. His position on the fringe started early.
As unconventional in his personal life as in his academic career, Thorstein Veblen always seemed to stand outside of his social and intellectual environment. In 1906, after fourteen years at the University of Chicago, some of which he had spent as a research fellow and instructor, he had risen only to the rank of assistant professor.
It is the author's contention that F. Scott Fitgerald's novel The Great Gatsby which was set in the 1920's was "not original with Fitzgerald, but reflects the influence, both directly and indirectly, of the earlier adversary of conspicous consumption and pecuniary emulation, Thorstein Veblen."
Veblen cannot be indiscriminately lumped with the common run of American academicians. Compared to the academic fossils of his time he was indeed one of the few outstanding original thinkers in America.
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist. Educated at Carleton College, Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, his most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is a biting satire directed at the leisure class. He coined the widely used phrases "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation".
If You Think Unions Are Declining Wait for the Rest of Society
The short form is an alluring phrase that has, as yet, no real meaning
Still, the Web is driving a move toward short form writing. Here is a selection of approaches to the short form that struck me as well-presented. At this point, such writing can be whatever you say.
Why Short Form Copy is Where the Money's at: "What are some well-paying, short-form copywriting projects you may wish to look into? Here are a few suggestions:"
Well worth a look if you have an interest in such writing.
Short Forms of Poetry - There are some easy-to-write short forms. Some of those follow....: "
Many will know of haiku but there are other options. Including what you make up yourself.
Writing Tall Tales in Short Form: "Flash fiction stories, also known as Immediate Fiction, can be difficult to write. Knowing a little bit about topics of persuasive writing can help you get your point across in succinct style."
A good introduction to what it is with examples.
Mastering Short Forms of Writing: "A trend toward shorter forms of writing benefits writers, publishers, website designers, and audiences. The short form exists in almost every genre, from drama to fiction, from poetry to prose. Shorter forms of writing are not only easily squeezed in among longer features, but they cater to the increasingly short attention span of information and entertainment consumers."
This gets to the point. Are we evolving in the direction of absorbing the information we need in forms that require massive abbreviation from what we're used to?
The final entry is from the Twitter meister himself. There is more on the page. It's worth a look.
140 Characters: "The amazing thing about this particular protocol is that it's being defined daily. By you. Twitter was inspired by the concepts of immediacy, transparency, and approachability, and created by the guiding principles of simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship."
Constraint is the take away word here. Enough said.
Short Form Writing From Twitter to poems to stories to copy writing, this survey shows that the short form is not yet written in stone.
Biblical hermeneutics is an impossible subject - 8 salient sites
Moreover, when we come to sites on biblical hermeneutics, we are lost in pdf files, curricula links and pages designed to sell this or that book. As you will see below, the best link I found was buried in the back of the Google results, meaning that what may be good for SEO is not very good for actually helping folk to find what's useful.
Fancy term
Hermeneutics is a fancy term for interpretation of texts. Biblical hermeneutics has been locked in the very culture war that we all know and love. The Chicago Statement noted below is an example of the comprehensive fundamentalist attack on anything that smacks at a denial of the divine inerrancy of the text of the Bible.
Into this wall bump many modernist and post-modern efforts to mess with the canon, if I may cadge a cavil from my bedside-mentor Harold Bloom. I throw my hands up. I would last one minute or less in a catechism conducted by fundamentalists.
But this exercise forces me to own up to my own hermaneutic, even though it will never be honored or taught. So as not to bore, my hermeneutic says that the Pentateuch is mainly about blaming YHWH for everything, that the high prophets and Job taken together veer directly into the mind of Jesus and that Jesus himself is done in in the New Testament by the good efforts of persons so unaware of what he was about that they turned him into the very thing he did not want to be turned into.
As Rem says, I've said too much.
Here, in any case, with a few descriptive emendations, are my candidates for the 8 Best Biblical Hermaneutics sites.
Web Directory: Biblical Interpretation (Hermeneutics) A useful and substantial collection of links on the subject of Biblical interpretation and hermeneutics buried in the back of Google results. I give it a first position.
Feminist Hermeneutics and The Bible: "However, if the exegete can expose contemporary abuse and prejudice in the use of the texts, revealing that the consequences of the Fall have perpetuated the oppression of women even by means of the Word itself, then she may serve the cause of Feminism within the bounds of faithfulness to scripture."
biblical literature :: Types of biblical hermeneutics -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Biblical Hermeneutics: "Biblical Hermeneutics in Relation to Conventions of Language Use in Africa"
Interpretation of the Bible - Theopedia
Biblical Hermeneutics -- Milton S. Terry Exhaustive, detailed, interesting.
Hermeneutics - Bible study interpretation Shows the difficulties of arriving at an agreed interpretation.
Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics Fundamentalist
Christian Thinkers Ponder Nietzsche
Visit Religion Online
From:
A Christian Scholar's Dialogue with Muslims by Hans Kung
Second. in the process of secularization, modern Christianity has had negative as well as positive experiences which Islam in its unavoidable modernization quite possibly might also have lying before it. That is particularly true in regard to dealing with the modern critique of religion, as, for example, by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
From:
A Political Vision for the Organic Model by Robert W. Hoffert
Both politics and personality would be reinvested with a wholeness they have lost in countless ways: in Marx's economic determinism, in Nietzsche's nihilism, and in Dahl's socioeconomic statistics.
From:
A Whiteheadian Chaosmos: Process Philosophy from a Deleuzean Perspective by Tim Clark
As it was with Nietzsche, so it is with the pagan Deleuze.
From:
A Worried America by Gunnar Myrdal
We could, and did, indulge in the pessimism of a Schopenhauer or in the aggressive egocentricity of a Nietzsche,
From:
An Interview with David Tracy by Lois Malcolm
I agree with Nietzsche: our souls are too small.
From:
Anselm Kiefer: Art as Atonement by Ronald Goetz
Because Nietzsche's thought was appropriated by Hitler and Nazism (however legitimately or illegitimately the Nazis understood that self-contradictory philosopher -- and the jury is forever out on that question), Nietzsche came under a cloud in Germany immediately after World War II.
But such an eclipse could not be expected to last, and at present Germany is experiencing a Nietzschian revival, Kiefer is plainly indebted, as were his early 20-century German expressionist predecessors, to elements within the Nietzschian mind-set.
From:
Has Europe Become Theologically Barren? by John B. Cobb, Jr.
When we read the neo-Kantians against the background of Nietzsche's critique, they seem somewhat superficial. As knowledge of other religious traditions became more important, the easy affirmation of Christian superiority was harder to maintain. I think here, especially, of Ernst Troeltsch, and his giving up of the claim to the absoluteness of Christianity.
From:
Whitehead and Nietzsche: Overcoming the Evil of Time by Strachan Donnelley
Whitehead and Nietzsche, indefatigable process philosophers, march to decidedly different philosophic drums. Yet at a striking junction, they cross paths.
Both find human life and the temporal world of becoming plagued by an ultimate evil that is deeply involved with the nature of time -- in particular, with the essential passage of time and the temporal dimension of the past. Time threatens to devour human significance and the humanly good life.
From:
Whitehead and the Dualism of Mind and Nature by Philip Michael Rose
His [Nietzsche's] naturalistic approach removes the veil of completeness and order which reason brings to the world and reveals instead a world which is essentially incomplete -- an open-ended, chaotic world of pure contingency.
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy -- Attitudes Toward Sourced attitudes toward Nietzsche and his philosophy from Religion Online.
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5/24/12
Nietzsche Online Some Pertinent Destinations
From:
A Christian Scholar's Dialogue with Muslims by Hans Kung
Second. in the process of secularization, modern Christianity has had negative as well as positive experiences which Islam in its unavoidable modernization quite possibly might also have lying before it. That is particularly true in regard to dealing with the modern critique of religion, as, for example, by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
From:
A Political Vision for the Organic Model by Robert W. Hoffert
Both politics and personality would be reinvested with a wholeness they have lost in countless ways: in Marx's economic determinism, in Nietzsche's nihilism, and in Dahl's socioeconomic statistics.
From:
A Whiteheadian Chaosmos: Process Philosophy from a Deleuzean Perspective by Tim Clark
As it was with Nietzsche, so it is with the pagan Deleuze.
From:
A Worried America by Gunnar Myrdal
We could, and did, indulge in the pessimism of a Schopenhauer or in the aggressive egocentricity of a Nietzsche,
From:
An Interview with David Tracy by Lois Malcolm
I agree with Nietzsche: our souls are too small.
From:
Anselm Kiefer: Art as Atonement by Ronald Goetz
Because Nietzsche's thought was appropriated by Hitler and Nazism (however legitimately or illegitimately the Nazis understood that self-contradictory philosopher -- and the jury is forever out on that question), Nietzsche came under a cloud in Germany immediately after World War II.
But such an eclipse could not be expected to last, and at present Germany is experiencing a Nietzschian revival, Kiefer is plainly indebted, as were his early 20-century German expressionist predecessors, to elements within the Nietzschian mind-set.
From:
Has Europe Become Theologically Barren? by John B. Cobb, Jr.
When we read the neo-Kantians against the background of Nietzsche's critique, they seem somewhat superficial. As knowledge of other religious traditions became more important, the easy affirmation of Christian superiority was harder to maintain. I think here, especially, of Ernst Troeltsch, and his giving up of the claim to the absoluteness of Christianity.
From:
Whitehead and Nietzsche: Overcoming the Evil of Time by Strachan Donnelley
Whitehead and Nietzsche, indefatigable process philosophers, march to decidedly different philosophic drums. Yet at a striking junction, they cross paths.
Both find human life and the temporal world of becoming plagued by an ultimate evil that is deeply involved with the nature of time -- in particular, with the essential passage of time and the temporal dimension of the past. Time threatens to devour human significance and the humanly good life.
From:
Whitehead and the Dualism of Mind and Nature by Philip Michael Rose
His [Nietzsche's] naturalistic approach removes the veil of completeness and order which reason brings to the world and reveals instead a world which is essentially incomplete -- an open-ended, chaotic world of pure contingency.
The Not So Great Society - A Note to The President
I wrote this a while back.
When you were just a little boy Sir
We made us a compact
To stratify by race
And look
And class
We used the Great Society
To befog the reality
And then we renamed charity
As organized community
Our tokenism breathed easy
As we moved outward from the city
Built more prisons
Elected mayors
And patted ourselves on the back
And shook our heads in private
Yes we left the bulk of poverty
Moved on to great careers
You know the drill
And now the chickens barely mumble Sir
Malcolm-like and honestly
And Rome remains unburned Sir
For the nonce
2010 How Wrong We Were - A Cautionary Post
If we cannot pull together this year ...
Obama Will Win the Election This Fall 2010
Obama Will Win
The Election This Fall --
A Polypoem
for David Plouffe
To "On Top of Old Smoky"
We need a new Congress
Not full of wingnuts
If we don't get one
We'll be out of luck
Cause Congress will fool you
And tell you more lies
Than cross ties on a railroad
Or stars in the skies
The Republican Party
Thinks the past's on their side
Along with the pundits
And the rest of the snide
But Obama is running
And Obama's no fool
While wingnuts are boiling
He's playing it cool
But behind his coolness
A great fire burns
On the fifth of November
The nation will learn
The people will do it
They'll throw the jerks out
And when it's all over
We're all gonna shout
We have a new Congress
Obama has won
And now his agenda
Can finally get done
We'll move beyond oil folks
We'll move toward green
McCain will be silenced
And we'll be less mean
Obama will win it
As in 2008
The young and the rising
Will decide our fate
Obama's not perfect
But neither are we
Let's all pull together
And make history
Obama Will Win The Election This Fall is a song to the tune of "Old Smoky" suggesting that the President will emerge victorious following the November, 2010, elections.
5/23/12
An Action Strategy for the Obama Campaign
Mr. Rattner (it would seem) is not in Mr. Romney's capacious pockets
Creating Jobs Wasn’t Romney’s Job - NYTimes.com: "On Monday, Mr. Obama struck the right balance, emphasizing that he wasn’t attacking private equity but was questioning Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital credentials to be the job creator in chief.
That’s fair, particularly because Mr. Romney himself has been foolishly reweaving history to claim, as recently as last week, that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his time at Bain.
In fact, Bain Capital — like other private equity firms — was founded and managed for profit: ideally, huge amounts of gain earned legally and legitimately. Any job creation was a welcome but secondary byproduct."
The underlying story is ironically
That Obama holds the key to the future
It is he who links recovery to creating new occupations
And moving beyond oil
While whatever Mitt is for
Means rolling backwards
Down the Sysiphean hill
5/22/12
Koch Funny Business in Ohio's Academe
Charles Koch + Roger Ailes = Ohio University? | AlterNet: "In the case of Ohio University, the full extent of Koch’s donations to the George Washington Forum isn’t known. But we do know that Koch specifically underwrote a talk the Forum hosted by John Yoo, author of the Bush torture memos (belying Charles and his brother David’s claims that their ideological activism is restricted to economic issues). We also know that through the Forum, the Charles Koch Foundation awards grants to students “interested in studying free market ideas” under an OU professor who researches conservative politics and economics. S"
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5/19/12
Mildred Purse Suggests a Mt. Everest Climb for John Boehner
5/18/12
What Does The Failure of Austerity Mean for The GOP?
Germany, the Crisis and the G-8 - NYTimes.com:
'via Blog this'
That austerity has been and is a failure is becoming so obvious that the GOP cannot possibly win an election touting its virtues. Whatever the problems connected with gaining prosperity for all, the recipe appears to be that it takes money to make money. Removing money from those who have little of it merely exacerbates a downward rush to the bottom.
When the GOP learns that congress=compromise and that careful stimulus generates prosperity, we shall take a few giant steps back to being a reasonable polity.
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'via Blog this'
That austerity has been and is a failure is becoming so obvious that the GOP cannot possibly win an election touting its virtues. Whatever the problems connected with gaining prosperity for all, the recipe appears to be that it takes money to make money. Removing money from those who have little of it merely exacerbates a downward rush to the bottom.
When the GOP learns that congress=compromise and that careful stimulus generates prosperity, we shall take a few giant steps back to being a reasonable polity.
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Commens Peirce Dictionary: Sign : ""I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and s... -
A Setting for a Poem "Denial" Beloved by the Greek People by the Nobel Prize Winning Poet Giorgos Seferis http://www.youtube.c...
