Mad Sox and painted Rocks

Mad Sox and painted Rocks

                            (Last minute addendum added after a few hours online) 

               

                         The same difficulty that trips up a lot of people with answers may well trip up those who wish to control the flow of the net – namely that not everyone may want to go along with your notion of what's right. Specifically the shutting down of the obvious file sharing systems will lead only to the opening of smaller and better protected ones and it is quite conceivable that at some point the cost of retrieval, meaning the cost to shut down pirate sites will exceed the gain realized – at which point what will happen?

Will merchants insist on prerogatives just to make a moral point? I doubt it. The hammer that is always held over the head of the public is that the business man will simply refuse to produce product. Social security was allegedly going to make it too expensive to do business in the US and would drive the country broke, supposedly - this did not happen.

                       Again it's worth mentioning that , after all, I am, at least allegedly, a content creator and my side of the fight should be with the publishers. Charles Dickens made copyright protection a big issue because he was paid virtually nothing by American Publishers throughout his entire lifetime. I suppose we could say then the shoe was on the other foot.

           Nevertheless at this admittedly late stage of the game as many a songwriter will tell you the large publishing companies are not overly generous with their remuneration. Again this is nothing new, but still it reflects the greater trend of the debasement of workers. Don't lecture me on the exceptions – the Micheal Jordans and the Madonnas – I don't want to hear it. To establish credibility of the NBA they needed and hence created a superstar, but it's still business as usual. The workers only alternative,of course is to not work – but do I have to mention the liabilities of that particular method?

                       In any case, we may go down, but we are not going down without a fight and what is more somebody, someday will find this maybe and they will know that not every one succumbed to the illusion.

                       

 From the other guys side of the fence          - the fabled one percent who take it all and do nothing

         Their attitude is not  unreasonable - As Galbraith said "Don't pity the poor white collar criminal who's lost their fortune. They never lose it all and even if they lose half they are still many times better off then you.

            This is to say that if we put the plutocrats feet to the fire they may find themselves being content with only ten million a year - they won't be happy - they will piss and moan like the spoiled brats that they are, the will claim the end of the world is at hand,  but at the end of the day they will accept whatever we offer - because it's better then working for a living.

okay, here goes...

                          It’s imperative, for my health among other things that we keep repeating that we are not speaking about truth in these essays, We are speaking about competitive belief systems in the information warfare that has thankfully in many cases replaced the actual warfare of the battlefield.

We have not even reached the point where we can define the deciding characteristics of the arguments or attack modalities that are most successful though we have it on the word of many generals of the past that even in actual warfare the psychological component is often the deciding factor.

We are aware, tangentially at least that modern belief shaping is patterned linguistically after that of warfare. We bombard territories, we seek total market domination, we engage in multistage invasion strategies all for the purpose of selling toothpaste.

A key element in the conditioning of the subject population however is the matching of the terms of conditioning with the cognitive structure of the subjects. A boy might write a hundred times “The dialectic determines action” and it could mean nothing if the the kid didn’t understand the basic terms.

A thesis I sometimes play with is the the Muslim faith is very sophisticated in terms of it’s ability to convey and convince. This is because primitive religious spheres tend to be based on stories whereas more modern ones are based on laws. Secondly the Koran, which I know very little of and which I confess I find hard to wade through (“For does not the devil find the blessed words of God abhorrent?”) is written in a very modern style. It uses short paragraphs and the way it works, from what I can tell, is it presents an idea and then another idea and leaves a space between the two ideas which invites the believer to contemplate.

A third characteristic of the Muslim faith is the ban on images of the prophet and that is what I’d like to speak to initially.

Essentially this ban forces the psyche to characterize the blessed one as one with themselves.

As indicated – as the most modern of the major messianic religions the prophet doesn’t really deal with a universe of cause and effect. Everything simply is. It’s not like a Polynesian story about how dolphins learned to sing, or how rabbits got their tails. In effect there’s no time for that.

In some regards this simplifies things. How many a catholic school teacher wishes they had such certainty; having to refer to instead of having to tell the students it depends on faith. Then again if you’re a fan of paradox you can appreciate the notion that faith only is real contingent on the extent it has no justification or causality.

Rolling along then in my parents bedroom asI was growing up there was a crucifix upon which the dying Jesus, in all his three dimensional agony could look down upon the marital bed. A child might well wonder why on earth this was done. Picasso suggested that while Africans and others may, by using masks, take upon themselves the visages of Gods the European chose instead to portray the Gods in human form.

I had a particularly gruesome epiphany one time whilst walking though the church yard og a German Village church that was several hundred years old. The dying savior was portrayed in such agonies as I had never seen before. It was of the school of Grunewald.

I bring this to your attention because people are different. It’s a safe bet that the genetic difference between peoples is negligible but behavioral patterns and cognitive templates tend to remain and “Bounce back” even after extreme traumas.

Germany and Japan were both devastated by the second world war and yet in less then half a century they were once again among the worlds most effective economies. Granted, Japan as of late has had some problems, to which we may attribute to the relative strength of the other Asian tigers but the essential facts remain.

But things are slipping out of order here so I’ll make two suggestions and then move on. One is that contingent with the military examples of organized force being of superior merit to disorganized, or trained force how we treat free speech is critical. It’s easy to say “Shut the F*ck up B*tch you don’t know nothing”- As the mystics say “They who know do not say and they who say do not know”

What you wind up with is decided not by knowledge of a subject- but by ability to speak, or shout, louder and longer then others. This advantages women, and those from verbally oriented cultures, but it doesn’t always get the job done and sometimes can lead to theories overcoming facts. As the great theorist Reagan would say “Facts are such bothersome things.”

                     It’s nice to have a story teller as a leader – but it’s not that nice that one would actually choose them to lead. As we indicated yesterday the control of the media, not necessarily by the media itself, but simply by those who are good at using it can serve to inhibit the access of those who are being disposed by current decision making. It has nothing to do with evil intent per se, although the results may be less then desirable. As the great Herbert Khaury (Tiny Tim) would say - “I love to pose,” and as many of us would say “I love to hear myself talk.”

                        (I jest that for many years I was upset with the New Yorker, et al because they not only wouldn’t hire me, but wouldn’t hire writers like myself which included many of us who cut our teeth on the style, which dates back to Twain and may be referred to as “ironic transcendentalism”- instead there was all this crap about rich people and their lives and poor people and the millions of ways they could be killed. Now I could care less – they kept telling the audience to get lost and guess what happened? They got lost! )

              I mean where’s the nobility in that? Where’s the pride, the dignity?

                      As to the question of why Japan and Germany seem so resilient my normal answer would be – the weather. It’s cold enough so people have to keep busy or freeze. A corollary to this axiom must be included, because the weather is so cold (but not too cold) the little children have to wear socks and it is a well known fact that the wearing of socks is known to increase intelligence as proven by hundreds of IQ tests.

I’ll now give a few examples of the kind of thought obstacles we face in trying to make a better life for us all. I do this not in the spirit of personal animosity but in the open contest of ideas to decide which seems best.

                            Indeed my research has led my to understand that there are several concepts that are nearly unbearable for our sense of selfhood to tolerate.   One is the genetic modification to a new species – It need not turn out like the Island of Dr Moreau to give us pause for thought.     Another idea, only slightly less frightening is the hive intelligence. It amuses me, in terms of chaos theory that the world cloud as in cloud computing is becoming acceptable since it is not too far from the imporating chaotic concept of flocking – as in the case of birds or fish.    Here the component units move as one in incredible syncronicity – without the knowledge of why. That in turn is a step away from the hive, where, like in the Borg, all individuality is stripped away and life becomes a simulacrum, a form of living death.

                  Don’t worry it won’t happen to you because you, unlike the rest of us can think for yourself. You have a soul. You will be judged etc etc.  Just kidding  Obviously we prefer to think of ourselves as individuals. The dignity of which I speak is based on just that concept and I weep each time I see a person renounce it for the drugs of power and wealth.  That said though we will get no where if we insist on doing everything ourselves. The only way the war against the undying corporate mind can be won is to create a more deadly mind then has yet been known.  I don’t wanna play intellectual king of the hill, just because a person doesn’t take us all the way to Parnasus doesn’t mean the trail is useless.

           The mind must be flexible.

             We must learn to accept the advice and knowledge of others without taking it as a personal insult.

                    At the turn of the millennium, a mere ten years ago two writers seemed to be saying things that people apparently wanted to hear I however was a little appalled. They both had come to the same conclusion – that the triumph of consumer capitalism was a done deal the world over.

In actuality I am more amenable to their conclusions today then when they were first presented – perhaps this is because they are now considered somewhat absurd.

             The writers, and their utopian fantasies were Francis Fukuyama and his end of history thesis and Thomas Friedman and his Flat Earth theory. Fukuyama believed that the ongoing dialectic of nations overpowering weaker nations had been fundamentally changed.

               For instance when we speak of neoliberal economic theory, or globalism, or of neo colonialism what we mean is rather then a conquering nation taking over the complete apparatus of state (an expensive and often thankless task) the modern method is to take over only the economic structure and leaving the health and feeding of the population to others.       This lowers the locus of control: especially it lowered below the threshold of war in most cases. The wars that have been fought in recent decades are always fought by surrogates and mercenaries.

              Friedmans idea, also in brand ready simple form stated that technology was well on the way to leveling the playing field (eg: flat earth) and that wherever the ubiquitous golden arches of MacDonald’s could be found the march to a house and a car in the garage was inevitable.

They were nice, optimistic theories and as I indicated if one assumes a global perspective they are not that far off the mark. As I also indicated I personally was furious. They had locked up center stage and were in effect, as we say, stroking each other, while I was outside in the cold in a region that had been devastated by these same trends and neither they nor anyone else, for understandable reasons was willing to listen to anyone else’s viewpoints.

The reason why they went along with the crushing of dissent in the past was they did not have an answer- they still don’t. Their answer is for me to die and I can’t accept that.

Fortunately the science of economics is like God, taking notice of every leaf that falls. As I’ve said we’d might do better to judge a society by how it treats the weakest rather then the most powerful.

In any event the wolf at my door, having eaten its fill has moved onto other doors and without much change I’ve gone from radical to mainstream.

Both of these writers may, in their hearts be advocates of the common man – if only because that’s where the sales are 

                 Fukuyama went on to write a book about the next wave of the future, one which entails a good deal of genetic engineering and if there ever was a topic that was a wasteland of moral pitfalls that’s’ it.

             To repeat, if one word could describe what I am concerned with it is dignity. There’s an old adage to the effect that we best judge a person not by what they do but by what they don’t do.

This brings cause and effect into the picture. Sure one could occupy themselves with others ideas of causality but do we really want to do this?

                    I’m not being too clear, admittedly. Consider this we are given a solution to our problem but don’t we have the right to suggest that others adopt the same solutions?

Classically Bill (“Just call me Bill because I’m your pal) Clinton told people that they should think about having several careers in their lifetimes but I’d didn’t see him take that advice

                  Returning to Fukuyama though I got the impression he was sufficiently humbled by the ideas of cloning and intelligence modification to at least refrain from making absurd claims about it. Thomas Freidman and Micheal Mandlebaum, a former white house policy maker have a new book out dedicated to solving the problems apparently facing America today in 2012. Unfortunately the word that comes to mind is to damn with faint praise – it is “sincere.”

  This ends a little suddenly due to a glitch in a program that lost some data.

          See you again

_ GR Schaefer