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Text of the page (random words):
on in saying that no choice is compulsory and indeed that any choice either way is discreditable sometimes you have to make a choice because your choice will affect events and you have to do something inaction is in effect a choice for a doctor to choose a treatment or a sailor to choose an anchorage will sometimes determine whether the patient lives or dies or the boat sinks or swims this situation by the way where one has some degree of real control is where the lesser evil argument actually holds true for most of us though and especially for choices of the substantive political kind i mean substantive as opposed to republican democrat that is they re about something intrinsically important our choice will have little or no effect on events for most of us for example choosing to be a ukraine fan or a russia fan will have no effect on events and yet we think it s important whichever side you choose the importance is agreed perhaps the difference is simply in the importance we assign to the outcome even if we can t affect it i don t think anybody would deny that the outcome of the russia ukraine war will be important as i would phrase it that outcome will either be a victory or a defeat for the ultimate instigator of the conflict which is of course the us and its sockpuppet nato give me that choice in the actually existing world and i ll always choose a us defeat i mean every time people on the other side would talk about international law or some other chimaera and bless their hearts as we say down south typically i find people taking the opposite view stress the relative whiteness of the two hats though the ukie hat has a distinctly dusky hue and so this side of the equation is seldom insisted upon rather the sable tint of the russki hat comes under the moral spectroscope as if it were our job rather than say god s to decide who s more righteous and choose our side on that basis i suspect that this moralizing perspective comes into play largely because people don t want to think about the outcome or rather they don t want to think about which outcome they really prefer or they don t want to be bothered with the history and the context it s all about schoolyard rules who threw the first punch in a sense the cynical neocons are rather refreshing this way they ll tell you quite candidly that they want the us to rule the world in saecula saeculorum and that s what this is about and screw you if you re not down with it so they are you might say the negative inversion of me hence really quite comprehensible they ve chosen a side based on what they want to happen and so have i on the same basis and the considerations we ve both taken into account are much the same except for the sign reversal the moralizers have also chosen a side more or less by default but either they re less honest than their de facto allies the neocons or perhaps less self aware factually to defend the ukes is to defend the us empire clearly an outrageous stance so the whole thing needs to be lobotomized no history or context please and transferred from the plane of consequential reasoning to the alpine slopes of abstract principle where the air is pretty thin and the reasoner s crampons need a purchase on the ice of fact but would rather call on a philosophical sky hook doesn t work though who threw the first punch though perhaps not very important is still a factual question as is what led up to that ask the one and you can ask the other the first punch theorist will reply that not throwing a punch is a moral absolute whereas provoking a punch is not but this just makes him look silly at least to anybody who really tries to do moral reasoning rather than just moralizing about it so perhaps the answer to my original question when is side taking needful and when is it not comes down to the pedestrian subjective question what matters to you returning to the locker room question its answer matters clearly to people who do have a dog in the fight and of course they re going to choose a side and should do there s also a penumbra of people professionally or personally committed to gender theory summed up in the slogan trans women are women for them the open locker room is an ideological victory and the closed one a corresponding defeat so they have a dog in the fight too though a different breed of dog then there s a further penumbra of people both on the uke question and the locker room question who are mostly concerned with attitudinizing and showing team spirit about the topics currently trending in their reference group but that s a topic for another post posted in uncategorized 165 replies quomodo sedet sola alma mater posted on january 6 2023 by michael j smith 3 jeremiah as is his wont laments my olde skoole on ye choppinge blocke correspondence with a fellow alum shows what a weak reed the credentialling sector ultimately is new college was founded at the heart of the postwar golden age when elite consensus was what we would now call liberal well it s not any more so all state institutions are going to bend the knee amazing in a way that nc lasted as long as it did the possible upside it will give the youngs something more consequential to fight for than gender categories and pronouns if they take it i wonder whether they will on my reunion visits i found them likable but utterly shipwrecked intellectually by wokeness the new left in our day had an iron backbone of red diaper babies sons and daughters of old commies from the 1930s they were having an oedipal drama with the rents on the old left which had admittedly pretty much collapsed and sold out to the democratic party but they inherited some of its materialist clarity of thinking and historical awareness but now the new left has been replaced by the no left which has no conception of class at all as far as i can tell and reduces politics to an extensive list of bad attitudes racism and misogyny of course in a very expansive sense and then the zoo of xphobias replace x with trans homo etc it will be interesting to see how the crackdown unfolds a new president presumably in fairly short order who will then issue directives to do or not do what and it will be interesting to see whether there s any real resistance pessimistically perhaps i doubt it profs are not usually made of very stern stuff posted in uncategorized 3 replies was will das kapital posted on january 6 2023 by michael j smith 1 must it or does it just like to economics is a topic that vexes me even among lefties a training in this pseudo science always seems to lead to a curious dogmatism you ask what seems like a simple question and often as not you get some canned answer that suggests the question hasn t even been understood but then perhaps my simple questions are simply imbecile something i ve been pondering lately is the topic of what capital has to do out of existential necessity as contrasted with what it likes to do if it can life process vs immanent tendency let s say this seems to me like a useful distinction for example my comrades all assure me that marx proved capital must expand or die but nobody has ever been able to lay out for me the steps in this theorem empirically of course we find that it has a strong immanent tendency to expand but if my distinction holds water that s not the same thing and then of course we also find it has a strong immanent tendency to destroy accumulated capital war being the locus classicus as far as i can see there s no obvious reason why capital couldn t get along just fine even under some fairly strong legal or regulatory or tax constraints this should not be misread as a defense case for capital by the way i m as eager as the next comrade to see the end of it as far as i can tell the problem is really political not technical or essential with capital in the driver s seat who s in a position to impose such constraints or motivated to do so corollary if someone were in a position to impose those constraints what would be the point of keeping the capitalists around posted in uncategorized 1 reply cop love posted on december 31 2022 by michael j smith 155 to me the sight of a cop in his brutish ugly uniform and his panoply of weapons is purely bad the badness is a composite of fear i really don t want to attract his attention and hate why is he there at all and why so heavily armed and i wish somebody would take him out or at least pin him down under covering fire and make him cry for his mother and wet his cop pants others feel otherwise obviously i wish i understood them better to me the menacing cop looks like a menace i mean a menace t o me to the cop fans the cop also looks like a menace but to somebody else whom they fear and loathe who might that be the obvious answer is black people and there s no question that in the us at least this is a big part of the picture but then there are black cop fans too and i think that race though it can never be overlooked isn t the whole story the cop is plainly an object of fear so to stan him implies that there s someone real or illusory whom we fear worse and against whom this horrid talus might be turned is that someone perhaps some part of ourselves is the cop the heavily armed external superego keeping our own unruly id in line the personification of a punitive social order whose rules regs we have to obey and are expected to love the cop can be for us or against us depending on which side of us turns up better for than against considering his heavy armament better to love him than hate him identify with him or he might gun you down but that leaves some id left over and so there s another other too namely all those people out there black people or for boogie black people cousin pookie unruly people undeserving people those who didn t do their homework or got bad sats or made bad choices we who have more or less made it under the rules have implicitly constructed these others onto whom we have projected our own anarchic id the thing that makes the cop dangerous to us they become the externalized internal enemy go get em officer once you ve gunned them down no way that id will rebound back onto respectable us and of course no way will we have to worry about you posted in uncategorized 155 replies the first church of christ communist posted on december 26 2022 by michael j smith 5 m smith senior warden rectorship currently vacant https jacobin com 2022 12 christmas marxism christianity alasdair macintyre jesus slightly surprising piece in jacobin this is a topic that has always interested me as a high church liturgically and theologically conservative episcopalian commie in fact my current tragedy is that my old mother church has become too liberal for me but has never been left wing enough i personally have never found any contradiction here i m not an especially good communist or an especially good christian but to the extent that i m either they ve never seemed to pull me in different directions he hath put down the mighty from their seat the remarkable lady sings and hath exalted the humble and meek sounds pretty commie to me jacobin s writer seems to be asking why shouldn t a commie be a christian well there are reasons start with the fact that the great sages were atheists marx engels lenin and so on so how can one be an admirer and follower of theirs and yet not an atheist one obvious answer is that our admiration for marx et al is not fideistic it s well empirical on matters of political economy and politics and history they seem to have got a lot of stuff right when they ascend to metaphysics they run the usual risk of hypoxia so these great men are not moses charged with tablets from sinai but fellow enquirers with us like newton or darwin they re not a package deal this is not meant to endorse a cherry picking eclecticism but to suggest that every reading however respectful of the greats marxist or not is also an interlocution there s another perhaps more serious obstacle the default position for self respecting college educated people in north america and western europe these days is to be an atheist the alternative is more or less an unthinkable gaucherie one has to be very contrarian to take it up i dare say that most marxists in my world were atheists long before they were marxists and why should an atheist ever change his mind absent some extraordinary road to damascus thing atheism is a perfectly respectable and consistent position after all and it s really implicit in modernity so i would turn mr jacobin s question around and ask rather why shouldn t a christian be a commie i think i could convert christians to communism more readily than most communists to christianity because christianity is basically a tough sell as st paul observed some years ago but communism is just good common sense for religious people not only christians but religious people in general there s the baggage of course that commies are supposed to be atheists i think this is easily disposed of in politics as in religion start with the praxis and the theory will over time make itself clear believers can easily and do easily make common cause with non believers on some agreed upon project and a lot of believers started coming to church with mental reservations consider the famous joke about episcopalians crossing their fingers when it s time to say the creed so they re used to this and they have the mental apparatus to dip their toes into communism except for the atheist part some of them will find the water fine lemma the atheist commies mustn t insist on atheism as a requirement and indeed i can t think of any way that marxism or leninism requires atheism qua axiom falls to the ground without it the substantive ideological obstacles to communism for religious people aren t often specifically religious ones in fact they re usually irreligious ones and lie in commonplace secular ideological notions about the nature of the state liberal representative democracy due process rule of law tyranny of the majority all that mythology or human nature sociobiology and all its hellspawn in the us at least the curious sociological fact is that a lot of the people that us commies would like to recruit in fact the social base we re meant to depend on are self identified christians the atheists are all pmc and therefore hardened liberals not quite beyond communist redemption perhaps but the parable of the camel and the needle s eye mutatis mutandis does come to mind in fact if 10 of christians could be brought round to communism that would be at least numerically a bigger deal than 10 of commies becoming christian because there are a lot of christians and very few commies i m sorry to say i wish there were many many more posted in uncategorized 5 replies okay i m a believer now posted on december 20 2022 by michael j smith reply so by pure chance i picked up a copy of the deficit myth by stephanie kelton i suppose this is the bible of modern monetary theory mmt i m t...