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bshepard

442 karma · joined February 16, 2013

collaborative artist working in painting, writing, experience work and institutional performance.
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bshepard··on Meditation and the Unconscious
"If, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recognize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there is no reason to suppose that such structures—even those that provide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational argument—have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle). A still more important consideration, however, is that naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.”

Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.

bshepard··on The control group is out of control (2014)
(1) All of these practices depend on cultivating virtues that are contradictory to industrialization/capitalization: just as lyric poetry is.

(2) It is intriguing to consider commercial music as an industrial utilization of lyric poetry, but the point is that the individual activity of lyric poetry is not amenable to industrialization IN ITSELF, but it still exists. But perhaps this example doesn't work -- the really important argument is above, namely, that the cultivation of these practices -- astrology, dousing, etc, is individuated, and oriented around virtues directly opposed to their mass utilization.

(3) As other commentators have noticed, we also don't know that these sciences aren't used on a mass technological/industrial fashion --- it seems likely, for instance, that there are corporate entities that use i ching divination, and likely, too, that there are financial firms that utilize astrological methods -- but wouldn't reveal this because of the likely opprobrium from a still dominant (if clearly declining) orthodox materialism...

bshepard··on The control group is out of control (2014)
Just because a phenomenon can't be industrialized doesn't mean it doesn't exist; you can't industrialize lyric poetry, for example.
bshepard··on All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
"If we think of the world's future, we always mean the place it will get to if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn't occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve & that its direction is constantly changing." (Wittgenstein, from Culture and Value)
bshepard··on Ask HN: What is humanity building towards?
The creation of 15 million bolos; each allowing a different form of life, eliminating nonconsensual labor, war, and ecocide. (https://libcom.org/library/pm-bolobolo)
bshepard··on MacKenzie Scott is giving away more money, faster, than anyone has before
"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?"-- Oscar Wilde
bshepard··on Piracy release group EVO ‘blames’ movie industry for its popularity
Here, from one of the founders of Ordoliberalism, is a consideration that is useful to keep in mind when reflecting on intellectual property: "Anbieter und Nachfrager suchen stets - wo immer es möglich ist - Konkurrenz zu vermeiden und monopolistische Stellungen zu erwerben oder zu behaupten"....."Suppliers and buyers always seek - wherever possible - to avoid competition and to acquire or maintain monopoly positions" - Walter Eucken
bshepard··on Art Vote
"In 1994 the artists Komar & Melamid commissioned a public-research polling firm to conduct The People’s Choice, the first poll on artistic taste in the United States. Individuals were asked approximately 100 questions on a variety of subjects, ranging from their consumer tastes and recreational activities to their knowledge of famous artists, and their preference for angles, curves, brushstrokes, and particular colors, sizes, content, and style in painting. As Russian émigrés, the artists were intrigued by the idea of the consumer-research poll as an outgrowth of American democracy. At the same time, their interest in democracy led the artists to ask what a genuine people’s art would look like. What is a democratic and populist painting?"

https://curatorsintl.org/exhibitions/the-peoples-choice

bshepard··on The culture war is killing us [video]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturkampf
bshepard··on Is Philosophy an Art?
"Everyone has to stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say to him; and, as with the prince, so he himself must not address it, for then he would hear only himself. It follows from all this that all wisdom is certainly contained in the works of the pictorial or graphic arts, yet only virtually or implicitly. Philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to furnish the same wisdom actuality, to make it explicit: in this sense, philosophy is related to the arts as wine is to grapes" (Schopenhauer)
bshepard··on India downgraded from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ in democracy report
Yes, very profound point, completely agree.
bshepard··on India downgraded from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ in democracy report
For recorded history, the subcontinent has been politically unified for -- at most -- 250 years. There are many different nations inside the "Republic of India." Some of these people are already seeking independence (https://referendum2020.org/) and more will join them. In retrospect, "India" will perhaps seem akin to the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman empire: a cage of nations. One friend of mine in Kolkata has informed me that there is more and more consideration of the "Himalayan Reconfiguration" -- a peaceful liberation of the nations trapped inside of the "Republic of India."
bshepard··on Museum of Bad Art
"According to Marcia Tucker, The New Museum’s director, "‘Bad’ Painting” is an ironic title for good painting, which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste" https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/5
bshepard··on India protests: Internet cut to hunger-striking farmers in Delhi
Here's a place to start: http://goodcat.news/cage-grh.html
bshepard··on New six-film series from Adam Curtis
The 1983 utopian fantasy "Bolo'Bolo" proposes an extremely workable strategy for a better ordering of the human species: bolos -- that is, micronational formations of 300-500 people. I've been trying for the last ten years to create an MVP for such a bolo, and will continue to do so until a more viable path presents itself or, I find myself living in Bolo'Bolo.

https://libcom.org/files/pm_bolo_bolo.pdf

bshepard··on Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 (1965)
“In Plato, art is mystification because there is the heaven of Ideas; but in the earthly domain all glorification of the earth is true as soon as it is realized. Let men attach value to words, forms, colors, mathematical theorems, physical laws, and athletic prowess; let them accord value to one another in love and friendship, and the objects, the events, and the men immediately have this value; they have it absolutely. It is possible that a man may refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world.”

Excerpt From: Simone de Beauvoir. “The Ethics of Ambiguity.

bshepard··on Why We Need Difficult Books
A guide to having fun with the wake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk
bshepard··on The Greatest Use of Life: On William James
It's interesting how biographers and scholars have closeted, seemingly successfully, William James, even after the revelation of the closeting of his brother should've alerted writers to the queer content of both James' work, and the significance of the repression of said content after the Wilde trial.....
bshepard··on Van Gogh’s Japanese Idyll
If anyone wants to dive deeper into Van Gogh, his letters are all online and translated into English: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/
bshepard··on Amazon, the Brand Buster
How much do consumers pay in Bezos tax for goods on Amazon? i.e, if the site simply let consumers buy from Chinese manufacturers (which, in the end, is what much of Amazon is) without the fee to the owners of the marketplace (i.e, "Bezos Tax), how much cheaper would it be?
bshepard··on Ask HN: What are some great books that are relatively unknown in the US?
Some US history books that are relatively unknown in the US:

-Ann Douglas "Terrible Honesty" (Study of artists, Black and nonblack in New York/Manhattan in the 20s)

-James W. Douglass "JFK & the Unspeakable"

-Walter Johnson "River of Dark Dreams"

-Gerald Horne "The Counterrevolution of 1776"

-J. Sakai, Settlers (readsettlers.org)

-Ida Wells "Lynch Law in America"

bshepard··on Intel CEO resigns after relationship with employee
Languages change over time, and the gender neutral "they" is becoming widely used to refer to specific people.
bshepard··on In the Philippines, Dynamite Fishing Decimates Entire Ocean Food Chains
It's because "richness" creates a pathologically competitive social system that encourages this sort of destruction activity in order to get the token that conveys value.
bshepard··on In the Philippines, Dynamite Fishing Decimates Entire Ocean Food Chains
Every single history I've read about slavery indicates that the middle passage was orders of magnitude larger and more intense than pre-modern slave systems.

To the first comment: our world is changing. We are leaving the world system that was created around 1500. That said, we're still inside of it, and so social practices as manifestly illogical and inane as concentration camps ("prisons"), national borders, and the burning of carbon continue.

bshepard··on In the Philippines, Dynamite Fishing Decimates Entire Ocean Food Chains
This is a fairly big abstraction, but we live in a world system that's based on discounting unseen externalities; sweeping the hurt under the rug, so to speak. The world-system started with the theft of the American continent and perpetual genocide of the natives, continued with the mass industrialized kidnapping from Africa, and persists today in a cyberpunk, abstracted form that some call "capitalism." There isn't any real name for what we have, the name will come from the next world system, if there is one, a world system where the collective genius of humanity will be free from the constraints of nation, money, gender......
bshepard··on The Chinese Communist Party’s fear of its people spells trouble
Nor does the US democracy place value on the lives of citizens in oppressed nationality groups; the so-called "prison system" of the US is a veiled concentration camp archipelago, the largest ever in human history.
bshepard··on Ask HN: What are the best hacks to fight depression?
Internal Family Systems therapy.
bshepard··on Stephen King: Can a Novelist Be Too Productive? (2015)
There is a way to find great pleasure in Joyce, it does require effort and education, but so do many other pleasures. Terence McKenna's "Surfing Finnegan's Wake" is a good way in, especially if you enjoy McKenna's weirdly-similar-to-George-Bush's voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk

bshepard··on The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar
There seems to be an important difference between everyday "Grammar nazism" and an effort to generate an accurate proof copy of a -- maybe THE - defining English language modernist novel.....Textual criticism, in general, is very important for the transmission of culture, and a different kind of thing than people who go around feeling superior because they still use "whom" in the "right" place.
bshepard··on Lost John Coltrane Recording from 1963 Will Be Released
Post-"representational" Painting is also strangely like this as well, even, strangely enough, with a certain time pressure: the first mark/stroke will, most of the time, be be better than the marks that come after that, and a corrected stroke almost invariably worse. Plus, as time continues, the surface ages.

Here's a concept from 19th century music that seems connected to the question of thematic refactoring/development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_transformation

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