bshepard

ww2 was more like that than you think. Check out Nicholson Baker's "HUMAN SMOKE"

Have the armed forces of the United States subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law? Yes (unanimously). Is the United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal#Conclusions_a...)

The parts in Guy Robinson's "Philosophy and Mystifications" about Aristotle still resonate with me in one way or another a few years after reading it. The book is happily available online: http://www.spiritual-minds.com/philosophy/assorted/041517851...

Here's a relevant bit:

"When Aristotle looks for a place to begin the investigation of any topic he suggests that we begin with “the opinions of the many or the wise.” This is hardly because those opinions are thought to be infallible. We need not have a mystical view about “the collective wisdom of humanity” to think it sensible to start there. It simply makes more sense than wasting our time with random fanciful or extraordinary views, views that have come out of nowhere and are likely only to lead nowhere, the wild suppositions of impossible happenings: colors that change on a certain date, universes that consist only of sounds or of one object, and so forth. Under the influence of Descartes’s method, these imaginings have been thought to reveal “conceptual boundaries.”

I shared this mostly because of the Gibson quote enclosed, and if you don't want to read the article, here's the quote, which involves a coolhunter who can viscerally sense cool and uncool evaluating Tommy Hillfinger:

"This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row . . . . But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

Do markets for art work in the same way as markets for talent in film? To what extent does success in mass media illustration correspond to success in selling singular art objects?

If anyone is learning German & Chinese at the same time, this is a very helpful site: http://www.tao-te-king.org/

"The Morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators. Instead, as Carlo Ginzburg analysed the Morellian method, the art historian operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting". These unconscious traces— in the shorthand for rendering the folds of an ear in secondary figures of a composition, for example— are unlikely to be imitated and, once deciphered, serve as fingerprints do at the scene of the crime. The identity of the artist is expressed most reliably in the details that are least attended to. The Morellian method has its nearest roots in Morelli's own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Morelli)

This is from the section of Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism and Jane Austen, and feels, in some sense, like a helpful clue about the value of Austen's work to recent US legal culture.

"As in Austen's other novels, the central group that finally emerges with marriage and property "ordained" is not based exclusively upon blood. Her novel enacts the disaffiliation (in the literal sense) of some members of a family, and the affiliation between others and one or two chosen and tested outsiders: in other words, blood relationships are not enough to a sure continuity, hierarchy, authority, both and international."

The full section from the book is here: http://oldemc.english.ucsb.edu/emc-courses/JaneAusten-2011/A...

Do you think the same argument, if applied more generally, would lead towards the exclusion of all foreign tech companies from all nations? Thinking here of the deep ties between Google, Amazon, Facebook, PayPal and the US military-industrial complex.

That's one perspective. Another (perhaps broader) perspective is that there's been a generations long civil war throughout South and Central America between elites and oppressed populations, and throughout this conflict, the US state has sided with and supported elite rule, oftentimes including gross violations of human dignity. This goes back to the Monroe Doctrine.

Some needed contextualization here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...

By transferring government resources from the perpetuation of force (military industrial complex/prison archipelago) towards the social expenses mentioned above. This would involve a diminution of force, and an increase in cooperative social relations.

Whether or not things eventually rely on force seems like more of a metaphysical question than a political one; the resources spent on the perpetuation of the military-industrial complex could have been (could still be) diverted towards raising the living standards of the poorest, ensuring a basic security net for all, providing decommodified healthcare and education. It is interesting to think about why this choice wasn't made, why it doesn't get made.

I found this paragraph especially thought-provoking: "Americans are inclined to talk about the "war against drugs," or the "war against poverty," or the "war against cancer," without questioning whether "war" is an appropriate metaphor. It’s a way of talking about complexity, but if it doesn’t fit, it will cause you to make errors in how you deal with your problems. The war on poverty failed partly because poverty is not something you can defeat, and that makes warfare an inappropriate metaphor. The same is true with the war on drugs, which has gotten us into some ugly situations. "

Yes, that's really true. Not sure what you're writing with, but writing cards in ink and brush is really pleasurable and poses constant design challenges.

Have any HNers found an effective digital version of index cards? The author mentions a" years of trying all kinds of digital equivalents a much-loved Mac outliner programme called 3×5" but then returns to return to physical cards. Probably the usefulness of actual cards comes from their materiality, but maybe there's some effective replacement that lets you combine/create cards with added digital ease - I can type a lot faster than write by hand.

I agree with the sentiment, but respectfully propose that the office con is part of a larger and even more brazen : commodifying all of reality. Besides all of the relatively well-known ethical and psychological problems with selling and buying time and land, commodification also greatly diminishes the development of what Marxists like to call "the productive forces" -- if not for this artificial system of value created to mask European conquest, we could easily be in some an unimaginably technologically advanced post-scarcity heterotopia right now.

I don't think it's a justification, it's a contextualization.

The United States was founded in order to protect slavery. The "enlightenment" stuff was PR. Check out Gerald Horne's Counterrevolution of 1776.

No way, those baby corns are "objectively" a culinary nightmare.

As a previously commentator mentioned, "colonized" is a much more fitting word than "discovery." The deeper problem, I think, with "discovery" is that it obscures the violence of the European settlement process -- the meta-genocides of the North American peoples and the transatlantic Slave Trade.

It seems that many people do care about celebrities, and that if you want to understand the world, understanding celebrity's function is part of that. A useful place to start thinking about why celebrity matters is Max Weber's conception of charismatic authority.

A helpful book in understanding the real Winston Churchill is Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke"

For reference, Superdeluxe remix of Jim Bakker selling buckets of food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnaSvvSqY-8

This passage points towards what (I experienced) as profound about the novel:

"Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here.They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as "it." They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish "human pronoun" used for persons in somer, I must say "he," for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman."

More info on this here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Twitter-move-away-from-Ruby-on...

"People say that the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, that dreams are hard to remember but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience. You lie in the baths and you close your eyes for thirty seconds and empires fall, dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope is disgraced and then somebody drops something and you wake up and fifteen seconds have passed. That’s the reality of life but we suppress this chaotic irrational side. The genius of Joyce and to some degree although in a more controlled form, Proust - and there were other practitioners, Faulkner certainly – what they called stream of consciousness but what it was, was an ability to really listen to the associating mind without trimming, pruning, judging or denying. One of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce because you would have thought they would have been comrades in arms but Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was very uncreative use of it and it should all be fabricated into literature. " McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake" above.

"If Ulysses is the Algebra of literature then Finnegans Wake is the partial differential equation." - Terrence McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake", a talk given at Esalen Institute in 1995.

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

Text: http://dominatorculture.com/post/78408036619/surfing-finnega...

here's another one with a beautiful cover

http://www.npl.co.uk/turing/intelligent-machinery

some related materials:

http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warne...

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Searle.html

http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html