Decoding Chomsky, by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky has often discussed "Plato's Problem," which he obviously finds fascinating. The problem is this: how can people know so much given a relative poverty of stimuli? Just today you found yourself talking to someone and the words just flowed out of you; you didn't have to think about them beforehand. You probably never uttered some of those sentences before, in the exact way. We all take this for granted, easily. Plato wondered about it and surmised that the reason we are able to know so much is because we already knew it in a previous life! You just talk to each other and knowledge sorta miraculously emerges via a quasi midwifery. Or rather: our forebears knew things and passed this ability to know (best example: apprehending our native language so easily) on to us. In a sense, we already "know" everything, but we need it drawn out by some...process. Today, people talk about genes. Chomsky takes Plato's "soul" and changes it to something like "biological language acquisition device," but you already knew that. (<----see what I did there?)

But this Plato Problem still seems iffy to me.

Chomsky has often written about "Orwell's Problem" too: how can people not know so many things that truly impact their lives, when the information is basically right in front of them? Noam has offered a solution to why this problem exists in books such as his famous one from 1988 (co-written with Edward Herman), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Very sophisticated propaganda tools have been developed during the 20th century, suffice to write, for now.

                                     Chris Knight, radical British anthropologist, studied

                                        Chomsky's works for over two decades

In the 1970s an intellectual proposed there's a "Chomsky Problem," which is this: how can one man write a massive body of work on linguistics, while never mentioning the social world or politics in those books, while at the same time issuing scads of books critical of his own country's foreign and domestic policies? In Chomsky's political books the mention of science, much less linguistics is basically zero. The writer who (as far as I know) coined the "Chomsky Problem" thought Noam's linguistic work was brilliant; his political writings were, IIRC, "naive." 

For at least 20 years I've wondered about the Chomsky Problem, but as I read more and more I came to the opposite conclusion: I thought Chomsky's linguistics were preposterous, while his criticism of the official lies of the State Department (and much much much more) were astonishingly acute.

I read books from the Right about Chomsky that were mostly ad hominem character assassinations. I've read far too many books by academics on his linguistics that see his grammar models as genius. Of course, the worldwide Left love his political books. There are at least five intellectuals who seem to have made their careers out of explaining, collecting, and championing Chomsky's oeuvre. 

George Lakoff is one cognitive neurolinguist whose work makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and he seems to despise Chomsky. Chomsky seems to despise Lakoff. (See Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars on this, and I understand Harris has an update in the works!) Chomsky answers Lakoff's barbs by saying Lakoff doesn't "understand" his work. But Lakoff was one of the early bright followers of Chomsky's linguistics models, only to break with him - radically - when it became apparent Chomsky's linguistics would never be able to account for semantics (by which I mean meaning in language). And Lakoff (who has amassed quite a large body of scholarship himself) has barely had anything to say about Noam's politics. Lakoff is definitely a liberal of some sort...

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So: Social Anthropologist Chris Knight (Wiki) has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I've been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. My many blogspews here as the "Overweening Generalist" on my own attempts to solve the Chomsky Problem now seem horribly unsophisticated. And so it goes...

 Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, recently released, is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you'll read for quite some time, and I say this if only out of Chomsky's massive influence. Knight has made a stellar contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals 1945-now, and has explicated lucidly a new and dynamite version of how the "cognitive revolution" arose. 

Knight has apparently spent the past 20 years researching this book and has managed to boil it all down to 240 pages, plus endnotes, a massive bibliography, and index. In an interview he mentioned that he'd finished a work in his field of Anthropology and hadn't really covered the origin of language in humans, because he felt he didn't know enough about the subject. Knowing Chomsky was Mr. Linguistics (having virtually single-handedly made it into a science and moving Linguistics from the Anthropology Department into the new Cognitive Science labs at your nearby Big University), he read Chomsky's linguistics in order to understand. And he ran into what I ran into: it's a cold, abstract to a painful degree, literally meaningless, an unworkable series of models that, - get this - by definition, has nothing to do with humans communicating with each other. 

Chris Knight says he admires Chomsky's political work, and there's no reason not to believe him; he clearly admires Chomsky's scholarship and courage in this regard. As do I. At times Knight's said there are a lot of conscientious academics and intellectuals who have criticized the US as imperial power, but no one really even comes close to Chomsky. That said...

                                    Noam Chomsky, whose linguistic models are 

                                   (finally!) seeming to be exposed as going nowhere

Anyone who has tried to follow Chomsky's many models of "Cartesian Linguistics" (AKA masochists) and thought to themselves, "Either I'm an idiot or this is a put-on, or possibly massive fraud" - that was me at one point - will know what I'm referring to: "Phrase Structure Rules," "Transformational Rules," "Grammar," "Deep Structure," the nature of the "language organ," "The Minimalist Program," "Universal Grammar," and "Merge"? All scientistic, all going nowhere, basically. (Knight runs all these down, pp. 173-179)

So, wait a minute: What? How can Noam write about lies and propaganda - which are by definition language and signs and symbols and social work among human beings - while his linguistics work has nothing to do with our social being? Because of an admitted "schizophrenic" life Chomsky admits he must lead, because, since the 1950s, he's worked in the very place that the Pentagon has funneled enormous sums of research money into: MIT. Perhaps because his quasi-kabbalistic linguistics allowed him that Ivory Tower opiate he needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance? If so, if this is anywheres near a close view of Chomsky, then it's dramatic and strange to the nth degree, no?

Chomsky once wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly admired the anarchists. He had just turned 10 years old. He decided he'd rejected Trotskyism by age 12. This is an interesting fellow, eh? 

Noam had friends help him land the job at MIT, where he was able to work on the Pentagon's new idea: that computers and cybernetics and information theory would help make the world safe for capitalism after WWII. The idea that there's a language acquisition device - a very sophisticated computer - inside every human being's head? Very appealing to Pentagon folk. This was a computer whose source code must be cracked! And Chomsky's work looked like it was moving in exactly the direction they wanted. Maybe we can develop a computer that can translate any language into English; that should help in the Cold War effort against the Godless Commies. Let's let Chomsky lead a disembodied cognitive revolution. And he did. But: Noam didn't want to do any intellectual work that would help kill people in the name of Omnicorp.

Here's where adept conspiracy theorists can take this book and run with it: did Chomsky hijack linguistics and purposefully make it useless? Neither Knight nor I believe this to be true: Chomsky seems to genuinely have ideas - which seem bizarre and fruitless to me - about a sort of purity of work in "science." There's one of William James's lectures on pragmatism from the early 20th century, in which James talks about two vastly different temperaments among thinkers: the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Somehow, Chomsky is the apex of "tough-minded" when doing his political work, while his Linguistics is the very apogee of the "tender-minded."

His persona as a man of conscience and political integrity seems to have been a perfect match for the Pentagon: see? The top man in Cognitive Science is free to write his books, give talks criticizing the Pentagon all over the world. Because we're a free society! 

But how does Chomsky manage this cognitive dissonance? Does he feel it? What have been the unintended consequences of Chomsky's total oeuvre? Knight answers these questions to my satisfaction. To those of you who've heard or read that Chomsky defended a Holocaust Denier named Robert Faurisson, was/is friends with former CIA director John Deutsch, and went against virtually the entire faculty and student body at MIT in defending Walt Rostow in getting his job back at MIT, even though Rostow has been nailed overwhelmingly in Chomsky's books on Vietnam? Knight satisfactorily answers these queries, too. 

As an Anthropologist, Knight treats the heavily-funded-by-Pentagon cognitive scientists as a "tribe." Why did this particular form of nonsense catch on so wildly in postwar Unistat? Knight gives a fascinating answer. If the only other superpower seemed to run on ideas based in matter (Dialectical Materialism), then what if we do away with matter? And, to a large extent, they did. Information/data is weightless, travels at the speed of light: matter is secondary. So is the Body...

Along the way, you'll learn about the deep roots of Sociobiology (and a form of scientific feminism that needs to come back from being beaten down by anti-science Leftists in academia), how a Russian Futurist/surrealist from the first two decades of the 20th century influenced Chomsky without Chomsky seeming to know about it, and much more.

If you had to ask me, what was the overall value of Chomsky's linguistic work at MIT? I'd say it was  "Don't study language using this approach! Language is and has no doubt always been a deeply social thing!"

If you're interested in politics, philosophy, and the idea of "science" being an open and public - and possibly ultimately unified thing?: Decoding Chomsky is for you. If you're already a seasoned reader of Chomsky, I feel safe to say you'll learn a few new things from this book. For me, the book spoke to my interests in the origin of language (of which Chomsky's work is literally laughable) and the fallout from the new and wonderfully interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences." Knight let me on to some reasons I hadn't even considered about why my valuation of being a "generalist" has taken such a beating since the 1950s. Not long ago I wrote a piece about why I thought Alfred Korzybski's work had waned, and Knight fills in a lot of gaps there, too. I'm interested in the history of Structuralism, the academy, "PR", mass stupidity, intellectuals, embodied knowledge, Descartes, Plato, Newton, Galileo and Bertrand Russell, the possible synthesizing of all knowledge, why many people have the idea that "science" isn't for them, the idea of theory and practice going hand in hand, and the timeless notion that ideas have consequences and one clue to this is looking at the time and place and social situation in which ideas blast off and catch on. 

So, I loved this book. My intellectual friends have already heard WAY too much about my problems with Chomsky, and I'm only so lathered up over Noam because I love him, although I know it doesn't seem like it. Ya just hafta take my word. - OG

Chris Knight's website for further ideas about Chomsky and MIT

Here's an interview with Chris Knight in the journal Radical Anthropology from five or so years ago that gives a lot of the gist and pith of Decoding Chomsky. It was this interview, sent to me by Sue Howard, that felt like a revelation: "Here's a guy who seems to have maybe solved the Chomsky Problem!" 

If you have been taken by Chomsky's ideas about language and want to remediate, some suggestions:

-The Major Transitions of Evolution, by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary

-Adam's Tongue, by Derek Bickerton

-Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello

-Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

-From Molecule to Metaphor, by Jerome Feldman

-Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy

-The Way We Think, by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier

Here's something many of us are looking forward to: 7000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think, by the stellar Lera Boroditsky. Gotta wait till 2018, though...

If you're way too busy and don't think you can get to reading Decoding Chomsky soon, HERE is a pretty damned good podcast interview of Chris Knight about Chomsky, by the thoughtful and erudite publisher and science fiction writer Douglas Lain.

Post scriptum: After writing about the Two Chomskys in light of William James's ideas of the "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" I remembered I blogged on it four years ago.

                                         Psychedelische Grafik von Bob Campbell

Donald Trump...POTUS? (Vol.2)

Carrying on from yesterday...

Chris Hedges at truthdig,  2 March, 2016:

Comment: Lots and lots of Hedges on fascism here, and as one of the more prominent Jeremiahs on the Unistat Left, it's one of the tunes he knows best. Longtime readers of the OG know I'm prone to invocations of FASCISM! and have been since I read 1984, followed by Brave New World, followed by Fahrenheit 451 one summer vacation, for "fun." I don't go to horror movies and instead prefer TV "news" to give me the twitchy creeps.

There was a time when, if someone asked me if I was a Democrat or Republican, I'd rapidly fire back, "I'm an anti-fascist!"

Subsequent reading and thinking over the last 15 or 20 years has led me to agree with Hegel: it's not sufficient to be only "against" something; you should be "for" something else too. So now I'm some sort of what Chomsky has called himself, a Libertarian Socialist (AKA anarchist), with heavy Green leanings but also with much sympathy for 19th century Unistat Libertarianism and European varietals of anarchy. I'm against anything that prevents our technology from becoming smaller, cheaper, more efficient and less-polluting (i.e., Buckminster Fuller's inevitable process of omniephemerlization). I'm for Basic Income (which still seems taboo in Unistat politics), for universal health care and education, for cutting the military budget by 5% every year and reallocating that money for R&D into renewable energy. I think the rich should be taxed at the level they were in the 1950s. At this point I'd like to quote one of our martyrs:

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

Anyway: Hedges is really against fascism, which is a jejune thing to write, I know. Just about anyone who's read a book is "against" it, but some seem quite a lot more haunted by its historical specter than others. Hedges seems one of the truly haunted, maybe even more than I am, which impresses me in an ironic sense. The "revenge of the lower classes" is equivalent to fascism, and in a classic Hedges riff: it's because of our college-educated elites who aligned themselves with power and privilege and not with The People. That's a dramatic riff on socio-historical dynamics that's long intrigued me. The true Owners play divide and conquer, and they always win. Educated "elites" are still human and feel they are better than the Owners, and seek to fulfill their prerogatives (this is not Hedges, but my own reading of interesting Leftist sociologists and historians, like Alvin Gouldner, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky), so they pay lipservice to the Great Unwashed but want the Good Life too. I know Hedges is with me here...

Hedges: "College educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay." By facing a POTUS named Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

And Hillary Clinton is a NeoLiberal to the bone, by the way...

Hedges has read all the books and authors that have roused me. His article quotes at length the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (died 2007), who is in turn warning about fascism in 1998 because of insufficient care about what to do with displaced workers in a post-industrialized society. Hedges quotes Rorty, who quotes Edward Luttwak the brilliant amoral political philosopher and author of Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, which was read by a character in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Luttwak's readings have led him to guess that fascism is in Unistat's future and one of the reasons is people whose jobs have been "offshored" and unskilled workers will be forced to realize no one they've elected is trying to help them.

Hedges cites Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here (which I read within a year after my summertime of Orwell/Huxley/Bradbury), quotes at length from a book I have not read, Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Patton. It's scary, oh yea. Hedges quotes Hannah Arendt, he reminds us of Durkheim's term anomie, he brings up the one Great Thinker on this subject I would've had I been commissioned to write a piece on Creeping Fascism in America, Walter Benjamin, who said that fascism has occurred when politics has become aesthetics. Hedges seems borderline trivially correct when he says fascist movements do not build off the actions of politically active people; they are built on politically inactive "losers."

Trump's supporters are brimming with a transcendent ressentiment and can't wait to get revenge on intellectuals who've told them they can't yell out "Spic!" or "Nigger!" or "faggot!" like the good old days. Also, they'd love to be able to use violence on non-whites with impunity. (Pssst! ever read The Turner Diaries?) All gains made by people of color and gays will be wiped out. Also, says Hedges, Trump's brownshirts hate "intellectuals, ideas, science and culture." (This also describes very neatly just about the only group of people I do not wish to party with.)

To paraphrase from an old Woody Allen joke:

On one hand, we have Hillary Clinton, who stands for just about everything that got us in this mess.
On the other hand, we'll have violent, uneducated racists running wild, who hate culture and ideas.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Hedges even goes here: There will be salutes to the flag and cross (instead of swastika and fasces), and "mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance" which will be a "litmus test for detecting the internal enemy." Now that is some haunted jit.

Hey, when they say, "Now let us all stand and sing our National Anthem" at baseball games, I have been that guy who remains seated. Sure, people glare at me for nine innings, but the idea of compulsory saluting and singing of some abstract idea about "freedom" is just too ironic for me. I've been like this for 20 years. Hedges goes down a turgid path here, but maybe he's right and I really hope not. If he is and this blog disappears around January 20, 2017, after the inauguration of King Trump, I guess I was wrong.

(Quick book recommendation from the OG: Alfred Jarry's Ubu Plays)

Hedges - who recently said he's voting for Green candidate Jill Stein - finishes his jeremiad with this: the only thing that will save us is a massive social movement to defeat fascism, but it will not come out of the Democratic Party. (Does he even realize that's basically saying, "We're all so royally screwed!"?)

Hedges always delivers with his apocalyptic Leftist jeremiads, and he always overdoes it. It's like Performance Art to me. Nonetheless, I feel for a guy like Hedges because I think we're of the same intellectual and emotional gene pool. Therefore...

Grade: B
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ProfB AKA @hilzoy on Twitter, in a series of Tweets, 29 February, 2016:

Comment: I don't know who this person is, but I admire the judo move of having empathy for Trump supporters and explaining why. The GOP has spent decades destroying trust in science, legitimate experts and the press, constantly messaging that "America is being destroyed" when a corporate Democrat is trying to do some moderately sane thing for humans or the environment. After years and years and years of this, now they're fucked and don't know who to trust. Republicans have been dismantling their quality of life, shipping jobs overseas.

Enter: Trump. He "speaks his mind" and can't be bought. When the mainstream Republican party says, "Don't trust this guy!" well, the Trumpanistas  have just about had it with them too. And who can believe anything in the MSM?

Message: the Republican party made this mess. It's entirely their own fault. They broke it, now they have to buy it, take it home and try to glue it back together. These ideas are seen in very many of the articles that seek to explain the rise of Trump, but I applaud "ProfB" or "@hilzoy" for encapsulating these spot-on ideas so tersely. And again, the empathic turn? Admirable.

Grade: A-
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Prof Rick Searle at IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emergent Technologies), 7 March, 2016:

Comment: Searle's thesis is that Trump's candidacy is a result of "dark epistemology" and Trump is the perfect character to use this epistemology on the mass stage for his own gain.

Searle gives us his own history lesson-spiel: Neoliberalism starts in 1945 when Friedrich Hayek shows that Soviet-style central planning is no good, but continuous distributed feedback loops of information yields a better economy.

Still, Unistat gradually went for a Welfare State/social safety net in addition to State capitalism. J.K. Galbraith alerted us to the problem of manufactured "needs" and this muddles things a bit for our values/economy/understanding of where we're at. Nixon created the EPA and flirted with Basic Income (really: the FAP), but by the time of Reagan and Thatcher, the welfare state had suddenly become something evil, or at least that's what our real-life versions of C. Montgomery Burns wanted us to believe. Bill Clinton converted the Democrats to Neoliberalism and bragged about ending "welfare as we know it" before his term was out in 2000. The political philosophy of Neoliberalism led to the Collapse of 2008. (NeoConservatism seems merely a more Far-Right version of Neoliberalism to me. - OG)

[Again: Hillary Clinton is NeoLiberal to the marrow. Think before you vote. Off my soapbox...]

Hayek was for Basic Income, by the way. It's a rare day indeed when I hear a Libertarian who mentions the greatness of Hayek's thought who also mentions he was for Basic Income.

The "dark epistemology" Searle addresses has to do with the acceleration ("flood") of information, which also inundates us with deception, conspiracy theories and manipulation. He seems quite influenced by Shiller and Akerlof's Phishing For Phools. Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Searle: "We live in a media environment in which no one can be assumed to be telling the truth, in which everything is a sales pitch of one sort or another..."

He also brings up Agnotology, a term coined by Stanford's Robert Proctor, and it's the study of manufacturing doubt in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. Big Tobacco saying "the science isn't really in whether smoking causes lung cancer or not" (when internal memos showed they knew it did long ago, but that tar in your mom's lungs was making them rich), and now the best example is probably the "doubt" fossil fuel companies have spread about anthropogenic climate change.

Now that is some dark epistemology! And with Internet and all the other fear-buttons being pushed, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that all of Searle's dark epistemologies are a way of Dumbing Down the population, but as if this process was being done, to use a postmodern metaphor, "on steroids." If so, by which agency? Rogue gummint forces? Corporations? Ourselves? All of the above plus more? Do we need to go back and read Jung now? Is Trump a continuation of some Top Secret CIA mind control plan that began with Herman Cain's run four years ago? Are we hopelessly mired in a funhouse mirror-reality inside a Simulated Universe run by the Nine Unknown Men, who foisted The Matrix on us to throw us off the track while they keep us from realizing we're all only brains in a vat, run by the Illuminati? Or am I seriously lacking sleep from my bronchitis?

Grade: A-
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Chris Lehman at In These Times, March 1, 2016:

Comment: This seems almost the essay form of the Twitter artist @hilzoy/ProfB, but with more bile and far less empathy. The GOP made their bed, now we're all forced to lie in It. We get the requisite quote from It Can't Happen Here. We've had decades of antipolitics and bigotry from the GOP, but there's no time for schadenfreude because if Trump gets in we're all fucked, etc.

Lehman cites NeoCon Robert Kagan, who calls Trump a "Frankenstein monster."

Yes, a monster that YOU helped build, you brain-truster for war criminals.

David Brooks was with the NeoCons and now we're supposed to pretend we can't look at his old articles and call him out as the profoundly overrated, lightweight hypocritical blowhard he is. Brooks says Trump is "a cancer." Yes, and you are a gallon of dioxin poured into the local brooks, Brooks.

Ross Douthat of the NYT, another complete zero of a thinker, in my opinion: Trump is Obama's fault. He should have literally mailed that one in.

Mitch McConnell, who Lehman calls a "procedural nhilist," which I find apt and yet somehow too kind, says the GOP will drop Trump "like a hot rock" if he gets the nomination. I don't, and never have, believed this turtle-man. Not for one second. He's as fascist as Trump, but he's the old-fashioned kind: he keeps it to himself and his friends. When there's no mics around. As a matter of fact, I consider McConnell a traitor to the US, because, with no actual principle invoked, said as soon as Obama got elected, he and his beige fascist Do-Nothing Nihilist Republicans will oppose Obama on everything. If Obama says the sky is blue, they say, no, we say it's red. It's better if we don't even listen, much less talk. There is no democracy, no fixing the infrastructure, no exchange of ideas. The Republicans have no ideas. This traitor seemed proud to announce his only purpose was to make Obama a "one-term President." I guess: fuck the constituents who didn't bankroll your run for Senate. And forget about moving the country forward in any way. No thinking, no need to even show up. Vote symbolically to repeal Obamacare SIXTY TIMES.

Oh, McConnell would love Trump in office. You Kentuckians have been had.
On the House side, John Boehner wasn't dipshit enough for these do-nothing decent Nihilists.

My favorite line from Lehman: this Trump run is a "Theater-in-the-round production of Falling Down."

Lehman thinks Trump really is pro-choice and more in favor of single-payer health than Hillary, about which I'll address subsequently.

If it feels like I really went off on McConnell, I did. Guilty as charged, but what's a blog for? And besides, I'm pissy from being inside for five straight days with bronchitis. So there.

Grade: B+
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                           The reason for this image will become clear when you read 
                                the last article in this spiel.


Paul Krugman at the NYT, March 8, 2016:

Comment: Nice geometrical diagram, (Krugman calls his own diagram "silly") but overall a tad flippant. How bad would Trump be vs. not-Trump? Krugman thinks, "Who cares?" It has to do with likelihood of being elected. Trump is awful, but not much more awful than the others.

Krugman thinks, as I do, that Cruz is a total ass and paranoid conspiracy nutjob, and Krugman has fun with pretending he's been fomenting a conspiracy that Cruz has bit into: "Progressives should be cheering Trump on (which is why my secret committee has been orchestrating that conspiracy Cruz talks about.)"

Just an aside: how do you vote for a guy like Cruz, who, no one who has ever met him liked him? Are the evangelicals that fucking stupid? I could give a long, detailed and wonky answer, but instead I'll just say: yes. Yes, they are that fucking stupid. Take the most idiotic reading of the Bronze Age text and its sequel, factor in the "decades" of anti-politics and bigotry Lehman cited, next swirl in the dark epistemologies Searle talked about: bake for however long Pat Robertson tells you to*, and voila!: a brain is a terrible thing to waste, but millions of brains wasted this way gets you a Ted Cruz who's still in this thing.

Krugman is no Chris Hedges, I'll give either guy that! (Wha?)

I'm sure Nobelist and science fiction lover Krugman would have more to say about Trump, but this time he'd handing in something a tad light.

Grade: B-
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Evert Cilliers AKA Adam Ash, at Three Quarks Daily,  2 March, '16:

Comment: Either this guy is fucking with us, or...something else.

Clinton, W43 and Reagan were so bad, Trump would be much better, because he's smarter than the GOP "(not that this says much)" and the thing to note: Trump is bullshitting his way to the nomination. He and his minions sat up and took notice when an anti-immigrationist nobody named Dave Bratt startled everyone and beat Eric Cantor in Virginia.

For Cilliers, Obama is the best POTUS we've had since FDR.

The building of a Mexican wall: isn't meant to be taken seriously by anyone who can combine a few neurons into a thought.

What Trump's true believers like is that he has no respect for Republican leaders. Just recall what he said about McCain, Romney, and Jeb.

Cilliers seems to believe that we can get jobs back from China by imposing punitive tariffs, which goes against NeoLib doctrine. Maybe it's true, but China has bought up our debt. What about that? And how many jobs will this bring back, with rapid automation? I have my doubts. This seems more Mexican wall-ish to me than a real idea.

Cilliers - as is required - calls Trump a "narcissistic blowhard vulgarian" and a "walking wish fulfillment of every poor guy." The OG qualifies as a poor guy, but I have not for a second in my life wished for anything Trump has. This all feels a bit glib, doesn't it? Now for the conundrum:

"Don't forget, Trump is a socially liberal New Yorker, and not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative by any measure. That's why he's got nothing against Planned Parenthood, Social Security, abortion or any of the socially retro bugaboos so beloved by the troglodyte GOP."

Cilliers asserts Trump's from the elite, so if he wins, he'll surround himself with Bloomberg-like types. (Yea, maybe. But even so, that's not exactly exciting...)

If you read the article, someone in the comments section challenges Cilliers about Trump on the social issues like Planned Parenthood, abortion, etc, with links. Here's where it gets into our problem with dark epistemology. I read the articles the commenter cited. Then I looked to see if Trump has reversed his stance. He has. As of today, it appears Trump is all for Social Security, Planned Parenthood, a woman's right to choose (this one he's hedging on a bit, but that's the way it goes with politicians and abortion: if your constituency wants to end Roe, you must appear to be trying to stop it, all the while knowing what a disaster it would be), etc.

[An example from simple searches: Trump on Planned Parenthood last Oct:
It should be de-funded:

http://www.lifenews.com/2015/10/19/donald-trump-planned-parenthood-should-absolutely-be-de-funded/

but on March 1st: he's for Planned Parenthood:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/donald-trump-truth-teller-planned-parenthood-super-tuesday-220090  ]

Now: who do we believe? This reality TV blowhard billionaire who has burned the playbook of every politician by getting rid of any semblance of decency and decorum and protocol, assuring us his dick is plenty big, insulting people to their face on TV, etc?

This, to me, is some dark epistemology, mi amigos y amigas.

And even if Trump is socially liberal and he's playing the clueless to get votes, he's eerily too adept at it, even for a politician. And Cilliers has nothing to say about Trump with the Launch Codes or drone strikes/a private murder list that Obama currently has.

But: For fucking with my head so well in such a short piece, I have to give Evert Cilliers AKA Adam Ash:

Grade: A
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*The OG was informed four hours after this post that Pat Robertson has called for a Trump-Kasich ticket. It remains to be seen how much this harms Cruz, helps Trump, or gets particular members of the flock closer to Jeebus.

Okay, my mommy says it's time to stop playing and come in for din-din. If you like this stuff, I'll do another one manana.

                                           artist: Bob Campbell

Voting For Unistat President: Maybe I'll Stay Home

It's more like who to vote against. I was dumb enough, naive enough,  to think that, in 2008, I was finally voting for someone I'd actually like, who might at least somewhat represent my values. I had never before gone into the voting booth to vote for someone because I actually sorta liked them. In 2008 I did, I'm embarrassed to say. My guy won, and he's been a crushing disappointment.

So, in less than two weeks, our big national Dog and Pony Show crests (finally!), after $1,000,000,000 has been spent by plutocrats and kleptocrats and fascists of various persuasion, in hopes of a more favorable showing for their money...or property. Whatever.

Obama, who our version of the Taliban (shown on Fox "News") has been trying to convince its viewers that Obama hates white people, that he's a communist, a secret muslim who wants to take our guns and magically install sharia law, who's a crypto-nazi, like "Stalin without the bloodshed" (the actual words of one of our TV idiots on Fox "News") - I'm not making ANYTHING up here, folks who are reading this from outside Unistat - that Obama is all of the above (somehow) and an East Coast liberal elitist who thinks he's so great because he taught at Harvard Law. (On what planet can such a "reality" be possible?)

Yep: Obama, according to the loudest and dumbest in our media, is a latte-drinking radical muslim who is like Stalin and Hitler, and he hates white people. He wants to take away our guns, force everyone to ride bicycles because he's a radical environmentalist too! He wants Sharia Law and will make all our children eat organic vegetables because he thinks he's so smart.

Enough with the Idiot Rundown...

Instead, the reality: Obama's a tool of Wall Street. He filled his cabinet with banksters and the very people who presided over the looting of the country. Obama believes in deregulation, even though he'll pay lip service to regulation when he's talking to his pie-eyed liberal cohort. Torture has been effectively decriminalized under our Barackstar. I find this endlessly shameful. But not as much as the unmitigated shame of his continuance of Bush Administration policies of not only torture, but indefinite detention without trial,his prosecution and persecution of whistleblowers - under the Espionage Act! - which is more than all previous Presidents combined.

And Obama's El Drone Assassino Numero Uno. (Yea, like that doesn't invite what the CIA calls "blowback"! Noooooo.)

Oh, but he gave us healthcare!, you say. You mean he did everything he could to not have single-payer, the only sane system in the world. The insurance companies privately love him, but most of them back the other guy anyway.

Obama hasn't done much of anything, nor has he said anything, about the rise of poverty and decline of the middle class. He was stupid enough (that is, if he actually wanted to be FDR, which I now no longer believe) to try to reach compromise with a Republican Congress that is so far right-wing that they openly told the American public that their number one goal is to make Obama a one-term President...and this was within a week of his election! The country was heading into a Depression like 1930, people were suffering, they were afraid, and these criminal Republicans didn't care: the billionaire fascists that elected them didn't care. But I guess enough people watched the corporate TV news enough to make it all seem legit.

[Am I ranting enough?]

                                                 Danny Schecter, one of my guys

So I read 200 articles by thinkers I admire, who more or less share my values, trying to triangulate, to figure out how or what to do in this upcoming election. Danny Schecter says this election starkly illuminates the overwhelming presence of the one-percenters; we really don't have anyone to vote for. Green Party candidate Jill Stein was arrested for protesting that she wasn't allowed into the Presidential Debates, which are so obviously FIXED, and yet no one in the corporate media will admit that, much less make it a real issue.

More interestingly, Norman Pollack, who admits he'll stay home on election day, argues that at least Romney and Ryan are openly Neanderthal-ish (which I find unfair to the Neanderthals); Pollack is bristling with disgust over the polished bullshit that Obama represents, and at one point Pollack asks, how much worse can Romney/Ryan be? Maybe they'll crack down on same-sex marriage and make contraceptives harder to obtain, but at least they're relatively transparent.

Okay: my whole adult life I've had anarchist friends, educated to the nines, they'd read everything and they made variations on this argument Pollack makes in "America: On the Cusp of Fascism" (skip down below the plea for money). What they really mean is: things are bad and horrible people are in power. Vote for the worst person, so that things get so bad there will be no choice among the populace but to openly take to the streets and make real change, as history has taught us.

Not only have I not read history quite that way, I've always had to argue, "Yea, you have enough material comfort and safety it's easy for you to say. Who will do your killing for you? Are you willing to shoot it our with a hundred-thousand SWAT dudes?" And not to mention the brazen indifference to the increased suffering of the already underprivileged. But at least it works with your Theory of History...This sort of emotional blankness toward the already-suffering reminds me of my problem with the so-called "right" Libertarians. We have a values disconnect.

Sheesh.

                                    Daniel Ellsberg. Kids: if you don't know who he is, 
                                    do some research on his life! There is much wisdom 
                                     to be had in looking into the traverse of his story.

I guess Daniel Ellsberg (and Noam Chomsky) make about the most sense to me: yes, Obama is bad, but Romney/Ryan will be far worse. There really does seem to be a difference that guys like Schecter and Pollack don't point out: Romney and Ryan will be the same or worse as Obama on every thing I indicted Obama for above, but they seem to want to attack Iran, the economy would probably be worse, women's reproductive rights, health care, the safety net (what little there is of it) would all be worse under these assholes. And I really do think both of them are classic white rich-guy, wealth-worshipping-above-all 8x10 glossy assholes, with zero empathy for anyone else's suffering. Not to mention they're both astounding intellectual lightweights.

Oh and under Romney/Ryan: they'd be worse on climate change, green energy, and the environment in  general.

And last, but certainly not least: do we want Obama or Romney to choose who gets on the Supreme Court? (Actually this seems - maybe - like the best reason to vote Obama.)

But I'm still not sure. Ellsberg makes maybe the best case I've seen. And yet I'm still not convinced. In fact, the action of vengeance (which I think Obama knows a lot about; I'm not a big fan of Saletan, but he makes an interesting point here, methinks) is something that might down Obama nonetheless.

In 2008, I didn't expect much of him. Bush/Cheney had done almost irreparable harm to the economy. But I did think one egregious injustice - marijuana prohibition - could be effectively dealt with. And Obama said pot was very low priority. But for whatever reason, he's gone back on his promise to not fight the war on pot. And for that, I may withhold my vote. Because I'm vengeful enough, I guess. I know my state - California - is going for Obama. Withholding my vote for him would be symbolic, it would mean something on some other level (possibly even less significant, if you can imagine some quark-sized entity).

But then I remain haunted with complicity because I did a "protest" vote for Nader in 2000, possibly helping in the argument that allowed W. to steal the damned thing; I was assuming Gore, his evil among the Two Lessers, would win...

                                   2012 Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who's my 
                                   idea of a sane Republican, but because that party
                                   has apparently outlawed sanity, he jumped parties.
                                    I believe him when he talks with disdain about both
                                       Obama and Romney.

David Sirota has a very interesting idea that the state of Colorado and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson make a "perfect storm" for defeating Obama, and it's because there are enough cannabis-toking civil libertarians who have HAD IT with this shit. I know I have. And perhaps "vengeance" is too strong a word for a peacenik like myself. Let us call it spite.

We shall see if Gov. Johnson siphons off enough angry stoners' votes in Colorado to change history and petard-hoist Obama. Hey Barack: you think you can get away with being one of the biggest hypocrites in history? We might have a say. (I'm suddenly feeling like I might show up and write in "Robert Anton Wilson.")

Meanwhile, I will make a prediction about the US election that I feel is 100% accurate: rich people will win.

                                               Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate
                                               In a halfway sane world, she'd be 
                                                 electable. She's my choice, stands
                                                     no chance.

October 9, 1975: Actualism in Action!

On this date in 1975, "Dr. Alphabet's Poetry City Marathon" took place. Actualist Dave Morice "composed a poem of paper taped around a city block, sideshows were performed by the Ducksbreath Mystery Theater & the Blake Street Hawkeyes..."

I hadn't known anything about the poetry movement of Actualism until I read about it in my friend Jack Foley's 1284 page (in 2 large vols) Visions and Affiliations, an immense chronicle of West Coast poetry and art (mostly poetry) from 1940 to 2005. The quote in the first paragraph above is from p.457 of Vol I. Foley's books are staggeringly compendious; nothing like this has ever been done regarding West Coast poetry from 1940, and very likely never will be done again. If you want to know about the history of California poetry from the second half of the 20th century until...recently, this is The Real Deal. His erudite yet delightfully readable cover-to-cover to cover-to-cover chronicle of the poetry scene in California is subtitled "A California Literary Time Line: Poets and Poetry." For me, it's been a veritable education. One looks at these two volumes and, after saying "Wow," "Just...wow!," one wonders how anyone could have accomplished such a feat, and I imagine I'd've needed roughly 17 million 3x5 note cards...

So back to Actualism. (For the goods, see Vol 1 of Visions and Affiliations, pp.452-458) It appears to be a sort of melange of Dada, Groucho Marxism, and street theater. It started around April of 1970, and held annual conventions that were free, although after a while they charged 50 cents per day. They were "annual" but no one is sure how many were held. It was centered in Berkeley and San Francisco...and a few other places. It appears to have begun in Iowa City, but I guess that's another story.

One of the chief Actualists was Darrel Gray, who wrote in an essay "What Is Actualism?":

"I want to emphasize that Actualism is not an aesthetic 'movement' in the usual sense of the word. It owes nothing to literary history that it could not find elsewhere, least of all aesthetic theory or literary criticism...Actualists are serious about their art...But most of them would agree with what Nietzsche said on the matter: 'Maturity is a return to the seriousness of the child at play.'"
-pp.21-22 of Gray's Essays and Dissolutions. Found in Foley, p.455, op.cit

                                         Vol 2 of "Vis-Aff" by Jack Foley, aided and abetted by Adelle Foley
                                                                          Quite a work! 

Here's one guy who was part of Actualism that you may know: Andrei Codrescu. Actualists had often urged a "calculated naivete," but Codrescu wrote:

                                     ...Revolution. The word is like a revolver on a 
                                      sunlit window sill.
                                      It is one of the few words that sets
                                      my heart on fire. Girl also sets my heart on fire.
                                      Girl & Revolution. Revolution & Girl.
                                      I am twelve years old and I intend to stay that way.
                                     -"Sunday Sermon," Codrescu, Selected Poems


At (probably?) the first Actualist convention the price of admission was "spontaneity." Instead of chairs lined up in perfect little rows, you came in and found all the chairs heaped in a large pile in the middle of the stage. You could visit the Actualist Museum, which featured a jar of peanut butter, and the Olfactory Factory, which was jars of mysterious odors. If you won the door prize, you were awarded an actual door.

One Actualist, Joyce Holland, started her own Actualist poetry magazine, called Matchbook. You could subscribe, but you might have trouble receiving your copy. You see, Matchbook was actually printed on a matchbook with tiny pages stapled to the front cover. The post office made her wrap the issue in aluminum foil. And it seemed every poet in America was an Actualist. Matchbook was the first magazine to feature one-word poems. In another Actualist magazine, Life of Crime, in the "Volume: Actualism / Number: Shmactualism," the mysterious Holland's birthday is given as April Eighth, because that's the first day of the year, if you decide to alphabetize month/day.

Many Actualist readings/theater were held, but if for some reason you were deemed to be using too much time, you got the hook, just like an old vaudeville act. Indeed, Actualist "writing events" appeared on the old TV shows Tomorrow (with Tom Snyder) and The Gong Show.


By the end of the 1970s the disparate bands of Actualists realized they had some disagreements, and the movement splintered into "punks" and far more serious L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

Foley doesn't link the Actualists to the Discordian Society or the Church of the Subgenius, but they all seem of a piece to me: brilliant, irreverent, anarchist humor and creativity, a branch of political satire and dissent, a marginal space for a certain type of artistic weirdo. In other words, something of the best in the American character.

In closing, I'd like to quote Actualist Joyce Holland:

                                     Wex fendible whask
                                     optera caffing, thatora!


                                    Neppcor-inco fendision
                                                   ubble snop!

There Is No "Scientific Method"

Or at least that's what the anarchist academic epistemologist/ontologist Paul Feyerabend argued, in his classic Against Method, which first arrived in 1975 and was amended significantly over the next two editions, the third coming out in 1993, a year before Feyerabend died of a brain tumor at age 68. There exists a 4th edition as of 2010, but I have not perused it yet and so will stifle the urge to comment on it.

                                  The pugnacious Feyerabend, ready to spar intellectually with all-comers.

He was officially a Professor at Berkeley from 1958 to 1989, when he left Unistat with a woman who'd seen him give a talk; both had been rattled by the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and it was time to leave.

A brief bracketed tangent on sources and "facts":
[The seemingly requisite Wiki article (I include links to Wikipedia because, while hit and miss, the entries are sometimes detailed and quite fine, and, if not, they at least give a few stats and links.) is here.]

[The always top-notch Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, should you choose to accept reading it, is here. If you happen to read Wiki and/or Stanford or some other linked source and something is at odds with what I say in the blog, so much the better, as one of my aims is to impart some learned cognitive dissonance and spur you to your own exertions. That's what I want from my reading; I will assume my Ideal Reader as being somewhat akin to myself. - the OG]

Among a handful of books (less than 15 but more than 7) that I regularly delve into that are about the sociology of knowledge, Feyerabend's Against Method is one. What a bold and entertaining intellectual!

                            Imre Lakatos, Hungarian Popperian whose sense of humor Feyerabend greatly appreciated

It was supposed to be called For and Against Method, a collaborative work with his equally brilliant and dear friend Imre Lakatos (say "LAK-uh-tosh"), who was a disciple of Sir Karl Raimund Popper, and had developed Popper's ideas about rationality in science in novel ways. Feyerabend says that Lakatos told him, "You have such strange ideas. Why don't you write them down?," and Feyerabend suggested they pit each other's ideas about the scientific method (which Paul thought was a fiction) against one another in a book, possibly as an exchange of letters. But Imre died in 1974, shortly before the first edition of Paul's writings on the topic came out.

Basically: Feyerabend said that, contrary to secondary school stories, in fact scientists have tinkered and bumbled and stumbled and used innumerable quirky methods in order to make their breakthroughs. And after tinkering enough, happy accidents occur. The Francis Bacon story about empiricism just doesn't really fly. Science as an endeavor is far messier than the textbooks make it out. Are there many scientists who themselves buy into the mythos of "the scientific method" and try to work along those lines? Yes, there are: but the results seem pretty sketchy. At best the narrative of "the" method cashes out at a lot less than you'd think. And different sciences have different approaches. And it's far, far, far more of a social endeavor than ever. And the sophisticated gadgetry and measuring devices increasingly lead to computer modeling and statistical analysis. And...well, you get the picture.

For enthusiasts of the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and maverick anarchistic ideas in philosophy, I consider Against Method a must-read, and I'll try to highlight a few reasons why...

Oh, but first: I wrote on David Kaiser's recent book How The Hippies Saved Physics here. And Kaiser's cogent ideas about the structural reasons for physicists' unemployment in the 1970s should hold sway, but I would like to point out that Feyerabend was one powerful thinker around Berkeley throughout this period, and he had some ideas that may have gotten into the air and then the minds of the Berkeley hippie physicists. In his 1987 preface to the 3rd edition of Against Method, he says:

"None of the ideas that underlie my argument is new. My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of critical rationalism. Lakatos was, after Kuhn, one of the few thinkers who noticed the discrepancy and tried to eliminate it by means of a complex and very interesting theory of rationality. I don't think he has succeeded in this. But the attempt was worth the effort; it has led to interesting results in the history of science and to new insights into the limits of reason."

Feyerabend was always against the "shut up and do your math" mantra with which physicists were inculcated during and after WWII in Unistat. (He also became friends with David Bohm, who influenced his thinking on quantum mechanics. Bohm also influenced the Berkeley hippie physicists.)
-----------------------------------------
Feyerabend noted that Thomas Kuhn had become duly famous and influential, but was preceded by John Stuart Mill and Niels Bohr in his line of thought. For Mill, see the passage on p.31 of the 3rd ed; Feyerabend quotes from Mill's Autobiography and it reads like proto-Kuhn...from a book published in 1873!
----------------------------------------
He does something I like a lot, a throwback: he includes an "Analytical Index" at he beginning of his book, which summarizes the basic argument in every chapter. I've seen this in many olde pre-20th century books and always found this rhetorical flourish charming. For Chapter 3, we read this statement, which is one the first hooks he got into me:

"There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory. Nor is political interference rejected. It may be needed to overcome the chauvinism of science that resists alternatives to the status quo." And then he elaborates in the chapter. This seems like a world turned upside down to many of us in Unistat in 2011: we would rather political ideas stay out of science, as the State-Military-Industrial-Corporate-Entertainment Complex seems to be doing us in, slowly.

But Feyerabend has, ultimately, a longue duree in mind. He agrees in the separation of Church (in this he considers not only the Churches, but rationalists, secular humanists and Marxist ideologies as "religious" and interfering!) and State, but he also - and this blew me away when I first encountered it - thinks "democratic societies must be protected from science." Dig this epistemological wildness and weirdness:

"This does not mean scientists cannot profit from a philosophical education and that humanity has not and never will profit from the sciences. However, the profits should not be imposed; they should be examined and freely accepted by the parties of the exchange. In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subject to public control [NB: recent concerns over nanoparticles, not to mention animal testing and those little things called "nuclear weapons" - the OG], there must be a separation between state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not the one and only road to truth and reality. There is nothing in the nature of science that excludes such institutional arrangements or shows that they are liable to lead to disaster."

Oh wow! I've already gone on too long, but you must read him to understand where he's coming from here, especially with that bombshell of a statement of "one view among many." To quote Mr. X from the movie JFK, "You may think you know what's going on..." (Oh wait: wasn't that Noah Cross in Chinatown?)
---------------------------------------------------------
Feyerabend, who grew up in Nazi-controlled Vienna and fought for the Germans in WWII, wrote a surpassingly readable autobiography just before he died. Even though it's written by a philosopher of science, it's the sort of under-300 page book that any intelligent person can read for fun, and contains frank passages on his very active sex life (even though he was shot during the war, the bullet lodging near his spine, leaving him impotent for the rest of his life...he married four times and had many affairs!) and lurid anecdotes about Popper, Lakatos, and even the eminent philosophy professor John Searle, a longtime colleague at Berkeley. It's title is Killing Time, and is a play on Feyerabend's name, which in German means "work-free time" or "after work."
---------------------------------------------------------
Finally, Paul was much-misunderstood - after reading his autobiography I'm not sure if he understood himself, emotionally, all that well - and he fed into this by his frequent changes of mind (any intelligent being "flip-flops" when they encounter new knowledge; it's part of a survival mechanism, something the Republican Party in Unistat seems to know NOTHING about), and Paul liked to say provocative things. But some seem to deliberately misread him. Here's an article from the National Catholic Register that seeks to defend Pope "Rats" Ratzinger in his "science ain't everything" screed of not long ago. Yes, "Rats" and Paul were both concerned about science run amok, but Feyerabend would vehemently distance himself from such an Authoritarian schmuck as the mitered infallible Pope-man, He who wears a dress and speaks on behalf of Gee Oh Dee. Oh, well...
---------------------------------------------------
While I don't agree with Feyerabend on everything - far from it - he was, to me, an overwhelmingly interesting thinker and personality. Sombunall readers of Robert Anton Wilson's book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science might find they generate an abundance of dialectical sparks when they rub that book against Against Method. Just sayin'.