Aesthetic Materialism

  I'm deep in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass.  Every time I take one of those tests that's where I find myself.  But I'm willing to work with the upper-left and the lower-right to defeat the upper-right.  Indeed, I believe in strengthening the bonds between people in all the quadrants besides the upper-right - increasing both empathy and organization.  So long as the rest of us remain atomized, the upper-right will win.

  When the Hartsburg Empire crumbled, the various ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups that had lived there all asserted their right to national self-determination, as was the fashion at the time.  The problem was that these "nations" massively overlapped, geographically, economically, and sometimes in the very same person, who might have, say, Slovenkian, Kirkosian, and Dragestani anscestors.  The result was the brutal, 31 year long Pekmeniy Civil War, followed by another, 8 year long war whose name is itself a matter of much controversy.  But by the end of this second conflict, the young Yvgeny Przenk, a rising star in the diplomatic corps, came up with a remarkable and unique solution, which managed to restore what was then presumed to be a temporary, fragile peace, but which has since proved surprisingly durable, in a way.   The Przenk Compromise was as follows: there would now be 108 sovereign nation-states, all of them with exactly the s...

   Lenin as Petit-Bourgeois Socialist   In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give 5 examples of proletarians: doctors, lawyers, poets, priests, and scientists - in that order.  Of course, they don't claim that these are the only kinds of proletarians - they're just the only ones specified.   It's interesting that, today, people tend to think that, in Marx's class analysis, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and so on are often thought of as "petit-bourgeois".  This is quite inaccurate.  (Perhaps a doctor who owns his own practice would be petit-bourgeois, but a doctor, who, let's say, works in a hospital - even if she is head of surgery - would be classified as proletarian.) So who are the petite bourgeoisie, then?  Of course, there's a section of the Communist Manifesto that concerns that, as well.  "In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating betwee...

  Woke: 1. v. past tense of wake. 2. adj. (inf., AAVE) alert, aware, vigilant. 3. n. disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism. 4. n. the legal theories that derive from this disbelief. Here is as brief a definition for that third definition of "woke" as I can muster: woke is disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism.  That would include (but not be limited to) disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination. I can understand why people find this confusing - for one thing, it contains a double-negative: disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination.  (And by the way, yes, double-negatives exist in English, and a double-negative doesn't always equal a positive .)  This is one more example of a double-negative that is not equivalent to a positive (so, disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination is not the same as belief in the ideal of discrimination). Wokeness can therefore be seen as a kind of di...

Ian MacKaye used to joke that there were two Ian MacKayes: (1) Ian MacKaye (rhymes with decay), a mostly media-invented symbol, who represented some pure, totalizing, moralistic force of the straightedge movement; and (2) Ian MacKaye (rhymes with guy), who was the real, fairly normal person. Similarly, sometimes I think that there are two entities: (1) Occam, the pure, simple, abstract being that emanated one of the fundamental rational principles of science, and (2) William of Ockham, the flesh-and-blood human being who historically lived in the 14th century and devised a system of theology that was, ironically enough, quite elaborate and complex.  But we needn't multiply entities beyond necessity. Why is the sky blue?  Why are good things good?  Why are bad things bad?  It's remarkable how "Because God wanted it that way" works as a catch-all answer for so many questions.  (Of course, so does "Because I said so.")  Does that mean that it's the simplest...

  The Lenin Maneuver Lenin was a brilliant strategist.  Anyone who wants to be a successful politician should study his example and the clever tactics he used.  For instance, I think Hillary Clinton is an example of a politician who might have been more successful had she learned a few things from his playbook.  (Steve Bannon, the Chief Executive of the Trump campaign in 2016, was unabashed about his being influenced by Lenin in political strategy.) One of these many tactics is a particular tactic that Lenin used so often and so effectively that I think it ought to be called "the Lenin maneuver," although I don't mean to imply that he was the only politician, nor even the first to use it.  Lenin used it so successfully that, in my opinion, it was his defining characteristic. The Lenin maneuver is useful when one is competing against rivals for leadership within a political movement.  The Lenin maneuver is a two-part move, a move in two, seemingly opposite d...