Aesthetic Materialism

  I don't think capitalism is evil.  I don't.  I think it's essentially neutral, or that there is no essence.  Because it's so decentralized and uncoordinated - not completely, but to some extent, capitalism is just people doing things.  Different people, all over the world, doing all kinds of different things, somewhat spontaneously, on their own - not completely, to some extent that's an illusion, but to some extent it's real.  It's sort of anarchic, not anarchic, anarchists would be very mad at me for saying that, and they're right - but chaotic, sprawling, huge, not chaotic either, because definite patterns emerge.  And some of those patterns aren't so good.  And then there definitely eventually is planning, because people start to see the patterns and plan for the patterns.  But there's no one person in control.  It's very difficult to control, it's very difficult even to categorize, to understand what is going on here - it's so ...

  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 - should 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 betwe...

  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...