7/31/11
Mencken was the disciple Nietzsche did not need
The President Should Preemptively Stop This Given Tea Party Intransigence
He should send Congress a simple sentence raising the limit and call for a vote.
Failing passage he should invoke the 14th Amendment.
A little thing I did on vampires thematically tuned to today's subtext
The Vampire Takeover that Failed - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "The drill for the vampires in this story involved a need for blood well beyond the sips that come from the ordinary neck clinch of fictional vampires. You know the scene. With the alleged liberation of women, it could be a he or a she vampire."
Global Online Privacy
The communities I am proposing are actually cybercommunities
Present metrosprawl with detached dwellings will not disappear overnight, but as alternatives emerge it will be less and less attractive.
I see no way that a hurricane could harm the community I am thinking of. It would be low enough to the earth to give the wind little to bounce against. It would have the stability of a stadium. It would be self-sufficient with its own power generated on site. It would be a recycling dream.
This development means starting from scratch just as much as we started from scratch with the car. The minute computers arrived in the 1980s, they became the new automobiles. The communities I am proposing are actually cybercommunities, created because cyberspace both extends reach and obliterates distances.
Today's economy based on separated dwellings with numerous cars per household is unsustainable
Communities of the future will need to be car-free, concentrated developments that combine most of thea attributes we look for in a city.
These communities will need to contain up to 10,000 people in order to be economically viable. Most services and commercial establishments will be within walking distance. Many public spaces will have multiple uses.Cars will need to be used outside the perimeter of these communities. Today's economy based on separated dwellings with numerous cars per household is unsustainable, ecologically disastrous and a threat to public health.
20/20 hindsignt we allowed the fatal connection
The poll nobody dares to have
Making cars more efficient is a death warrant for the American economy
Some notes from our troubled past
Democratic U.S. Senate Primary 1970 - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "It's generally acknowledged that, following the National Council Triennial in December, 1969, the decline of mainline Protestantism in the United States continued apace and that attempts to renew the churches along lines Adam proposed had failed"
Global Online Privacy
Any huge cuts in programs will be up to the people in 2012
Debt-Ceiling Deal: The GOP Gets Its Way - The Daily Beast
The 2012 election and not the debt deal will determine the future
We will have a grand and glorious fight over whether to be reasonable or idiotic
Ultimately the goal posts will be moved a trifle one way or another
We will all have been royally entertained
President Obama actually does not care about winning in 2012
The GOP would like to believe Obama cares about winning
That he is being political by advocating that his people Tweet common sense to the GOP
In point of fact the President is so Zen that he really does not care if he wins or not
He is in it for the life whatever that turns out to be
When the President uses the word politics it is a disparaging term for playing games with what is reasonable and just
If what he thinks is reasonable today proves impossible tomorrow he changes course
The GOP will yell flip flop
He will brush them from his lapel
I still think the President will win this fight
But do not underestimate his enemy
These are genuinely true believer types of the sort Eric Hoffer wrote of in his classic treatment
History will adjudge them crazy and deluded win or lose
A foofnote on J. Edgar Hoover
I have little doubt that Hoover will go down in history as a meddlesome and ethically-deprived advocate of the worst part of the spectrum that still contains our deleterious and destructive belief the Cold War. We have not gotten to the point that the Cold War itself can be seen as largely delusory, as a means of organizing a national paranoia and launching a military-industrial, big oil economy. As we now reap the whirlwind the pendulum will swing toward a more balanced and sober analysis and toward a more candid assessment of the dangers of men like Hoover in places of power.
Where Nietzsche and Mencken are both wrong
This a bald statement of Menckens's low regard for the mass of people.
How could Nietzsche the scourge of democracy become its advocate?
Mencken in his introduction to his translation of The Antichrist, says of Nietzsche:
He was plainly a foe of democracy in all its forms, political, religious and epistemological, and what is worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly offensive.
There are two democracies. There is the mass, herd, common denominator image of a Kafkaesque aggregation of reified souls lost in anomie.
And there is the highly individualistic notion of democracy as a value lodged in the soul of all persons waiting to be ignted by deeds that affirm the universal value of each living being and the universal rights of all. This is a democracy that Nietzsche was not at pains to affirm.
Sunday morning and the GOP still leaves us in limbo
To the note below I wish to add the following.
If the President must speak to the nation and suggest a course, having met with a failure of Congress to overcome the petulant and unpatriotic actions of the House Republicans, he can wave the one page bill that simply raises the limit and play clips of all leaders saying they intend to raise the limit, and state as Commander in Chief that this is an immediate matter of national security. Pass the sucker now.
If they fail we have a list of traitorous Republicans for 2012 and we have the 14th Amendment. And we have a President vindicated in demanding that people elect legislators who will redeem the center and eschew the extremes.
Ontological values are values which, when willed, work to create progress.
The values Nietzsche might have arrived at, had he been able to complete his project of revaluing values, include democracy, tolerance and helpfulness. Non-idolatry is the root value which we can relate to Nietzsche's perspectivism. Most of the "values" Nietzsche actually espoused were virtues which, by definition, have no meaning unless they are linked to active values. (A killer can have courage.) This is the trap into which Aristotle also falls (Falstaff liberated him). It is the reason, in part, why the inherited global value system is woefully inadequate, both theoretically, and practically. Exist whether we will them or not. Ontological values are values which, when willed, work to create progress. They are core values.
That task of revaluation is ours. It is the work of this century. It is life and death work.
Short Form Content at Blogger: I believe that if Nietzsche had been able to complete his life work he would have agreed.
In his introduction to The Antichrist, H. L. Mencken (the translator) quotes Nietzsche:
"In me the Christianity of my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns _against_ Christianity. In me Christianity ... devours itself."
Ultimately Nietzsche liberates Christianity from creed and establishes it as a way of life which he claims had only one follower, Jesus.
What Nietzsche does not do is articulate the values of this way. Nietzsche skewers the existing values of Christianity (which he relates to resentment, weakness and a sheeplike mentality). But Nietzsche does not wrestle what values Jesus would put in their place. That task is ours. It is the work of this century. It is community work. It is a matter of life and death for the world.
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