Curiosity Over Pride (FYI: To comment, send an e-mail to scifidink@gmail.com)

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The Home Depot Manifold and Various Nietzsche Quotes

So I had to run to Home Depot last for a thermocouple. In past years the place was always bustling with activity, even late on a "school night". But it was a ghost town yesterday. No carts filled with flowers or people arguing over paint chips. My initial reaction was one of mourning. Which makes sense since what was once "alive" had passed. But then I remembered that this is what I've been snarling at for years.....and that I should be happy that wasteful consumption is finally coming to an end. You can't win along all the manifolds.

I can't quickly find the Nietzsche quote about why women shouldn't vote...something about once they have a taste of power they'll have their heels on men's throats. So Deb, why no posting yet? ;)

And the classic "Character is Destiny". Yoyomo, religion isn't the main influence of character. Probably not even in the top twenty factors unless a kid grows up in an extremely religious community. Sigh, how is it that the alpha-atheist has become the defender of some silly sky-man people? I guess its like my great-great-grandmother (nee Meyer) used to say....wait, I have no idea what she used to say. Apparently ancestry isn't destiny either.

19 comments:

Debra said...

Dink, I haven't figured out how to post yet.
What am I supposed to do ?
Wait, I have to go onto the Google account, right, and check out your mails...
This is complicated...

Debra said...

HA ! I found it !
Hey you guys, I linked to Cotton's article about Web socialism, and found it very very interesting.
I have been posting in my "forum" in France, in this kind of collective experience since December 2007, and this is really utopia.
PLUS... we have managed to physically get together, and in my book, this is very very important, because VIRTUAL activities, and sharing, etc etc tend to scotomize our physical bodies, and in my book this is NOT GOOD. Not good for us, but also not good for mother nature on whom we ALL depend.
Religion or religiosity is very important, dink. I keep harping on the fact that we collectively desire someone to be all powerful to protect us when we feel small, vulnerable, etc, and this is the "imaginary" (Lacan, SS) aspect of religion. It is unescapable. Inevitable. And it makes us do weird, irrational things...
As for Home Depot, it has been my brother's haunt for years now.
Last summer, the place made me feel like really uneasy.
All that STUFF.
You know, the word "stuff" is really strange. I should do an etymology check on it. It is like an aggregate word, it refers to NO INDIVIDUAL objects. It refers to MAGMA.
I don't like living in a magma world. I like living in a world with individual, recognizable objects.
And one of the creepy things about Home Depot is that you can find really valuable objects sitting right next to objects that are worth diddly shit.
That offends my sense of propriety, and discrimination. (By the way, discrimination means the capacity to sense a difference between articles... how appropriate that is, my friends...)
That's all for now until I can dig out and translate that article on Vaucanson that I was singing about over there on Hell's blog. (Or on this one, I can't remember any more.)

yoyomo said...

Let me see if I can explain this to you in squirrel language:

*There are three walnut shells:
(A) under this shell are the Jews who take the Tanakh and the Talmud literally and these Jews see nothing wrong with harming (even killing) a Gentile unless it causes harmful blow-back to the Jewish people

(B) under this shell are secular Jews who don't believe in the Tanakh & Talmud but agree with the notion of Jews being privlidged to one degree or other; depending on where they fall on the spectrum they can be considered Jewish-supremacists, zionist, or Judeo-Nazis; many of the Israel lobby groups are hiding somewhere under this shell

(C) under this shell are non-literalist religious Jews and non-supremacist secular ones; some of them support Israel for emotional reasons but can't defend the way it was established or the way it behaves on either ethical or legal grounds so they insistently avoid examining or discussing it (like Thai changing the subject rather than attack my points as false [which he knows he can't]). Also under this shell are the same two types of Jews but who don't support Israel (like Rabbi Elmer Berger and Norman Finkelstein) or do support it but not as a zionist state (Prof. Israel Shahak) and it is from these Jews that I draw most of my information and inspiration, chirp-chirp (or whatever sound squirrels make)

PS: If you're really that concerned, spend a little less time on sci-fi fantasies and look through some of the links I made for Thai & SS. If you're really willing to take the time, let me know and I'll compile them for you in one place.

*these three groupings don't include small splinter groups like Naturi Karta which opposes oppression of non-Jews on religious grounds and Karite Jews who accept the Torah but reject the talmud and rabbinical infallibility in interpretation; they believe each Karite should have the right to come to his on conclusions.

SS said...

Dink,

Are you sure that was Nietszche? It doesn't sound like him. He was not anti-feminist and hardly believed that anyone should vote.

Thanks for getting up a new post, minds need to refocus periodically.

Please everyone be polite to each other.

SS

yoyomo said...

If you only have ten min, see this video*

*One of my profs in college was in WW2 and he said the same thing, there was no such thing as a mass resistance (10% is being overly generous)

yoyomo said...

SS,
Are you referring to anything specific, candor can be so refreshing even if occassionally bracing

Debra said...

SS, are you perchance being a tad SKITTISH here ?
I hadn't noticed anybody being rude or insulting on this blog...
One of the really evil disadvantages of the "liberal" mindset is autocensorship, and people running around on tiptoe to avoid hurting feelings IN ANTICIPATION of what will offend others.
This kind of mindset creates a Casper Milktoast society, and politically correct euphemisms everywhere, until we arrive at little oxymorons like "negative growth".
Not good for healthy thinking and feeling.

Dink said...

Yoyomo,

I just have a second here so I haven't look at the video yet, but I swear I actually have looked at most of your links.

I just have to say that 1) you know exponentially more about Judaic texts and the history of Isreal than any person of Jewish heritage than I've ever met, which leads me to 2) under your walnut example the Jewish population would be split into 33% each, no? Maybe if you had a tiny shell for 1% of the population that even knew of the existance of these texts and a giant shell for the 99% of the population that just goes to temple twice a year for an hour to make their moms happy it would be a more accurate representation.

Also, you're an encyclopedia on the history of human misdeeds (Burkina Faso??). So how many practicing Jews are there on the planet right now? Fewer than the number of Mormons? I mean, as an atheist looking out at the vast sea of religious zealots on the planet right now, the zionists would seem to be the least of our problems right now.

(Ah,boy, you're really going to unleash on me now aren't you? ;) )

SS,

I could be wrong about the "heels on throats" quote, but I would be sad because I find it hysterically funny.

Also, could you describe to Deb how to post? I've described it to her via e-mail, but I'm thinking the screens may look different for me since I'm technically the admin instead of a normal author.

Grazie

yoyomo said...

Debra,
"Yoyo, I am mystified in the face of your impatience with Thai."

I feel the same impatience with Thai that I might with a spoiled only child whose parents spent entirely too much time praising and telling him how much brighter than other children he was. I can imagine he was an absolutely adorable and precocious kid at 6-7 years old but 40 years on, not so much.

"Is Thai DELIBERATELY sidestepping your points ?"

That is the only logical conclusion, he only responds to the items that he thinks he can score points on and studiously ignores the others. If pressed, he will start pulling the grass out of left field and from under the bleachers and anywhere else handy and throw it up in the air and then tell life is fractal and complex and everything is the same or different depending which prism you look at it through. His frantic hypercompetativeness makes me think he either was captian of his high school debate team and he wants the whole world to know it OR he didn't make captian and he's continuously reliving that lost battle determined not to repeat it. If he's not exasperating me with his evasiveness, he's usually going a few rounds with Marcus although they seem to have made up of late. His argumentation style strikes me as skillfully disingenuous; score your points even if you have to run out-of-bounds to do it.

"Why are we spending SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY on this question..."

see next comment, this one is getting long

SS said...

@ Dink

If Deb can't figure it out maybe you and I could undertake to post it for her? All she would have to do is e-mail it to us.

SS

Debra said...

That's what my HA was about. I have already figured it out.
But I'm playing for 1 1/2 hours in a concert on Saturday night (Chopin, Grieg, Debussy) on the piano, and I will have to DOCUMENT myself a little bit and spend MUCHO more time if I'm going to post here. Although I'm toying with the idea of posting on the farmer's markets here, just so you guys can water your mouths over how much you're missing in the mother country where people SERIOUSLY entertain the idea of getting all those boring vitamins by popping (vitamin) pills..., and where the only fruit you see in those organic grocery stores is mysteriously already cut up into little pieces so that you will not KNOW that it really came from a real live plant.
I could do a whole blog on FOOD. Have to enjoy before the ship goes down, right ? Carpe diem, for the lit majors out there, of whom there are not many...

Dink said...

Yoyomo,
Okay, let's try this. Make a specific list of say 5 or so specific items that you feel Thai (or any of us) has not addressed.

Then we can address them without feeling that we're trying to hit a moving target (i.e. we'll have listed issues so the conversation will not stray as we are all prone to). You may not like the responses, but you will have responses. You must understand that I don't actually control AIPAC so all I can really do is say "I dislike that" and move on to other subjects.

SS,
If she e-mails me an essay I'll post it, but theoretically I could modify the text before posting it. And then she wouldn't be stepping on our throats to her full potential ;)

Debra,
"I'm toying with the idea of posting on the farmer's markets here"

YOU WOULDN'T DARE! At long last, have you no decency (or mercy)?

yoyomo said...

"Why are we spending SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY on this question..."

In my previous comment to Thai I touched on the increasing involvment of, and ruinous expense to, the US in its ME policy which is almost completely tailored for Isreal's benefit. Without Isreal the US would have no problems in the ME and no need for massive military bases and continuous war (whether overt or covert) since Reagan was elected. Contrast America's relations with the region in the 50's and what has been happening since LBJ made a deliberate shift in the US's posture from nueteral to strongly partisan. The 50's were a golden age for relations in the region and every country in the ME considered America a friend and military expenditures were minimal. Since LBJ it's been all steadily (and at an accelerating pace) worse. This path is not sustainable, these increasing military commitments will exhaust America's capacities.

You can't compare them to the commitments during the Cold War when 100's K of troops were stationed overseas in friendly countries which paid a large portion of (and in some cases, more than) the cost of those troops. Being stationed overseas was a positive learning experience for the young recruits and even if it wasn't at least they didn't come back home screwed in the head.

What we have now is more like the Viet Nam experience where being sent over is creating a generation of warped individuals who will create an intolerable drain on resources. Either social services are going to be slashed to the bone to free up the resources to care for these damaged soldiers or they will be abandoned because the rich will never pay more in taxes and the middle class is increasingly depleted, you're not going to get too much more from them.

America, as a country (and as opposed to the interests of TPTB), gets absolutely no benefit from this disasterously costly policy. On the contrary, it only reaps hatred and revenge that will last long into the future when its diminishing stature in the world would benefit from having more friends and allies; not creating more self-inflicted wounds and enemies. Then there is the public relations aspect.

Although it has always been a carefully cultivated image, the US has benefited enormously from its reputation as a fair-minded, law-abiding, leading member of the international community. By playing the role of Israel's sword and shield in the region the US has exposed its ugly imperial nature to the full light of day and this will make all of America endeavors overseas more expensive (and even worse) more violent. For the sake of Isreal the US is morphing into the Third Reich of the Third World. You can kill only so many million people before people start to notice the similarities.

Google "Paul Craig Roberts" and "Charlie Reese" or go to AntiWar.com and read their archived articles. These two are not leftist hippies; Roberts was Reagan's AsstSec of Treasury and Reese was a right-wing supporter of Israel until someone challenged him to back up his support with specific facts. As an investigative reporter for a major news paper in Florida he thought it would be a piece of cake for him to win the challenge but what he found out turned his world upside down. He became so anti-Israel that people started accusing him of having a Palestinian wife so he wrote an article titled "My Palestinian Wife" explaining how he came to change his views; google it along with his name, it's not long.

(continued...) the nuclear dimension

I'll get to you Dink, first I want to finish fleshing out my answer to Debra; patience please.

Thai said...

Ah the nature of saloons. :-)

Hope you are all well

yoyomo said...

(continued...) the nuclear dimension

After the Diaspora Jews and their sympathizers/mercenaries in the US/UK and France helped Israel steal the nuclear technology, materials and components to acquire a nuclear weapon in 1964 Israel became increasingly aggressive constantly trying to push its borders north into Syrian territory which provoked return fire. This was then presented as justification for seizing the Golan Heights in 67'. Although the western media tried to portray the 67' war as defensive all serious historians have concluded that it was a prepackaged plan waiting for an increase in tensions to be launched. Once it had a nuclear security blanket it felt it could attack who it wanted and steal as much more land as it could grab and that almost led to a nuclear 'incident' in the 73' war that went largely unpublicized and still is unknown to most people.

As Isreal was rapidly losing control of the occupied Sinai and had totally lost the Golan Heights (but the Syrians once they reached the border with Israel halted their advance and tried to fortify their positions rather than press their advantage) it threatened to use nuclear weapons against Egypt and Syria if the US did not immediately ship it all the weapons it said it needed to push back Egypt and Syria from taking back their own territories (see pages 4-11 of this document).

Henry Kissinger knew that the Soviet Union had a deterrence policy of responding to a nuclear attack on one of its clients with a nuclear counterstrike. To prevent the Soviets from considering that option Kissinger (being a good Hasbara Jew and all) inserted US nuclear forces into the region as a counter-weight; the Soviet Union would not be counterstriking against an Israeli nuclear attack, they would be involved in a nuclear exchange with the US and Kissy-boy did all this while Nixon was drunk and passed out in despondancy over the escalating Watergate scandal desperately hoping the Jewish media would somehow save him if he gave Israel everything it wanted.

We almost were engaged in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, not to save Israel from being invaded (but even if it were, it wasn't worth risking nuclear war for it), but to allow Israel to hold on to illegally occupied territory. The whole world saw what happened to Iraq when Saddam tried to hold on to Kuwait (which used to be part of Iraq before those kindly British do-gooders helpfully decided to partition it and leave Iraq as a virtually landlocked country).

Now if the prospect of being dragged into a nuclear war for some little Sparta wanna-be doesn't obsess you night and day you are the ultimate nihilist; nothing will ever ring your bell. That is the most immediate reason to spend all this time and energy worrying about this question and that is not even to touch upon international finance and Israel serving as HQ for certain elements of it, especially of the fugitive variety.

yoyomo said...

Dink,
I'll work on your points for tomorrow, I spent most of today looking for better links on the Kissinger episode but it seems they were either erased or the search logarithms are not very good at picking them up.

I had this same problem at the NYTimes site yesterday; I had the title, author and date of an article but the search engine refused to bring it up but they forgot to erase the letters to the editor regarding it. I know Thai will say these are all random incidents but in my considerable experience, certain critical items are very difficult to bring up or have been erased.

The most famous case I can think of right now is that of the 60min interview with Madalene Albright where she tells Leslie Stahl that the death of 500-600K Iraqi children under age5 was a price worth paying to maintain sanctions on Iraq. I saw it myself on TV when it originally aired but soon afterwards it became impossible to find or access it. If you should have a VHS copy of it and try to upload it to youtube, CBS will sue your ass off even though fair-use copyright law specifically allows it. In other words, even the courts can be made to see matters in the proper light if the issue is important enough to TPTB (shadow elite).

I promise I'll think seriously about your points before attempting a reply.

Debra said...

Wow, yoyo, I'm impressed with your mastery of this subject.
I have neither the time nor the energy to do it. (Terminal laziness, plus a desire to not spend ALL my time on the computer...)
What is TPTB short for ? I'm seeing it a lot.
Personally, I think that the Jewish religion as a potential positive force in the life of those who have been practicing it has been significantly harmed by two things : 1) confounding Jewish/Israeli identity in the melancolic, nihilistic "origin" of the Shoah (repetition of the melancolic identity established with the Babylonic exile) and 2) reducing the "symbolic" promise of "next year in Jerusalem" to a simple question of geography.
Very bad for Judaïsm, in my book...

yoyomo said...

Debra,

TPTB - The Powers That Be

TEOTWAWKI - The End Of The World As WE Know It

you'll see these contractions a lot in resourse depletion discussions

yoyomo said...

"In my previous comment to Thai I touched on the increasing involvment of, and ruinous expense to, the US in its ME policy..."

Here is that comment on one thread:

Thai,
As so often in the past you have deftly and subtly shifted away from the major focus of my statement to you by bringing up Baghdad(1960) and deigning to answer the minor point that you felt would help advance the heads-of-Jews-on-pikes imagery you wanted to embellish.

Let me address your basket-case point; OK, so what. If that is the case, then why not just get the hell out instead of increasing the US involvment from decade to decade? Eisenhower sent a few hundred marines to Lebanon for a few weeks to help avert unrest (and prevent even more extensive French intervention) but that was about it publicly. Clandestinely, Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA helped the Shah get back in but I don't know how much the prez was behind that. JFK, to my knowledge, didn't interfere in the region but since Johnson then Nixon and going forward the US has steadly increased its meddling and just by coincidence the region has gotten increasingly unstable but I guess it would be silly of me to draw any inferenses.

It is an amazingly expensive basket that the US now has to pour billions of dollars per WEEK in to (destablizing/dominating) it. For such a God-forsaken waste land, it's amazing its inhabitants can survive so much (unwanted) generosity. You constantly kvetch about keeping Granny alive too long but pissing away more than $100B/yr just on making 'friends' in the ME can't even get a piss chubb out of you. And let's not forget that everytime the voters of one of those basket cases vote for the wrong candidate, it is not long that the blood starts flowing courtesy of Uncle Sam (and sometimes France), even if care is taken to work through proxies. You may remember the Algerian (as well as the Nicaraguan) elections of the early 90's when the announcements were flying that victory for the wrong candidate could 'regretably' result in violence (by whom never specified). Hillery and Holebrook have been camped out of late in Lebanon offering friendly advice on who best to vote for.

Try telling me with a straight face that if there were safe havens (that the US couldn't hit) on America's borders from which saboteurs could launch regular raids that it wouldn't have a destabilizing effect on the country. Because countries in the 3W can't retaliate against their western tormentors the US can get away with exactly the same situation described in the previous sentence.

Finally, a quick retort to your heads-on-pikes; as the son of an Englishman, do you need to be reminded that in colonial America those accused of being sympathetic to the crown often were dragged to the town square where they were doused with molten tar and covered with feathers while the good townfolks gathered to watch in amusement as the 'traitor' flapped his limbs in agony? You're the doctor; tell me, what is the effect on human flesh of molten tar (~200C)?

Now let's turn the mirror toward those evermore so civilized Ashkenazi role models of yours:

*Said Filmmaker Woody Allen in a mocking article published on the New York Times' op-ed page: "I mean, fellas, are you kidding? Beatings of people by soldiers to make examples of them? Breaking the hands of men and women so they can't throw stones?"

#"We read with shame," wrote four Jewish intellectuals in a letter to the New York Times, "reports of HOUSE TO HOUSE beatings of hundreds of people, leading to broken bones and hospitalization of the AGED AND CHILDREN." (emphasis mine)

I have no problem acknowledging and addressing the points you bring up; why is it that you seem to get a case of the watery-runs whenever I present you with some delectable tidbit to nibble on?

June 2, 2009 3:03 PM

The hyper didn't carry over; they are:

(*) Link One

(#) Link Two

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