The below has been edited entirely by deletion, mostly by the removal of sections (e.g., on Free Silver) which are not relevant today and which seem unlikely to become relevant in the future.
[Note: If you think the below is irrelevant at this point in time, you should still check back in again every year or two.]
Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.The newspapers are largely subsidized, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into ["European" = terrible] conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.
The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it the establishment of an absolute despotism.
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.
While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we nevertheless regard these questions, important as they are, as secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of free institutions depend; and we ask all men to first help us to determine whether we are to have a republic to administer before we differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered, believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied and equal rights and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women of this country.
April 5, 2009 at 5:31 am
Just wanted to commend you on the great site John, I’ll stop by often.
April 6, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Paraphrasing VI Lenin on Upton Sinclair (after reading The Jungle), not bad, but you, like Comrade Iggy, lack theoretical understanding.
Here’s a smackdown for Trollblog: Popper vs Adorno. Both heavyweights (or near to it). Did Popper succeed in knocking out Adorno, and the conceptual marxism of the Frankfurt school, with a few positivistic jabs? If not, why? Be sure to substantiate your response with ample material from the text.
April 6, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Link 1
Link 2
April 6, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Adorno’s writing on music was so bad that nothing else he wrote could be any good. He has a habitual practice of picking things up by the wrong end.
I have no idea which kind of theory you mean, but theories take ten years to learn and a lifetime to unlearn, and all they do is make it possible for you to make counterintuitive mistakes instead of traditionalist, common-sensical mistakes. No payoff.
April 6, 2009 at 5:43 pm
You object to Adorno probably because he peremptorily dismissed all of your favorite jazzsters, rockers, or balladmongers. That’s actually one of his strong points. A bit of jazz will do (even a Dylan hymn once in a great while), but let’s not forget where jass starts: mainly Nawlins’ bordellos, and then percolates up to NY, chicago, etc. Duke Ellington & co, however talented, played for mobsters, well-to-do party boys, show-biz types, etc.
Adorno was classically trained, btw, and realized that nearly all jass harmony had already been done. The improv. and rhythms of jass were a bit unique–according to TA, jazz embodies the mechanical rhythm of modern capitalism, as was rock, and all about pop-hedonism, and consumer thrills, instead of authenticity. (For that matter, Adorno may have disapproved of Duke E, Louis Armstrong, be-bop, but he laughed outloud at the Beatless and the rest).
Chopin may not have had the riddum of jazz, but was playing jass harmony and chromaticism (even somewhat beyond) in what 1840s. Ludwig van himself does not lack a chromatic sophistication. It’s just not suited to the par-tay.
Theory as in some knowledge of, say, Kant, Hegel, Marx. Karl Popper hisself had read the germans, generally disapproving–not always (Popper actually agrees to Kantian subjectivity to a certain degree, though he waffles a bit).
April 6, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I know plenty about Adorno on music. What he said about Mozart was crap. What he said about Bartok was crap. His way of looking at music was just silly, treating it like some kind of world-historical force. Literature too.
Cut the crap over Unfogged? About a third of your comments over there are fine. Get a pseud, post your good comments, and get rid of the moron jive talk.
Your posts over here are usually fine, but I get tired of the other crap.
April 6, 2009 at 10:14 pm
What did he say about Bartok? A populist or something–which he was. Bartok’s music often sounds a bit arbitrary, as well.
Some of Bartok’s music works (like that of that wild and mostly unknown opera, Bluebeard), but he and his pal Kodaly were akin to 60s folkies in terms of praising about anything from rural people (though Bela rather more skilled musically). That said, I am not always in agreement with Adorno–like his pal Schoenberg, he considered tonality as kaput, a rather difficult approach. I’d reach for my Bartok/Kodaly, Debussy or Stan Kenton CDs sooner than Schoenberg/Berg school.
I tried serious, or semi-serious at the unfogged malt shoppe. Didn’t make it past the censors. So decided to stick with derailment, 24/7. Most of the unf’ed frat boys, even McManus the part-time anarchist, have little to say of value anyways; same for the goils (thought at least Becks can spin a bit of Dotty Parker type jive, unlike, ___________).
April 6, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Just stay away then. I don’t share your opinion, and have absolutely no objection to just sitting and chatting about bullshit over there.
Bartok started off well, according to Adorno, but backslid away from atonality. Adorno treated musical and literary tendencies as political causes.
April 6, 2009 at 10:28 pm
some kind of world-historical force.
That’s right. The Hegelian Geist not exactly silly, however (though TA’s not a complete Hegelian). What is Beethoven’s Eroica if not a realization of Geist? LVB’s music wasn’t made for just cheap thrills, saloons, or a soundtrack to a melodrama; at same time LVB wasn’t reproducing the parlor music of Mozart. Instead of LVB, we have Bobby Dylans, Beatles, britney, rap, bland smooth jazz, etc
April 6, 2009 at 10:39 pm
The Hegelian Geist does not survive a positivist or analytic analysis, though.
Gellner has written a Hegelian justification of his kind of positivism, though (I forget exactly what he calls himself). Basically, his philosophy can’t be justified on its own terms, but from a big-picture, sociohistorical, progressive, Weltgeist point of view, it’s the best.
In all of these arguments, people keep trying to kick me back to Hamilton Burger philosophy (Continental philosophy), but I’m a pragmatist.
April 6, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Gellner was aligned with the Popperians for some time; I doubt he’s a historicist of the Hegelian sort (and the fiendish Russell wrote a preface to his book criticizing the ord-language types). The excerpts from Plough, etc. look fairly anti-communist, Anti-Hegelian, etc. I doubt the comrades approve of Gellner (he also was critical of Said, one of the PoMo’s heroes).
April 7, 2009 at 12:42 am
He used the term “Hegelian” tongue in cheek. But he did say that his ultimate justification of his philosophy was more or less holistic or cultural, and not internal to his philosophy.
April 7, 2009 at 2:35 pm
The Hegelian Geist does not survive a positivist or analytic analysis, though.
That’s the topic at hand, isn’t it? Historical continuity–at least in terms of human history– seems to suggest something like hegelian process, with Ideas as motivating factors, and something like dialectic (yet the Hegelian jargon, not to say inconsistencies a problem: the Science of Logic is a bit more obtuse than Aristotle or propositional logic).
Popper claims that process is BS, more or less and suggests that history concerns individuals, not ideology or some vague world spirit; events are not really connected, dialectical thinking and class struggle are illusory etc. Obviously something was at stake with the Popper-Adorno spat.
Ideologies do seem to function to some degree, however though I don’t believe Hegel’s term logic captures the ideology battles, except in a vague sense–we might note something like one historical Force (a Being of some type) negated–say via warfare–and that results in a synthesis of some type, or at least alterations, but that’s hardly predictable: the socio-historical process being more akin to a polylectic, or factionalism, of some sort, which includes history, language, economic, technological (ie materiel), and nationalist factors. Language barriers themselves more significant historical factor than most yokels realize: mutter a few words of french or even spanglish around the usual ‘Merican, watch his eyes roll, and one begins to understand that the socio-linguists were not completely mistaken.
Reality’s more of a plurality than the germans–or their greek masters–realized, though I am not suggesting we automatically reject Hegel’s insistence on totality, and universalization (though Hegel’s more Aristotelian, than platonic–Hegel is read as idealist or mystic, but he never doubts the reality of phenomena, and of history, Time itself. His position closer to aristotelian mechanism–or maybe it’s spinoza materialism– than most college boys realize).
April 8, 2009 at 2:28 am
Munz’s “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker” has a lot of interesting stuff about Wittgenstein, Popper, and Gellner, and Popper’s later appreciation of Darwin / evolution after his earlier doubts.
Too expensive for me, too, but the Googlebook gives you the idea. Munz gets into ev psych etc. in what looks to be a very interesting way.
April 8, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Popper did affirm Darwinian evolution and naturalism for a time, but not consistently.
Starting like in 60s, he criticized the behaviorists and naturalists, hinted at metaphysical dualism of some sort. I have read he later retreated back to his more Darwinian approach. I respect Popper, and the Open Society, but he was a company man so to speak, of OppenheimerCo (one reason Feyerabend turned against him)
Popper considered Wittgenstein an imposter, if not closet nazi (St. Ludwig in fact knew Der Fuhrer and had attended the same school. I doubt they were pals–LW a bit older: but I suspect LW, who fought for the Kaiser in WWI, would have joined his schoolmate Adolf and the nazis, but had a bit too much jew in him–though there were nazis–even officers– with as much jewish blood as Wittgenstein. Goebbels, Der Fuhrer himself had a speck of two ).
I agree somewhat with Popper’s anti-Wittgenstein perspective, but doesn’t mean I accept Popper as a guru. He was sort of like the late Russell at times: given to grand pronouncements, “position statements”, methodology. The Phil. of Science people, such as Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos were overrated. They might chart out the history of sciences, make pronouncements, talk about paradigms, verification/falsification, etc etc. but it’s all rather vague. Feyerabend doesn’t worship western science, or scientists as did Popper (or Kuhn really). He acknowledges good work–say in medicine, or engineering–and then points out the monsters, even those heroes of America such as Oppenheimer and Einstein.
April 9, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Wittgenstein, continued:
Wittgenstein’s daddy was one of the wealthiest of European industrialists; they were jewish, kultur-vulture sorts (Brahms, Mahler stopping by on occasion, etc) though they converted to xtianity–when the Anschluss started, the sisters barely escaped being, er, Anschluss’d–probably because of the Wittgenstein gold. I believe the Witts were given the “Mischling” stamp: mixed, ala mestizo. Misschling were not treated too well, but generally allowed to live.
Read about Witt’s time at Cambridge (not to say the Poker incident): an eccentric, unstable hysteria case, flitting from atheism to Kierkegaard, philosophy, to engineering, psychology, schoolteaching, etc, a member of the Apostles, at least bi-sexual (rumors there are the LW was, until like the 40s, sort of into hard trade, possibly including pedophilia: at one time he accosted a boy in one of his classes in Austria). And tho’ the Witt-types say otherwise, LW was routinely rude and condescending to Bertrand Russell, who more or less granted him gave him carte blanche and admitted him to a Cambridge PHD, though LW did not have a background in philosophy. Russell may have been glib or a bit pompous: he was hardly Anubis (as Wittgenstein seems on a closer reading).
The Tractatus may be brilliant to some extent (though most variations on Frege and Russell)–k Wittgenstein was more of a constructivist than many realize, and suggested that the tautologies of formal logic don’t really count for much, regardless of the great mirror and so forth
The TLP, mad inconsistent, if not slightly sinister–like the statement at the end, that the TLP was merely ein Spas, and you really didn’t need to bother reading it at all. Adorno also felt that Witt. was a rather monstrous figure, referring to the “What one cannot speak about one must pass over in silence” as a type of “indescribable spiritual vulgarity inasmuch as it ignores the whole point of philosophy”
in cali-code, 5150.
April 9, 2009 at 7:35 pm
It ill behooves us to call other people crazy Horatio. Lots of great philosophers were weird as hell, often in unpleasant ways.
Between Adorno, Russell, and Wittgenstein, I find Wittgenstein philosophically the most interesting by far, and none of them a source of insights into historical and political reality.
April 10, 2009 at 3:11 pm
So you have mastered LW’s TLP? What think you about that section where LW denies the possibility of inductive reasoning (actually rather Humean, in bad sense). Wunderbar. LW’s bipolar disorder (if not psychosis) might be detected even in the labyrinthe of the TLP: at times Witt. tends to a somewhat empirical-semantic view (and vaguely Humean), and at others he sounds Fregean, logical form as transcendent, a priori, etc.
That said, his points on logic, while important, not that revolutionary: Whitehead/Russell (if not Frege) had already done most of the work for first order logic. Witt’s a philosopher of language–not really a great logician, metaphysician, or political/ethical writer. His writing–the apothegms–itself arrogant, reductionist, guru-like ( Don Barthelme described the mad Guru Ludwig fairly effectively in The Genius).
April 10, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Horatio, seriously, it ill behooves us to point fingers. But in that vein I’ll cite Mirowski, who mentions in passing that pretty much all of the great logicians had episodes of mental illness, often serious enough to require institionalization. Goedel and Zermelo are the only names I remember, and the book is packed away at the moment.
I like W’s writing, mostly in the PI, and many of his specific points. I doubt that I agree with him about most things, and don’t claim to fully understand him. I think that he was wrong in his apparent belief that “the ethical” can only be spoken of, as it were, poetically, but that he was right to make the separation from science, etc.
The belief that, one way or another, “the ethical” is undiscussable is common to avant-gardists, liberationists, transgressivists, positivists, Marxists, Freudians, structuralists, Nietzscheans and postmodernists. It’s like the conventionalism of our time.
“The ethical” is the wrong name for what they’re talking about.
April 12, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Goedel’s a different kettle of fish from St. Witt., though both had crypto-platonic elements, and both quacks distrusted Russell, both in terms of his philosophy, and his anti-religious nature (and I believe Russell at times waxed slightly constructivist/nominalist, verboten to the mathematical purists). Goedel, however brilliant, was whacked: he thought people were attempting to poison him, and stopped eating after his wife was hospitalized, and weighed like 60 pounds when he died.
The incompleteness arguments are rather daunting, but they can be criticized.Quine wasn’t completely convinced Goedel had accomplished what he said he had accomplished. Goedel’s numbering system itself questionable: admit a statement like “this statement can’t be proven to be true”, put into a reductio, it seems still similar to Russell’s paradox, or the Liar. The real problem of formal logic arises a bit more concretely with the Einscheidungproblem, as discussed by Church and Turing: some shit is not computable.
That said, even the Einscheidungproblem does not seem to pose much of a problem in computing (I imagine it could in some contexts). Your OS works: so much for Turing or Goedel. The pragmatic logician–or programmer–can usually find an ad hoc solution (say, eliminate self-referential statements, algorithms that look Liar-like, etc), and at the same time, get “meta” and ask what does Computability really entail? say in political terms. Programmers are usually glorified accountants (like Java Guru Gosling, who coded …….e-bay).
April 20, 2009 at 9:17 pm
time to post something new, John!