since you insist i haven't answered you post, a long postscript.
>You've failed to address the key sentence in my post.<
it might have looked to you like the key sentence, but it didn't strike me as all that decisive, for the reasons below. but in any case, there is no question, just a series of qualifications.
as for unanswered questions, you can answer the question i posed a number of times: do you think the state is or is not the instrument or vehicle of planning? simple and direct question, and everyone seems to be too scared to answer it.
>There is no reason why a reasonably (i.e. humanly) effective planning
depends upon "complete knowledge," unless one thinks that the only
planning worth doing is an infallible (i.e. impossible) planning. Do
you disagree with this? If so, please explain why you think without
what you call "complete knowledge," a reasonably (i.e. humanly)
effective planning (for the regular satisfaction of most human wants) is
impossible.<
the problem yoshie is that you fudge where it suits you and see only those bits of your sentence that suit you as well -- ie., endless qualifiers, eg: "reasonably"; "humanly"; "regular"; and, "most".
four qualifications in one sentence!
which add up to little more than a pretense at having an argument for reasons which are hardly transparent to me. that is, you insist that the glass isn't half full, it's half empty. compare that sentence, with all its qualifications, with the sentence you wrote in the prior post: "Why should "planning" assume "a transparency?". the qualifications entered in because you already know that planning does assume a transparency. this is why, in each case, you place the qualifications on the side of _planning_, _not_ knowledge.
if there is no connection between the two, then why burden planning with so many hesitations and so much incompleteness? because there is a connection between the two, and the connection is precisely in the presumptions of planning which, without such qualifications, is exactly a desire for (in your words) the illusion of infallibility, or in my words, the illusion of transparency.
i happen to think there are implications that arise from the centrality of the notion of planning in certain marxist currents, specifically, authoritarian implications, as i've said -- which had been the context of the discussion before you decided to detour it to some terrain that, in itself, yes, makes no sense -- other than as the act of detouring from the topic of the state as the vehicle of socialist planning.
> Unless you can prove that planning can only be done with "complete
knowledge," the rest of your post doesn't make sense.<
never once said planning could only be done with complete knowledge. you are too enamoured of the performance of a disagreement. i said a number of times that planning _presumes_ complete knowledge. i take it you can work out the subtlety of that distinction. that is, in order for a plan to be characterised as effective (not reasonably or humanly or whatever other qualification you want to make) there must be posited a transparent knowledge.
we both know this equation does not work, for reasons which we probably both share to some extent (glass half full, half empty), and, as i said, you have gone further than i ever have in positing an insuperable non-transparency. so, your game eludes me.
but, the specific difference here however between us is that you want to render a recognition of the opacity of knowledge as null and void when it comes to what are central concepts in a certain marxist orthodoxy. and, that you still won't answer the question about who or what is to be vested with the plan means, perhaps, that no matter how much you want to pose as more orthodox-than-thou, you're even more hesitant of answering that rather more simple and i think risky question (ie., risky from/for the perspective of the vision of socialist planning).
>>> ahh, yoshie. you're fudging. we both know you didn't say shitting;
you said wiping your bum with toilet paper. hardly a biological given
there is it? my point was that shitting gets a mention every time in
supposedly witty attempts to cast around for some supposedly immediate
natural need, despite the fact that how you shit, and in particular how
we use toilet paper, is hardly the bedrock it's claimed to be.<<<
> Well, once you shit, there does arise a need to wipe your ass, unless
you like keeping shit on your ass. In other words, biological givens
*constrain* your subsequent actions (e.g. to clean or not to clean
your beshitted ass).<
well, another fudge: "constrain". you keep qualfying your argument out of existence. next you'll be saying words liek "mediate" and somesuch, or, that you didn't write: "I do know, for instance, that I should like to have ready at hand something to wipe my bottom with after each satisfying experience of bowel movement, and that without going to too many meetings to wrangle with others."
That is, not shitting, but wiping your bum with toilet paper, and toilet paper is definitely not a natural need (there are and have been other ways of dealing with shit, and to have to say so strikes me as a ludicrous). but perhaps here, when you get to talk about shit, since you also implied an aversion to participating in the 'planning' of the provision of toilet paper for this apparently natural need to use toilet paper, you did give an answer to the question of who is to plan for this 'need': presumably some form of delegated authority, perhaps the state. you'll have to clarify this for me. but what i find interesting on reflection is that you are prepared to delegate authority in the case of what you define as natural needs. given your quite dubious defintion of what natural needs are (toilet paper), then what happens: the socialist planner state is characterised by a defintion of natural needs that, as in your example, extends beyond the banalities of shitting, eating and shelter to be defined as toilet paper, pop tarts and regulation californian architecture? when some people get cranky and want other kinds of shit treatments, food and architecture, what are those wants, unnatural?
i guess the whole exercise might well besome kind of entertainment, which is fine by me, but i suspect it has more to do with innoculating orthodoxies despite (or rather against) your own hesitations.
but the more interesting question to raise here would be how you distinguish this kind of maneuver (that of delimiting the scope of the state's planning to supposedly natural needs, laughably and broadly defined in this case as 'toilet paper') from that of nazism, which is exactly the synthesis of biology and economics within the state. moreover, given your previous odes to 'national sovereignty', perhaps you can explain whether or not you envisage the topology of planning as the _national_ state?
Angela _________