Last part of my catch-up with various messages addressed to or in response to me. Please contact me off-list if you wish to discuss these further. Thank you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message includes replies to: Chris Doss, Wojtek Sokolowski, Tayssir John Gabbour, Carl Remick, andie nachgeborenen, Charles A. Grimes ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Messages in this digest:
* Re: Iran poll results
* Re: Dewey on intelligence, co-operation, and class
* Re: Constructive Criticism vs. Opposition Criticism(wasTargeting Empire?)
* Re: techbeanie update, long Sunday afternoon
* Re: Nietzsche
* Re: Liberalism (Was Re: Nietzsche)
* Re: India neoliberalism (was: Iran's Youth Movements
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/// Subject: Re: Dewey on intelligence, co-operation, and class ///
On Oct 19, 2007, at 4:40 AM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> On 10/18/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>> Such an idea of classes is a survival of a rigid logic that
>> once prevailed in the sciences of nature, but that no longer
>> has any place there. This conversion of abstractions into
>> entities [*] smells more of a dialectic of concepts than of a
>> realistic examination of facts, even though it makes more of an
>> emotional appeal to many than do the results of the latter.
>
> I particularly don't understand this point. Don't scientists separate
> things into "classes" and taxonomies all the time? One thing's an
> electron, another's a positron? Sometimes these particles interact
> explosively and annihilate each other -- literally speaking.
>
I am not sure I follow. Those are the names for those particles. They are not classes, unless I am missing something. Scientists do classify things into taxonomies, e.g species, alkalis, etc... but Dewey would point out, I think, that they would not suggest that these classes are not entities.
> And the "conversion of abstractions into entities" sounds like the
> definition of reification to me. Certainly, any software programmer,
> particularly one using object-oriented techniques, consciously makes
> taxonomies and reifies abstractions all the time. These technologies
> run useful parts of the world.
True, but as a programmer who only uses object-oriented techniques on occasion, I also notice that a lot of stuff is retro-fitted into an OO paradigm. Not to forget such things as instantiation (a class has no memory allocated, etc -- it doesn't exist!), multiple inheritance, and so on!
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/// Subject: Re: Constructive Criticism vs. Opposition Criticism(wasTargeting Empir ///
On Sep 11, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
>> From: ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org>
>>
>> The point is not all this stuff about "aid and comfort to the
>> enemy" (has anyone written this sort of nonsense on LBO?), but that
>> this sort of thing (even if correct) is "intellectual honesty" for
>> its own sake. A constant reminder to me is Seymour Hersh's great
>> expose (unverified) that Morarji Desai was a CIA agent -- right
>> around the time that the Indian population was struggling its way out
>> of years of emergency rule under Indira Gandhi (described by another
>> white guy as someone in possession of "uncommon wisdom", IIRC).
>
> I would welcome more info on Morarji Desai if you can provide it,
> Ravi, because frankly I can't make head or tales of Desai's record,
> aims and character based on his Wikipedia entry, e.g., on the one
> hand, his record sounds inspiring and progressive: "He spent many
> years in jail during the freedom struggle and owing to his sharp
> leadership skills and tough spirit, he became a favorite amongst
> freedom-fighters...." And: "He is the only Indian to receive the
> highest civilian awards from both India and Pakistan, namely the
> Bharat Ratna and Nishaan-e-Pakistan."
>
> OTOH, his record sounds anything but positive: "By Desai's orders
> in 1960, a peaceful demonstration by the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti
> was fired upon by the police resulting in the deaths of 105
> demonstrators. Many innocent people were killed in the incident
> leading to public outrage that shook the central government. ... As
> Home Minister, Desai outlawed any portrayals of indececy (which
> included 'kissing' scenes) in films and theatrical productions.
> Although a staunch Gandhian, Desai was socially conservative, pro-
> business, and in favor of free enterprise reforms, as opposed to
> Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's socialistic policies."
>
Carl, I feel like I have responded to this already, and my apologies if my mailreader is lying to me (it says I haven't). It's true that Desai is a mixed bag, but what he represented in 1977 and what the Janata Party and Jayaprakash Narayan were bringing about were (in large part) not. While Desai's reach as a PM in a parliamentary system was not as far-reaching as that of the POTUS, slander of him could easily be extended for use against the Janata Party.
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/// Subject: Re: techbeanie update, long Sunday afternoon ///
On Jun 11, 2007, at 12:53 PM, Charles A. Grimes wrote:
>
> ``...I hope you are using the m4 macros...'' ravi
>
> -----
>
> Ahhh, hmm. Well, see I hum, ah. Nope. I poped that sendmail.cf right
> into an editor and hacked the motherfucker, straight up. I couldn't
> figure out what the submit.mc shit was for. Freebsd default install
> renamed the sendmail.cf and submit.mc something like freebsd.cf
> freebsd.mc so I deleted all that crap...saying to myself, submit? You
> mean for approval or something? Kiss my ass. I left the default
> submit.mc alone, figuring sendmail wouldn't take kindly to killing her
> children.
>
;-) At some point around 2000 the MTA was split into multiple parts, one of them is the MSA, the mail submit agent -- hence the submit.cf. The idea behind the MSA is that for most hosts in a network the sendmail configuration is fairly trivial: forward blindly to a smart host. And there is no need to have the daemon listening on 25. So instead, sendmail runs on demand in MSA mode and passes the messages off elsewhere.
You really should get off of sendmail and switch to Qmail or Postfix. I have edited sendmail.cf decades ago, including the rules, and its masochistic to put yourself through that. The m4 macros do make life easier, though, if you are going to continue with sendmail.
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/// Subject: Re: Nietzsche ///
On Jun 29, 2007, at 8:46 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> I really don't see what's so earth-shaking in
> Nietzsche. My personal response to reading him was
> always basically "meh." He never shook me up on a
> personal level like Kierkegaard, Heidegger or
> Schopenhauer did.
>
> Maybe I have a sick soul. :)
>
Well, I confess that 19 years ago, the simple question (Why truth? Why not untruth?) in Beyond Good and Evil (or was it one of the others?) really got me excited.
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/// Subject: Re: Liberalism (Was Re: Nietzsche) ///
On Jul 3, 2007, at 12:28 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> What's your alternative? Which of:
>
> competitive elections
> universal suffrage
> extensive civil and political liberties
> democratic decisionmaking (as opposed to imposition of
> someone's idea of the good life will-we-nil-we)
>
> would you give up? What would you replace them with?
> What eclectic ideas could we mix in with a gutted
> liberalism that would be better?
> <...>
>
> --- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I am afraid this reminds me a bit of Doug's "No Alternatives" post/
>> forward. The original author of that piece claimed that there were no
>> alternatives to [what I dub] Western establishment
>> medicine. This of course after this establishment medicine
>> opportunistically absorbed (and continues to absorbs) "alternative"
>> remedies.
>> My "martyrs" (a bit different perhaps from yours) wouldn't have
>> called themselves "liberals" or their movement/ideology "liberalism".
>> I OTOH do consider myself a liberal. It seems to me that both
>> in the case of establishment medicine and the liberal me, what we
>> are (and what our ideology is) is an end product, not a source. We
>> are
>> opportunistic, and that's a good thing, but that also calls for
>> humility (which was sorely lacking in the "No Alternatives" author
>> as is
>> also lacking amidst modern liberals i.e., the blogosphere, etc,
>> which now prefers the term "progressive"). It is true that such a
>> liberalism is part of the next cycle -- but here, IMHO, it serves
>> as a
>> sort of nourishing ground for new left ideas, movements, and
>> leadership
>> to emerge.
>>
To answer your question (top-posted above), it is not necessary that I know or have the alternative. I have none. But that does not mean there is none. As I state above, I think others will come up with them.
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/// Subject: Re: India neoliberalism (was: Iran's Youth Movements ///
On Jun 27, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Ravi:
>
> Though India, as it is currently
> evolving, is a much more serious threat (particularly in an
> ideological sense) since it is re-validating the neo-lib model (with
> attendant Reaganite clich=E9s), coupled with a dangerous naivet=E9 =
about
> markets, capitalism, corporatism, consumption, etc, the lessons of
> which [significant segments of] the West is only now beginning to =20
> learn.
>
> [WS:] What do you think is driving it? I mean, what social groups and
> forces, besides the usual suspects (finance capital etc.) are behind
> =20=
> it?
>
I am not sure I am expert enough to answer that at a deeper level than =20=
pointing out what is probably obvious: I see two immediate things =20 driving it: a) the opening up of the economy for a particular segment =20=
of the meritocracy to gain wealth and power rapidly, and b) the =20 product of years of government and socialist spurred development (in =20 higher education, etc) is easy picking. That doesn't really answer =20 your question, I think.
--ravi