Is Republican sabotage treasonous?

This is the question that Thom Hartmann asks in a recent broadcast. Why? Republicans have done nothing but sabotage the economy since day one of Obama's Presidency in the hopes of making him a one-term President. "Passing the Senate version of the highway bill would keep 1.9 million Americans on the job building our roads and bridges." But Senate Republicans refuse to act on it and Senator Harry Reid rightfully accused them intentionally trying to crash the economy to achieve their prime directive above. He referenced Michael Brendan Dougherty of Business Insider on Real Time saying he was told by a Republican Senator that they plan to block any legislation on the economy for this very purpose.

In defense of subtle parsing

In the near infinite IPS OOO discussion Dial again raises his perennial point on the 'art of living.' He says: "In looking for an answer to your question regarding the textual bodying found in Proust and Neitzsche I found this below. This tradition of writing about the ‘arts of living’ is where I imagined Integral thought should evolve to. It is, after all, where it began. As stimulating as the subtle parsing of ontologies that goes on here, might be, I hardly think it places everyday praxis at the center where it should be. To those who might say this thought is precisely about the decentering of self – anti-correlationism, fine, give me a sense of how you experience this making a cup of tea. Or, how you see it at work in the movement of clouds, or why you think one issue is criminal, while another is not,  and so on and so on. The decentering of self is not a flight from the body of being." (See the thread for the excerpted quote.)

I replied: Again I find this to be your personal preference rather than an indictment of "the subtle parsing of ontologies." Nahamas even admits an 'art of living' type endeavor is but one of many philosophical modes, and by no means best for all. We can grant it a place but it is not a replacement.

Lessons from Nazi propaganda

The Nazis were infamous for their Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. Quite a bit of money and organization were invested in this department. They knew its value and how to implement its enactment. At the time Goebbels said: “I consider radio to be the most modern and the most crucial instrument for influencing the masses.” Today this is TV and the internet.

Granted Naziism's core principles and inhumane behaviors were despicable but we can certainly learn from how they understood and effectively utilized propaganda. The conservatives learned this lesson well. And no, I'm not comparing US conservatives to Nazi ideology, just that they learned well its propaganda lessons. As can we.

You'll see some similarity to previous sources in the below, albeit with Hitler's delusional, dysfunctional, misanthropic and misogynist twist. Twist it back to humane, progressive morals and values and it works just as well. Hitler devoted two chapters to the topic in Mein Kampf. He writes in Chapter 6:

Lakoff on the lessons of Wisconsin

A recent theme is the materiality of communication and its propagation through media. Lakoff teams up with Wehling in offering this preview of their new e-book on how to communicate liberal ideas and counteract the conservative narrative. As noted earlier, liberals focus on policy issues, as if a rational argument's truth value were enough to affect the voting public. Whereas conservatives focus on their moral vision, which reaches deeper into our psyche based on emotion, as well as communication tactics and vehicles to reinforce their meme. Liberals need to learn from them and communicate and propagate their moral vision as effectively, while simultaneously exposing the truths hidden by the conservative version.

Prigogine, Is Future Given?

In the ongoing IPS discussion of complexity and pomo I provided these clips from Is Future Given? I also threw in a little Stengers, who co-authored Order Out of Chaos with Prigogine. One can draw many parallels with the OOOers, as well as the deconstructionists and the polydox crew.


"We have shown that the difficulties in the classical formulation come from a too narrow point of view concerning the fundamental laws of dynamics (classical or quantum)" (8).

"For classical physics and for quantum physics there is no privileged direction of time. Future and past play the same role.... The traditional description is deterministic, even in quantum theory....but the results obtained...contain certainly a large part of truth....[but] these descriptions are based on a too restricted form of dynamics" (10).

"It is remarkable that orthodox QM used classical integrable dynamical systems as a model.... For non-integrable systems the situation...is quite different....that is of systems for which we cannot construct a unitary transformation" (12-13).

"Integrable systems...refer in fact only to exceptional, ideal cases. We are living in a nature in which the rule is non-integrability" (16). That one has some serious implications reminiscent of ideal forms, etc.

The ecology of spreading ideas

Bryant's 6/10/12 post on rhetoric is hammering a theme I've also recently been focused upon, the materiality of ideas. Given that big money is now free to buy elections, this is part of how ideas are spread and reinforced. It matters not so much whether the ideas are right or better, since how much space/time they take up on tv ads is the strongest determinant and to which memes get elected. To wit, the witless Scott Walker getting re-elected. Bryant says:

Bill Maher's new rule to Occupy Wall Street

On Real Time last night Maher laid into the OWS movement for not getting politically involved (starting around 53:10). While he agrees with the sentiment they must come up with a more effective form of protest besides camping. The message is right: "That America's wealth is increasingly in the hands of a tiny kleptocratic priesthood of finance cowboys and the politicians they buy, protected by a free firezone of rules they wrote themselves, feeding on the Republic from within like a transcontinental tapeworm the size of Route 66."

Fight Citizens United

Given the shining example of the Wisconsin recall election, and how money is buying elections, fight back against the Supreme Court decision that started it all, Citizens United. There is a concerted effort to get Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment to counteract its disastrous effects. Below is information from People for the American Way, with a link to efforts underway in your area. Please check it out and get involved. If we don't fight back then kiss democracy bye bye. Thank you.

In January of 2010, the United States Supreme Court upended our political system with its decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The decision undermined more than a century of laws regulating the influence of corporations in elections, and was an unprecedented attack on the core democratic values of the Constitution.

$ will buy (all?) future US elections

This Huff Post story discusses May fundraising for both the Republicans and the Democrats. The GOP raised $76.8 million, $17.6 million more than the Dems. As we saw in Wisconsin, money buys media time which buys more reinforcement of the message. It doesn't matter if the message is an outright lie or a sleight-of-hand spin (like the WI budget surplus). Repetition matters, especially with less informed voters who don't fact check their authoritarian puppet masters. And if the Dems don't match the money to spend on ads then they will more than likely lose.

Object oriented rhetoric

Continuing my recent inquiry into rhetoric, here are some excerpts on object-oriented rhetoric from around the internets:

From Bryant's 5/28/12 post on OO rhetoric:

"I’ve heard a lot of theories as to what object-oriented rhetoric (OOR) might be. One theory has it that object-oriented rhetoric is the investigation of the rhetoric of object-oriented ontology. This strikes me as a particularly stupid and uninteresting project as who cares about the rhetoric of object-oriented ontology? All this is, is an attempt to integrate the theses of OOO into a traditional correlationist framework and issues of persuasion through language. While I have no desire to dispense with the discoveries of figures like Burke and Aristotle, if OOR exists I think it’s up to something else. I don’t suggest that this post is exhaustive of what that 'something else' ought to be, but I do think that minimally if there is to be something like OOR, it will consist in breaking the bad habit of a focus on representation, persuasion, and identification, and will necessarily consist in drawing attention to the materiality of speech acts, communications, texts, and signifiers. It’s not that OOR, if it comes to exist, would give up on these things, but that it would become a little less representational, a little less 'decoding,' a little less interpretive, and far more material. It would become a little less focused on what things are about and the pathos, logos, and ethos that animates them, and a bit more focused on what texts are."