Don't worry so much about duplication...

I've been saying this for a long time--on philosophical not scientific grounds, I suppose.   It was the beautiful mind of Georg Cantor that led me to it--although I doubt my reasoning would qualify as mathematical or scientific.  

Cantor "proved" that some infinities can be bigger than others. 

Even if the universe is infinite,  it doesn't mean that there are somewhere an indefinite number of near replications of *moi*--or anybody else.   In fact, an infinite universe could contain an infinite number of planets &  yet there might not be a single true duplication of anything... 

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-dont-infinite-scientists.html

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Post-revolutionary society...or the Reign of Heaven...or

Whatever...(as the children say)...

We Semi-Marxist-Taoistic, Shamanoid, Zen-ish, Neo-Christians tend to avoid explicit depictions of that which is indicated in the subject line because we do not know what humanity at that point may find valuable, or what stuff innovations may make possible, desirable or necessary.   Still, with the caveat that all such representations are inevitably conditioned by the era of their creation, I should like to recommend the movie:

*Bagdad Cafe* 

as providing a sort of ghost of a hint of what social conditions could be like--at least at the end of the movie.  

R. 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The Chinese are coming...

And, well, it could be worse...maybe...

I've been skimming through a book by Dambisa Moyo called *Winner Take All.*  She's an international economist with great credentials--from Nigeria I think.  

Her book sounds the alarm about China's systematic effort to garner commodities and basic resources for the sake of its own growth and prosperity.  One would think that all countries do this to one degree or another.  I'm sure the CIA (and other agencies) have in-depth studies about the issue.  But according to Moyo no other country or group of countries is putting forth the kind of single-minded, long range effort that China is.  Her concern is that China's ambitions will ultimately create resource strains throughout the world that will lead to horrendous conflicts of one kind or another over oil, land and water, etc.  

But despite that message & most interestingly, it seems to me that her book is largely an *apology* for China's policies.   China goes into host countries and by Western capitalist standards greatly overpays for resources, labor and access to resources.   In Africa, for example, China makes a practice of hiring as much local labor as is feasible for a project.   The net result is that while the U.S. has a net positive regard in some of the poorest places on earth, China is viewed with *much* more favor by a couple of orders of magnitude.  

The thing is, even in ostensibly private enterprises, the hand of the Chinese government is deeply involved in coordinating economic outcomes in accordance with policies set by the government.   The thing is, also, it works pretty well.  In the space of a decade China has created a middle class of 300,000,000 people and cut the poverty rate from 80% to 16%.   And as far as I know (and perhaps someone knows better), the Chinese Commies don't have the reputation of cooking the books the way the Soviets did in the FSU.    Even where the Chinese state doesn't formally own major enterprises, the degree of regulatory control arguably amounts to de facto state ownership.   

Based on a few news reports and Mankell Henning's novel, *The Man from Beijing,* my highly impressionistic & not particularly well-informed view is that the Chinese ruling elite is notably unstupid in that they are aware that the existence of the nouveaux riche and the growth of inequality and corruption are problems they have to deal with.  Also, there seems to have been a sort of groping toward the rule of law.  Human rights activists continue to live in peril of prison or worse,  but they are there and active.  

I believe the Chinese people fear their government, but it is also the case that the Chinese government is beginning to fear its people.  Most Chinese identify themselves as belonging to a single race--the Han Chinese.    If you look at the variety of physical types throughout the country, that becomes almost as absurd as the notion that the all the nominally white people in the U.S. somehow belong to an identifiable & unitary "white race."   The Han Chinese are patriotic about being Han Chinese to the extent that it makes the government nervous.     Han Chinese tend to believe they have a civilizing mission toward peoples like the Tibetans & that they are ingrates and rebels for seeking independence.   I recall that the government sought to dampen down patriotic Han Chinese fervor in the wake of some clashes between Tibetans and Chinese.   

I would like to believe that the Chinese will one day evolve into a genuine democracy with guarantees of human rights & without relinquishing the progressive features of their economic arrangements.   Well, it would be nice.  

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

God and Hartshorne...

Writing what follows, I'm not trying to convert anybody, or to annoy my atheist and agnostic friends--I'm mostly just thinking out loud, as it were, for my own amusement (and ideally for anybody who happens to read it).   The only evangelical impulses I might have would be directed toward political right-wing Christians and Moonies, but they irritate me too much for me to carry out such impulses.  

Any way I saw a new edition of a collection of essays by Charles Hartshorne at the library and checked it out--it's called *The Zero Fallacy*  The title refers to the view in process philosophy to the effect that there is nothing in the cosmos that is really "nothing"--that is, everything that is actual in the cosmos has a form of subjectivity--is in fact, alive.   

But I won't pursue that.  Rather I wanted to take up Hartshorne's view of God.  He takes very seriously Whitehead's idea that God is the "fellow sufferer"--that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but that God humbly suffers everything that his creatures endure--and also all their "enjoyments."  Hartshorne infers an interesting ethic from this doctrine.  It is important that we as individuals avoid suffering for ourselves and that we also try and help others avoid suffering as well--because if God is God and is the Ultimate Good we do not want to God to suffer any more than necessary (as finite creatures, it is inevitable that we will in fact suffer, oh, a fair amount).  It may seem extremely obvious that we should avoid suffering, but a casual glance at history suggests that there has been *a hell of a lot* of avoidable suffering.   And another philosophical aspect of this notion is that the dilemmas generated by the arguments around self-interest vs. altruism are avoided.  Of course, none of the foregoing is very convincing if you don't share the worldview in the first place & as I say, I'm not going to try and convince anybody.  

Hartshorne had considerable faith in democracy and the decency of ordinary people, but in his later years he came to regard humanity as a threat to itself and to the whole natural world.  

Hartshorne, BTW, was not a Christian.  He was a Unitarian-Universalist and his views of God in a general sort of way approximated those of Reformed Judaism.  (I also think of Isaac Bashevis Singer's).    

Here's Wikipedia on Hartshorne:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hartshorne   Although I have my own criticisms of a couple of Hartshornean notions, my cursory  glance at the criticism section in the Wikipedia article led me to conclude, "mere trifling and piffle," as Nero Wolfe might have put it.  

Hartshorne lived to be a 103 YO.   He was an amateur orinthologist of no mean achievement.  One of his last works was a philosophical study of bird song, entitled, *Born to Sing* in which he provided the final answer as to why birds sing:  it's because they are happy.  

R.  

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Fw: Trotskyites for Romney

Some of you (you know who you are) may be semi-amused by the referenced article below.  Back in the day when I was a Trotskyist, I was wounded when I read about James Burnham and his apostasy from the Socialist Workers' Party & his espousal of technocratic capitalism in the wake of his new-fangled theory of managerial capitalism.  I guess I had the notion that exposure to Trotskyist ideas was not only an inoculation against Stalinism & Stalinist turncoatism a la Whitaker Chambers, but also against reactionary politics in general.   I was realistic enough to know that some Trotskyists  might turn away and become mere liberals--a distinction without much difference for our more sectarian comrades, but still...(Um, I should note here for the benefit of those who may not be up on the finer points of left wing splinter group politics that the Socialist Workers Party was the major Trotskyist organization in the U.S. from the 30's onwards.  The SWP was a
split from the Communist Party after the conflict between the follower's of Trotsky's ideas and the followers of Stalin's "ideas" erupted into open intra-Party warfare. As CPers I knew never tired of reminding me, Trotsky lost.  Some of them liked to make jokes about pick axes that I thought were in poor taste.)

Sadly, I was wrong.   Burnham, for example, went on to become an important contributor of Buckley's rag, *National Review* & was regarded by Buckley as the the conservative movement's leading intellectual at the time.   Wikipedia notes that some regard Burnham as a founding father of neoconservativism.  

And before I was a Trotskyist, I was an adherent of the Young People's Socialist League, i.e. a YPSLer, the youth section of the the Socialist Party U.S.A.--the party of Norman Thomas.  (Also, referenced in the article below.)   As a YPSLer, I regarded myself as a kind of American Fabian socialist, a position rather disdained by those in YPSL who were more Marxist in orientation.  

In fact, I believe I had a tendency to think of bringing socialism to the U.S. by a kind of stealth operation--much the way the Eagle Forum has tried to bring creationism and religious education to public schools by means of stealth candidates for school board and the like.   (Even die-hard Stalinists want the masses to consciously believe the stuff they are trying to promote--me, at the time--I tended not to care--I just wanted the masses to accept passively what I thought was good for them...)  So, becoming a Trotskyist was actually a move toward a more democratic outlook.  In any case, my views at that time were based on a complete misunderstanding of the British Fabian orientation.   They weren't trying to fool anybody--they just wanted to downplay the significance of labels and party affiliation and get to, you know, substance.) 

In any case, as the article notes, both YPSL and the Socialist Party U.S.A were the beneficiaries of a split in the Socialist Workers' Party between the majority faction led by James Cannon and a minority faction led by Max Schactman.   Schactman and many of his followers wound up leaving the SWP and many did join the Socialist Party U.S.A. and/or YPSL.   (Schactman differed from the the majority Trotskyist position in that he believed that the Soviet setup was not a "degenerated workers' state" but an altogether new and reactionary formation that he described as "bureaucratic collectivism" and as such was actually inferior to bourgeois democratic capitalism.  You can see where that's headed:  not only toward systematic right wing anti-Communism, but also the anti-Soviet stance of "cold war liberalism.") 

It is true that many of the figures who passed first through Trotskyism and then became Schactmanites ultimately did become some form of conservative.  And so did some who skipped the Schactmanite stage.  To me, that raises an interesting question.  It seems that secular intellectual conservatives do not have much of an intellectual matrix of their own in which to incubate.  It's only after exposure to the relatively holistic & global & philosophical kind of thinking one can find in Marxism that they were capable of developing a more or less systematic conservative worldview.  (Other secular philosophical views, such as they might be, did not have any determinated political effects or else were hostile to the kind of "totalizing" thought found in Marxism.)  My point is that perhaps Trotskyism did supply a disproportionate number of conservative and neoconservative intellectual "turncoats"--but that's merely because they came out of a tradition of
systematic political thought.   Orthodox Communists (aka Stalinists) perhaps did not produce as proportionately many conservative intellectuals because they were a tribe of "vulgar" Marxists not as given to systematic thought in the first place.  

There emanates from Raimondo's article, cited below, a very faint odor of some kind of conspiracy theory--or maybe better put, an insinuation that Trotskyism somehow is especially morally tainted and prone to generating neoconservative warmongers such as those foreign policy advisors surrounding Romney at present.  Well, however many of those folks who may have been Trotskyists in their youth (Irving Kristol and Wolfowitz), they sure as hell aren't now.   And erstwhile Trotskyists I have known ran the gamut from being anarchist libertarians to continuing on in Trotskyism, to taking up plain old liberalism, to, in one case, a Tory admirer of Maggie Thatcher and Sarah Palin who also very much dislikes Mitt Romney.   I can even imagine that Raimondo has become slightly possessed of that old timey Stalinist spirit that used to lead to cries of "Trotskyite wrecker"  

It should be noted that Russ T., who forwarded the link to the article to me, *is* an erstwhile Trotskyist & that his comments are tongue-in-cheek--perhaps with a wistful undertone of *if only it were so*--that is, that these fellows indeed really were Trotskyists, hellbent on a secret agenda of "permanent revolution."  

(It was once suggested to me that perhaps George W. Bush was recruited to the Young Socialist Alias (youth section of the *Socialist Workers' Party* while at Yale.  A Trotskyist who happened to be in on that conversation said, nah, that would be something that the Progressive Labor Party would do.  Progressive Labor was the party with the Maoist franchise at the time.  They *were* in fact, given to stealth tactics.)  

But be that as it may, the  Dark Knight and Avatar of the True Neoconservative spirit, Dick Cheney--he sure didn't need no stinkin' Trotsky--or Mao--to be who *he* is...

R. 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

----- Forwarded Message -----
>From: "Russtea
>To: roygg9@yahoo.com
>Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 4:29 PM
>Subject: Trotskyites for Romney
>
>
>
>Finally Comrades, we are sooo close to taking power.....
>
>Click here: Trotskyites for Romney by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com
>
>

Chavez wins re-election in Venezuela...

And by a comfortable 14 point margin.  As the article below points out, Chavez was facing a competent and credible opponent, leading a (for once) unified opposition.  Contrary to the mouthings of certain Republicans, this election really should seal Chavez's legitimacy.   Chavez engages in quite a bit of anti-American bombast--& there is no doubt he hates neoliberal colonialism--but I believe his using anti-American rhetoric to talk about neoliberalism  is mostly for domestic consumption.  It is regrettable though.  Even if the Obama Administration wanted to be nice to Chavez, there is no politically feasible way that it could.  

And to put it somewhat flippantly, his canoodling with Russia, Iran and China is merely an effort to find friends in a largely unfriendly world--rather like Israel did with apartheid South Africa. 

Now I know brain-dead "movement conservatives" and Tea Party types have little use for nuance and will never read this, but I can't help myself:   

Despite his friendship with Fidel Castro and the symbolic redshirts of his supporters, Chavez is not a Marxist.   He himself has so stated and contrasted himself explicitly with Fidel.   He belongs to a mostly unheralded but real tradition of Christian socialism.  (Although I would not be disturbed if he *was* a Marxist.  In any case, I tend to hold with the early Niebuhr that Marxism is a Jewish or Christian heresy..."misguided Children of Light" as Niebuhr describes the hard Communist position.  (In the early part of *The Revolution Will not Be Televised* there is a scene in which Chavez in a conversation with the filmmakers alludes to his reading of Sartre--at that point I was ready to conclude that if Chavez is a mere caudillo, he is a "good" one).  

But to expand the article below a little:   The 2002 coup attempt against Chavez had to do with his government's efforts to get more control of the giant oil company, PDVSA.  Although nominally owned by the state, the company was actually ran for the benefit of Venezuela's long ruling oligarchs.  

Here's the article: http://www.france24.com/en/20121008-venezuela-hugo-chavez-elected-third-term-socialist-president-henrique-capriles

And if you want to get down in the weeds about Venezuela's economy during the Chavez years, here's economist Marc Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/venezuelas-economic-recovery-is-it-sustainable

And for an earlier assessment: 

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela_update_2008_02.pdf

Chavez now has the chance to consolidate his "Bolivarian" socialist revolution.  Whether or not he succeeds in that task, this election was important because Chavez has been the lynchpin for  the govenments that have come out of *genuine* democratic and grassroots politics in all of Latin America. 

Chavez is a cancer survivor.  If he has to step down because of health before he has completed four years of his six year term, it will be necessary for new elections to be held early.  

But whatever happens after Chavez is gone, even most of the opposition agrees there will be no going back to the old oligarchic pseudo-democracy.  

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

As Jesus says, "They have their reward..."

I have long felt the Marxist notion of "class struggle" as the master narrative of history is simplistic and too reductive of too many complexities to be "true"--at least not without a bunch of qualifications.  But how else to explain why the super-rich like Romney and his billionaire supporters engage in the kind of politics that they do?  They must feel under threat from below with an urgency that makes little sense to many of us proles.  Utopian politics aside, we would all like to be substantially better off than we are, and those in a condition of real deprivation vis a vis U.S. standards obviously feel that with the most intensity.  But no substantial number of people anywhere is ready to take to the streets with pitchforks--or Saturday night specials--to overturn the existing order.  And under current conditions I have difficulty imagining any organization with the will and resources to prompt a sufficient number of the masses to do so in a way that would threaten the position of  Romney & sons, et al. (or is it "et alia?") 

Any way, David Atkins writing in Digby's Hullabaloo below reaches a conclusion that may or may not be explanatory 

digby 9/03/2012 04:00:00 PM Comments (5)

 
Eric Cantor insults workers everywhere

by David Atkins

Eric Cantor tweets:

Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

As a small business owner who understands that my value to society is no more than that of a teacher, and who knows that my activism does far more for humanity than the smattering of jobs and economic activity my business creates, I would like to be the first to tell Eric Cantor to go to hell.

Nor is Eric Cantor the first to make statements in this vein today.

What the GOP is doing this Labor Day is akin to thanking weapons manufacturers on Memorial Day. It's sick, disrespectful and little more than tonedeaf plutocratic jingoism. It's not enough for them to own all the power and the money, crushing everyone underneath them. They want to be loved for it.

Fat chance.

 

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