02.23.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 2:26 pm by nemo
What “Nationalize the Banks” and the “Free Market” Really Mean in Today’s Looking-Glass World
The Language of Looting
By MICHAEL HUDSON
“Banking shares began to plunge Friday morning after Senator Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the banking committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he was concerned the government might end up nationalizing some lenders “at least for a short time.” Several other prominent policy makers – including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – have echoed that view recently.”
–Eric Dash, “Growing Worry on Rescue Takes a Toll on Banks,” The New York Times, February 20, 2009
How is it that Alan Greenspan, free-market lobbyist for Wall Street, recently announced that he favored nationalization of America’s banks – and indeed, mainly the biggest and most powerful? Has the old disciple of Ayn Rand gone Red in the night? Surely not.
The answer is that the rhetoric of “free markets,” “nationalization” and even “socialism” (as in “socializing the losses”) has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges. Having undermined the economy at large, Wall Street’s public relations think tanks are now dismantling the language itself.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:23 pm by nemo
what’s new http://socialistworker.org Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Booknotes, you've got mail at 2:17 pm by nemo
mxmail
FROM MARXISM TO POST-MARXISM?
By Göran Therborn
In this succinct and panoramic work—both stimulating for the specialist and accessible to the general reader—one of the world’s leading social theorists, Göran Therborn, tackles the question of the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first.
Therborn takes a historical perspective on the parabola of Marxism and critical theory over the last hundred years and looks to the original developments in radical thought at the turn of the new century—embracing the oeuvres of Žižek, Negri, Badiou et al. From a contemporary vantage-point on the debates over modernity, post-modernism and post-Marxism, Therborn examines how Marxist and Marx-related theoretical currents have coped with the changing intellectual as well as political-economic contexts. The critical, theoretical overview is situated in a global investigation of the parameters of twenty-first century politics. This work is set to become the essential appraisal of Marxism in the modern age.
GÖRAN THERBORN holds the Chair of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and, among his numerous publishing credits, he is editor and author of, respectively, Inequalities of the World and Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000.
Praise for Between Sex and Power:
“A great work of historical intellect and imagination. It is the fruit of a rare combination of gifts.” — The Nation
“This is a deeply impressive book by a major sociologist” — Eric Hobsbawm, London Review of Books
—————————————-
ISBN 978 1 84467 188 5 / £14.99 / $23.95 / Hardback / 208 pages / Published March 2009
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Posted in General at 2:10 pm by nemo
RG mail
A disturbing new report says our criminal courts have been relying on
bad evidence
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131711.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:07 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/4742641/Karzai-is-US-stooge-says-Afghan-deputy-president.html
Karzai is US stooge says Afghan deputy president
Afghanistan’s president and vice-president accused each other of being
US stooges during a recent cabinet meeting which degenerated into a
furious row, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
By Ben Farmer in Kabul and Dean Nelson
Last Updated: 6:45PM GMT 21 Feb 2009
In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has
become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by
his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. He responded in kind, saying Mr
Massoud was part of an American conspiracy to oust him.
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02.22.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:38 pm by nemo
Dutton’s The Evolution Of Art
Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind’s universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.
This thesis at least subjects itself to refutation by trying to find some adaptive function for art. It is interesting to consider that ‘disinterestedness’ is a key to the ‘aesthetic judgment’ as discussed in Kant. It seems the antithesis to motived adaptation!
At least we can agree that art and evolution have a connection, but only evolution in the sense of the eonic effect.
Here is a passage from World History And The Eonic Effect
2.6.3 Art, Evolution And The Tragic Genre
The historian William MacNeill, in Keeping Together in Time , considers the element of dance and song in human evolution. But this process is right under our noses if we carefully do some accounting of relative transforms in our eonic pattern. Most ‘song and dance’ elements are well established in the human legacy and cease to show relative transformation. We need to find one that is inside the eonic mainline, what we will call an eonic emergent. We can see that the eonic pattern is pervaded by spectacular cases of artistic flowering. Here is a prime case for our distinctions made between what is potential at all times and what appears in our macroevolutionary pattern. We can in fact isolate one spectacular intermittent effect in the genre of Greek tragedy (whose ‘song and dance’ elements are almost vestigial, as it passes into a literary genre). Its relevance to our ‘evolution of freedom’ is direct. And the suspicious similarity of the ‘tragic theme’ to the issues of religious evolution should alert us to the importance of the issue. The potential to create art, acts of purpose, and will, and the freedom to ‘screw up’, closely resemble each other. This is a complex subject, but our remarks will be restricted to periodization, and it also true that the example of the tragic genre, although of special interest, is only one of a whole range.[i]
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution, religion at 5:50 pm by nemo
Comment on One gene away from defeating religion
James said,
February 22, 2009 at 4:14 pm
“We feel that we are the helmsmen of our actions, free to choose, even to sin.
But increasingly, those who study the human brain see our experiences, even of our own intentions, as being an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do.”
This article is probably too stupid and sophomoric to be worthy of reply, but it illustrates the dangers of the attempts to foist the Darwin/reductionist religion on society. It is incredibly irresponsible to draw pernicious conclusions such as this from evidence that is undoubtedly incomplete.
The idea of reducing religion to genetics has been exposed here on this blog a dozen times, but these sillies articles just keep coming.
Just as a quick statement, the fallacy is like confusing the machine code, hardware, for Microsoft Word with the software.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 5:23 pm by nemo
Comment on Free market ideology, biology, and Darwinism
James said,
February 22, 2009 at 11:56 am
“What was meant is that too many biologists/economists/social theorists think there is an analogy.”
You’re certainly right about that. Here is the latest effort of the propagandists:
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/2009/winter/neuroeconomics.html
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Posted in Evolution, History, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:49 pm by nemo
Comment at my review page of Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True
This a reply to a comment puzzling over the eonic effect, and the problems with a three beat, two beat, or one beat sequence. Check out the comment being replied to, it shows some of the problems people have with the eonic model.
I conclude only that something is missing in human evolution. I don’t necessarily generalize to all of evolution.
You denounce this as sophmoric on the basis of one paragraph. Why not follow the evidence over the full range available? It is Darwin’s theory of natural selection that is sophmoric. It is worse, it is childish fantasy to think that Darwin’s scenario could explain the totality of man. This Darwinian fantasy theory is grotesque. This is the proof by insult tactic. Enough.
The point is very simple: no macro forces are considered to exist in human evolution, but we can detect them even in world history!!!! and evolution and history overlap. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 2:59 pm by nemo
gnxp
James Q. Wilson: We may be genetically predisposed to appreciate
listening to Sinatra or staring at a Seurat
http://www.newsweek.com/id/185821
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Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 2:58 pm by nemo
gnxp
Evolution doubters have adopted a new focus for their attacks on
Darwin’s theory: the human brain. They say it’s impossible that a
grouping of cells could produce something as abstract and complex as
consciousness or free will. Brain scientists counter that there’s
plenty of evidence that the brain causes the mind. But they admit
they’re not exactly sure how this happens
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100867217
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 2:56 pm by nemo
A few more words about a creationist’s Review of WIDF Anthology
By Mark Perakh
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/widf.cfm
A review by an ID advocate of the WIDF anthology is an example of how ID proponents pretend that their dreams are reality.
published: Feb 22, 2009
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Posted in Science & Religion at 2:54 pm by nemo
Debate: Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza
Thomas Center
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.thomascenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=162&Itemid=207
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 2:52 pm by nemo
Science is just one gene away from defeating religion
by Colin Blakemore, Guardian
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion
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Posted in environment at 2:21 pm by nemo
Most Wars Occur In Earth’s Richest Biological Regions
ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2009) — In a startling result, a new study published by in the journal Conservation Biology found that more than 80 percent of the world’s major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 occurred in regions identified as the most biologically diverse and threatened places on Earth.
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Posted in global warming at 2:18 pm by nemo
Glaciers In China And Tibet Fading Fast
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2009) — Glaciers that serve as water sources to one of the most ecologically diverse alpine communities on earth are melting at an alarming rate, according to a recent report.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:16 pm by nemo
Single-celled Algae Took The Leap To Multicellularity 200 Million Years Ago
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2009) — Some algae have been hanging together rather than going it alone much longer than previously thought, according to new research.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 2:12 pm by nemo
Published on Sunday, February 22, 2009 by the Huffington Post
The Politics of Bank Nationalization
by Jay Mandle
As a response to the financial crisis, the Bush Administration’s Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) was woefully inadequate. But its implementation brought to a close a nearly thirty year period during which market deregulation was the touchstone of economic policy. Now, market fundamentalism is dead. As a result of the economic free-fall we are experiencing, the question being asked is whether the government’s involvement in the economy is adequately focused or large enough, not whether it should be undertaken at all. Governmental intervention is the new flavor of the month.
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Posted in global warming at 2:09 pm by nemo
Mass Migrations and War: Dire Climate Scenario
by Charles J. Hanley
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – If we don’t deal with climate change decisively, “what we’re talking about then is extended world war,” the eminent economist said.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, politics at 2:06 pm by nemo
Obama: Learn From Lincoln And Do The Right Thing
by Schechter, Danny
As The Economic Situation Declines, He Has To Stop Centrist Diddling
Last week, television was filled with programs marking Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (The official holiday is February 16.) We watched reports on how the civil war erupted and was almost lost by the Union side. We were reminded of how many died and were wounded in that great, national tragedy.
We were also told how Lincoln was often despondent and forced over time to take stronger measures including the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of Slavery, even though, at first, he waffled, compromised, and proposed less definitive measures. Somehow, events end up driving policy and as the war got worse, the president found himself doing things he initially opposed or deflected.
Ultimately, he did move against slavery, justifying freeing the slaves at first as an economic and military blow at the Confederacy. Later he called it a moral issue. His last speech calling for voting rights for some freed slaves was the trigger that sparked racist actor, John Wilkes Booth, to become an assassin.
Today, we seem to be at the beginning of a new civil war, a great economic war with fresh details trickling out every day about how bad it is, and how bad it may get. Many banks are insolvent and companies bankrupt. Millions are out of work. No one knows what will happen. Even as the Stimulus bill was passed, no one is confident it will stem the tide of economic decline. No one.
Today, there are modern Confederates called Republicans even though, in his day, that was Lincoln’s party. Like the obstructionists of the old South, they have closed the door on compromise and are, in effect, seceding from the change agenda that the majority of the voters supported in the 2008 election. Rush Limbaugh’s statement, “I want him to fail,” speaks to and for these defenders of policies responsible for this disaster.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:56 pm by nemo
Could a Sudden Collapse of Mexico Be Obama’s Surprise Foreign Policy Challenge?
By Bill Weinberg, AlterNet. Posted February 19, 2009.
Free-trade politics and the drug war created a social crisis in Mexico, and a militarized response to it may push events to an explosion.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:47 pm by nemo
RG mail
US commander warns American troops will be in Afghanistan for years
February 21, 2009 by sudhan
By Peter Symonds |WSWS, 21 February 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/afgh-f21.shtml
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Posted in Booknotes, you've got mail at 1:44 pm by nemo
“The myth of Reagan is once again debunked. This book lights the way towards a deeper and truer understanding of a life that was more about salesmanship than all else.”
The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
By William Kleinknecht
From the Nation:
The myth of Ronald Reagan’s greatness has reached epic proportions. The public rates him as one of the most popular presidents, and Republicans everywhere seek to cast themselves in his image. But award-winning journalist William Kleinknecht shows in this penetrating analysis of his presidency that the Reagan legacy has been devastating for the country—especially for the ordinary Americans he claimed to represent.
http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/1492
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:41 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-mcmanus22-2009feb22,0,118591.column
Doyle McManus:
Obama’s Iran strategy
The Obama administration is likely to opt for a policy of containment
in the event that Tehran acquires nuclear capabilities.
Doyle McManus
February 22, 2009
President Obama is working against time to untangle 30 years of enmity
and prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, but even his own
advisors know the chance of success is slim.
So they also have been working on Plan B: What do we do if Iran gets
the bomb?
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02.21.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:47 pm by nemo
I have been rereading a number of books on the question (s) of human origins, and ordered this one (cited in WHEE) from Amazon: The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein
This is one of the best on the whole subject, despite the author’s clutching at the straw of the ‘magic mutation’. The basic point is that ca. 50 thousand years ago, in that range, the ‘big leap’ of human evolution must have occured to produce behaviorally modern man.
We need to be careful here and listen to slightly different ‘slower’ style accounts, but the basic issue is clear. The allotments of time don’t (fully) square with gradual evolution.
To put the matter in a nutshell: Darwinian-style accounts make very little sense here because we see the whole sequence of hominids from homo habilis (and/or australopicthecus) to anatomical homo sapies (ca. 150 thousand years ago) over several plus millions of years, yet the crucial period that does almost everything happens suddenly (for 50K years ago, you could also read sometime ‘after 100K’ BCE, before 50K).
This material is prime fodder for the eonic effect: this ‘effect’ shows us a non-genetic, and very spectacular, evolutionary pattern stretching over about ten thousand years, operating with directionality, globally, according to a very specific set of principles.
We can’t be sure, but this is just the kind of situation we seem to see in the Great Leap, or Great Explosion. But biologists are unwilling to let go of their Darwin obsession, even as the evidence points to something else.
I read this book for the second edition, but the issue was only peripheral to the depiction of the eonic effect (lack of space). Read the selection from WHEE here:
The Great Explosion
Make sure you grasp how the dynamics of the eonic effect operates.
This situation is unfair. Contradictory evidence is simply finessed as the critics are ignored.
The Great Explosion Evolutionary theorists have longed puzzled over the sudden advance ca. 50000 (?) years ago at the point man seems to have crossed a threshold to become the recognizably human cultural being that he is in terms of language and culture… Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 4:34 pm by nemo
The evolutionary role of cookery
Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
But it is important to see that within historical times, powerful evolutionary movements are arising to migrate to vegetarianism, viz. Axial India.
And the early modern: vegetarianism is a concealed modern movement and appears very early in the period of the English Civil War. It is a sleeper movement of modernity.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:53 pm by nemo
I posted a comment at my review of Coyne’s book: Why evolution is true, and natural selection false
I don’t know what you mean by ‘professionally’. I know a lot about professionals: most of them are too scared to even talk about evolution in public. Are PhD candidates professionals? They know that they can’t talk the truth on evolution, to obtain employment.
It is therefore pointless to harp on professionals. It is almost impossible to trust their statements, or to determine which ones are sincere and telling the truth.
So in many ways the issue of ‘professionalism’ is misleading: in the final analysis the matter must be taken up by non-professionals.
The question of micro/macro is hard to understand until you see an example: e.g. the model re: the eonic effect (check out my World History And The Eonic Effect link for such material)
It is a point sensed by Lamarck (his theory of adaptation apart): evolution on two levels. One level shows directionality, the other level flat evolution. The one is ‘evolution’, the other a series of other processes, e.g. natural selection, genetic drift, etc… The confusion of these two is longstanding and apparently beyond the capacity of the current generation of Darwinists.
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Posted in selections, The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:41 pm by nemo
Just about the most popular posts on this blog have been those critiquing Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, a text that hopelessly confused the Axial Age question.
World History And The Eonic Effect (get the book!) has a short critique of her treatment (it is a bit too fair, almost):
2.6.1 Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation
The appearance of The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong has introduced a new set of confusions into the question of the Axial Age. Our previous remarks about a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ show how the analysis can go awry if we identify the Axial period with the phenomenon of religion. Thus the subtitle of her work, “The Beginning Of Our Religious Traditions”, is already a distortion of the broader balance we can see if we take into account the total phenomenon, especially the at first anomalous case of the Greek transition. Armstrong’s distinction of mythos and logos, with the comparative puzzlement or denigration of the later, shows the result of the misplaced emphasis on religion. This prejudice against rationality is a reflection of the current postmodern critique of the modern theme of reason so evident in many New Age attacks on modernity, as they call for a new era of spirituality. Armstrong, evidently aware of the first edition of World History and The Eonic Effect, seems uncertain how to proceed, on the one hand noting the modern transformation and yet pointing to the need for a second Axial Age to solve the problem of the dreaded ‘rationality’ spawned by Greeks, the black sheep of the previous Axial Age. The rise of the modern is that ‘second’ Axial Age and it is about a different business than religion.[i]
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:35 pm by nemo
2.5.7 History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?
The issue of history and evolution is a confusing one, and it seems as if we are making a category error. But consider the following question: when did evolution stop and history begin? This tricky question will trip up the Darwinian approach and leave it to collapse in a contradiction. The answer of course is that there couldn’t be an instantaneous switch. We can see that to set a specific date is contradictory. So we must specify a transition between evolution and history. What form would this hybrid take, passing from evolution to history? Either it is all evolution or all history?? Or maybe a series of mini-transitions with evolution dominant then history dominant. In alternation. Now look at the eonic effect: it speaks not just of evolution, but of history and evolution, the two braided together, with history emerging from evolution. And this eonic effect takes the form of a sequence of alternating periods, with evolution (in our sense) dominant during eras of transition, and co-related periods with history (in our sense) dominant. Thus we actually see in history the data matching the deduction about transitions, passing from evolution to history.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:32 pm by nemo
5.4.1 Canaan and ‘Israel/Judah’: The Old Testament Riddle
It is hard, in fact, impossible, to think of any other explanation than that of the eonic effect, for what is bequeathed to us by the redactors of the Old Testament, who, incidentally, lived after the events they purported to describe. It is the eonic ‘smoking gun’, for behind its history, however we reconstruct historical incidents from its account, lies an implicit straddling of the period –900 to –600, with a particular intensity in the period between –750 and afterward, an eonic Bull’s eye, and indirect evidence that stands on its own irregardless of the complete facts.
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