[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', '
')PMS--I was thinking dominatrix gear with sensible orthopedic shoes. That would stun them into silence. (and subservience, perhaps)!

[some_guy282]

Rove is going to get off. I saw this story on CNN. It says Rove told the grand jury he did tell two members of the media about Plame's wife, but that he didn't find out about her from classified documents, but from another reporter. What reporter? Why, Bob Novak of course! Now they can't get him for perjury. And if Novak is pressed to find out where he got the info from, he wont tell. He'll do his little 90 days in jail...

I could use a lot of choice words to describe Rove. Stupid isn't one of them.

[bart]

Related article on the Marx poll from the UK Observer:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.')..In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'.

Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ('It's the economy, stupid'), Cassidy pointed out that 'Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist conception of history", and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.'

Like Molière's bourgeois gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan to write his brilliant study Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (1997).

'Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances,' he wrote, 'and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory. It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us.'
...
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/ ... 50,00.html

[PenultimateManStanding]

Bart, this may be true for people on Wall Street, but it isn't true for me or for many of the members of this forum. My material circumstances are threadbare. I make enough money and nothing more. My mental life is not conditioned by my performance in the marketplace. If anyone around here is conditioned in their thought processes by their material circumstances it would have to be BiGG or maybe JD. The Marxist ideology that mental life is conditioned by material circumstances may apply to Capitalists as a kind of irony of history, but it doesn't apply to honest people.

[bart]

PMS,

I gotta admit that the people on this forum seem to be statistical outliers. At first it appears difficult to make us fit into a general pattern.

But Marx is saying something subtler than you may think.

It's not just that people who benefit from a capitalist system tend to have ideas that support that system. Our consciousness itself is shaped by the system we live in, and by our place within that system.

Because you are on the outskirts of society, it's probably easier for you to see the shortcomings of the prevailing worldview. Yet you and I are formed by this society -- even in our method of rebelling against it. We are rational, verbal, perhaps quantitative, all characteristics of a technological capitalist society. And there are many more ways in which our worldview is determined, whether we like capitalism or not.

It's difficult for us to investigate how our consciousness is formed, since to us it appears as perfectly natural, common sense. As they say, "We don't know who it was that discovered water, but it certainly wasn't a fish!"

The best Marxist thinkers try to understand the nature of our distorted consciousness, and to compensate for it.

For example, many of the attitudes of people on this board are fairly predictable for people from the middle class in times of stress (I don't except myself):
- an intellectual or technical approach
- hyper-individualism
- cynicism
- survivalism
- unrealistic idealism (utopianism)
- anarchism, libertarianism, idealistic socialism
- suspicion of the rich and powerful
- nervousness about the "rabble"

Sometimes these characteristics are helpful, other times not. They definitely are dangerous if we are blindly driven by them.

[lorenzo]

Bart, I've always had one pretty simple question about Marx's notion of 'false consciousness': if there is such a thing as a 'false consciousness', why would Karl Marx himself be able to escape it and to analyze it in an objective manner? How can one get 'outside' of it, as an intellectual (which Marx was)? (Much later, post-structuralists like Deleuze and Derrida will say: there is no 'outside', no 'objective' reality; and the notion of 'representation', both in a political sense as in a linguistic sense, is completely bankrupt. To be more precise: Deleuze said "there is only interiority", his idea of "immanence"; while Derrida said the same thing but came to the conclusion that there is only "exteriority", an endless play of empty signifiers, with the signifié always being pinned down to it, after the fact, by "authoritarian" cultural structures). So this is a question of representation.

As you know, Marx made the switch from writing history books in an early phase (historical representation) to political 'representation' in the strongest sense, in a later phase (with the Manifesto - Lenin later inflated this, with his theory of a spearhead elite).
Marx fused linguistic representation and political representation. But where does his authority to do this come from?

Marxists have always ignored this fact, namely that they themselves and their entire theoretical framework is always already determined ('overdetermined' as they would call it).

They sometimes try to reason themselves out of this contradiction, by stating that you can write the history of capitalism, with a very specific method (historic materialism). If you do this you see the roots of the system, and you can track the gradual formation of this false consciousness. But then, why would the entire theory of historic materialism not be 'stained' already by this supposed false consciousness...?

In other words: why would Marxists be 'representative' or 'representants' of any kind of reality? (As Derrida would say: Marxists erase the trace of themselves being always already determined by the thing they're trying to describe. And this is their violence.)

(Hegel was asked the same question: why would you know that 'dialectics' is the universal law of history? His answer almost came down to violently screaming: "because I am God!" )

I'm not an expert, but do you know how Marxists get out of this simple contradiction? You seem to know a lot about this. Maybe you have an answer.

[bart]

Good questions, lorenzo. I checked out of Marxism and philosophy before Derrida, etc. became popular, so thank God I never had to deal with those dilemmas. You know more about them than I do. They remind me of mirrors within mirrors.

I'm skeptical of carrying any philosophical system to its extremes, especially Marxism. Whenever Marxism claimed absolute status -- that it was an infallible guide to history, science and literature (during Stalinism) -- that's when it was the most bogus and hateful.

If Derrida, etc. are attacking the idea of any philosophy that claims absolute truth, then I'd agree with them. I just found them overly abstract and too fond of paradox. There are other ways to criticize dogmatic Marxism that made more sense to me.

So, are Marxists infallible? NO! They are prone to social influences as anyone else is. But they do have the Marxist method, which can counteract some socially induced delusions.

It's similar to scientists and the scientific method. The method doesn't guarantee truth, but it can help you move in the right direction.

[BiGG]

"Keys to Paradise": Marx on Religion

The most famous quote from the work of Karl Marx (and one of the most controversial statements in all of philosophy) is his frank assertion that religion "is the opium of the people" (141).1 This pithy comment is indeed a good summation up Marx’s straightforward appraisal of religion, which he said "eased pain even as it created fantasies" for those masses of oppressed workers suffering at the hands of a powerful few (141).

As a functionalist, Marx insisted that religion does not exist independently, but only operates "to satisfy other needs or conditions" (158). He was convinced that "religion is so fully determined by economics that it is pointless to consider any of its doctrines or beliefs on their own merits" (138). For Marx, religion serves only to comfort and placate the poor and wretched, while simultaneously justifying and protecting the privilege of those in control, and therefore it "should not only be dismissed, but dismissed with scorn" (139).

Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater

[lorenzo]

Well Bigg, isn't the irony of Marxism that it started out as the first genuine celebration of pure materialism, but ended up as being its total opposite, namely messianic?

[EdF]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', '.')..Then I'd give them something by Philip K Dick. ...

[threadbear]

Economic theories are reductionist in nature, a one size fits all approach to life, but they still have some use, if that is born in mind. Marx's over arching idea, that capital eventually ends up in the hands of a very few, we'll be learning first hand. It's a simple and elegant idea that actually DOES capture the essence of a Capitalist system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources.

Capitalism without checks and balances degrades to a sort of piracy.

[Eli]

Here is an article that shows clearly why there is no story or crime here even if half of what is written in it is true. The media has written a friend to the court brief in which they argue Plames identity was blown long before the Novak and Rove story.
The media admit that no crime was committed. NRO with link w/i To the brief

[EdF]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Eli', 'H')ere is an article that shows clearly why there is no story or crime here even if half of what is written in it is true. The media has written a friend to the court brief in which they argue Plames identity was blown long before the Novak and Rove story.
The media admit that no crime was committed. NRO with link w/i To the brief

[Bandidoz]

What has this thread got to do with energy?

[EdF]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bandidoz', 'W')hat has this thread got to do with energy?

[Eli]

agreed this thread should be moved.
the friend of the court brief This is what I think is interesting granted the source is defiantly right wing I had not heard about the friend of the court brief in which the media argue NYT CNN ABC ect. argue that no crime was committed.

[EdF]

Eli, Thanks for posting the brief.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I can understand the position of the media that confidentiality of sources should not be breached without compelling reasons - I agree with that. On the other hand, the compelling going on here may be exactly to determine whether a crime occurred. In the end, I suspect that there will be no prosecution for a crime, given the high criteria of the particular law.

[Carrie]

*Sigh*... This isn't good. Looks like Fitzgerald's boss is going to be leaving, and guess who's probably going to replace him?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he departure this week of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who has accepted the post of general counsel at Lockheed Martin, leaves a question mark in the probe into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Comey was the only official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation. With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recused, department officials say they are still trying to resolve whom Fitzgerald will now report to. Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is "likely" to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale.

[gg3]

I read a bunch about this development today. Apparently Fitz's present boss is mad at Bush for choosing Gonzales rather than himself for Attorney General. And as a result, he is leaving for private practice, but he has also taken good care to seal things up quite tightly, such that his replacement will be unable to do a whole slew of Bad Things to Fitz & the investigation.
In any case, here's a useful meme for the new nominee:
RECUSAL OR FILIBUSTER.

That is, the new guy would have to recuse himself from the case or the Dems will block his nomination. And while we're on the subject of filibuster: Secret societies are a conflict of interest. Who knows what oaths those people swore by candle-light in some cave, and how they might conflict with their official duties? If there's nothing sinister about those "societies," why the secrecy? In this day & age of terrorism and heightened scrutiny of matters that were once private; and especially in wartime, and especially after the whole Chalabi spy affair, the public deserve answers.

And, relevant to one of the main threads on this BBS, the guy had FOURTEEN CHILDREN! That IMHO is an automatic disqualifier: reckless reproduction, reckless disregard for his wife's health, sex-drive on overdrive, ape-level genetic propagation program gone wild, no sense of restraint or self-discipline.

I'm not insisting on a 1-kid policy for these people. But think of how many standard-deviations beyond the mean average reproductive rate he is. Fourteen kids is probably five standard deviations off the mean: 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000. That is not mainstream. That is extreme. And that is an understatement.

[Carrie]

Rumour Alert! Indictments are said to be imminent:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he D.C. rumor mill is thrumming with whispers that 22 indictments are about to be handed down on the outed-CIA agent Valerie Plame case. The last time the wires buzzed this loud — that Tom DeLay would be indicted and would step down from his leadership post in the House — the scuttlebutters got it right.