From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jun 20 2004 - 22:26:40 BST
Wim, Mark and all non-fascist MOQers:
Mark Steven Heyman wrote:
Right on que, Platt mentions "The Bell Curve" as scientific evidence
in support of the idea that one "race" of humans is inferior to
another. I was wrong when I said no scientific evidence exists to
support this statement; I should have said no CREDIBLE scientific
evidence.
dmb says:
Racism isn't the only thing Holden and Volger have in common. They are also
both fond of quoting Pirsig's "germ" passages to justify their murderous
hatred. They both think everything left of center is Marxist. They both
think Pirsig is compatible with their fasicst views. Watching the various
threads unfold was both disturbing and amusing. I joked that Platt might
find some friends at Vogel's site. But thanks to Mark's efforts in exposing
the Pioneer fund's fascist heart and deceptively packaged psuedoscience, now
I see that they already had friends in common...
The same MSH wrote:
Platt is also impressed by an advertisement ...signed by 52 "experts",
If you look at the Pioneer Fund web site, you'll see that EVERY major
grantee, who happened to be alive at the time the ad was composed, is
listed among the "expert" signatories. Others of the signatories
have published papers in the fascist journal, Mankind, which is
maintained by Pioneer funds, or in other similar journals. ...A much more
useful list would be the one containing the thousands of names of scientists
who didn't sign the advertisement.
dmb says:
There are parallels in many of the sciences. Bogus science is used to muddy
the waters on issues like global warming and biological evolution, for
example. The right-wingers have hatched think tanks and media outlets that
are equally psuedo-intellectual. Conversatives tend to hate the eggheads and
the elitists, as they like to call them, but they also want the
respectability and status that comes from scientific and intellectual
credibility. They sense that its a good thing that people should have, but
they don't really know waht it is. I mean, Rush Limbaugh doesn't even
deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with Noam Chomsky. Ooops. This
is what Pirsig was talking about when he said social values can be
intellectually defended. But it is the social values that are being defended
and the style or manner hardly matters - except when it serves to hide,
disguise and obscure the substance of the assertion, as is almost always the
case with the pseudointellectual nonsense asserted by Platt and PV. These
guys clearly don't know their crackpots from a hole in the ground...
S.J. Gould:
"'The Bell Curve' ..presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic
social Darwinism, so I can only conclude that its success in winning
attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time -- a historical
moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social
programs can be power-fully abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot
be helped, owing to inborn cognitive limits expressed as low I.Q. scores."
dmb continues:
"Unprecedented ungenerosity" is a very generous way to put it. And it has
become even worse since he wrote it. I believe Platt and Paul and their
sympathizers are quite sincere and simply do not understand that they are on
the wrong side in a larger metaphysical battle, one depicted quite well in
Lila. Platt does not even see that his views are a kissin cousin of the
freak show called Cosmotheism. And VP thinks he is not a racist. He
re-defines the word in a racist way that allows him to escape the charge and
hate the jews at the same time. I would hope that the irrationality, if not
absurdity, of such a move is obvious to all reasonable creatures. But more
importantly, I hope that these guys serve to demonstrate what social level
values look like as they are exhibited in particular individuals. The
titantic battle between social and intellectual values plays it self out in
ways large and small, in different cultures and contexts, but we can learn
to see it well enough to see it in the guy next to us and in ourselves.
Pirsig in LILA:
"The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed this
century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution. This conflict
explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power
but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of
intellectualism."
Ken Wilber in his INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY:
..........................................."Auschwitz is the result of the
many products of rationality being used in irrational ways. Auschwitz is
rationality hijacked by tribalism, by an ethnocentric mythology of blood and
soil and race, rooted in the land, romantic in its dispositions, barbaric in
its ethnic cleansing. You cannot seriously attempt genocide with a bow and
arrow; but you can attempt it with steel and coal, combustion engines and
gas chambers, machine guns and atomic bombs. These are not rational desires
by any definition of rational; these are ethnocentric tribalism
commandeering the tools of an advanced consciousness and using them
presicely for the lowest of the lowest motives. Auschwitz is the endgame,
not of reason, but of tribalim."
dmb says:
Is uncritical patriotism so very different from the "glorification of social
authority". Is racism so very different from an "ethnocentric mythology"?
I'm not saying that Platt is building gas chambers. The differences are
many. But the similarities revolve around the desire to assert social level
values and/or attack intellectual level values. This basic distinction is
what puts fascism and its cousins on the right on the wrong side of the
evolutionary struggle. So, when guys like Platt and Paul imagine that Pirsig
supports their value system, they couldn't be more mistaken. They love a
book in which they are depicted as the enemy of intellect and evolution
itself.
Similarly, one of the more important ideas in drama is that the bad guy is a
hero in his own world. Bad guys who know they are bad guys, like Lex Luther,
are for children, as are superheros. But in books and movies and plays for
us grown ups, the bad guy doesn't know he's a bad guy, cause that's how it
is in real life. Bad guys do not decide to be evil, its just that they are
so badly mistaken, so bloody wrong, that the consequeces of their limited
beliefs are just naturally so. This is true in drama because its true
psychologically. I'm sure Hitler thought himself a hero. So does Bush, who
honestly cannot recall making a mistake. It has to be psychological because
nobody's that stupid. No, it involves a kind of selective blindness that is
more complex than mere dullness of mind and surely is related to our own
personal cultural immmune system that attacks anything that seems alien. And
so when a social level value system encounters intellectual level values,
they are seen as "germs". This explains bot Hitler's anti-intellectualism
and Platt's hatred Chomsky and Zinn in favor of Rush, the Bell Curvers and
the rest of his crypto-fascist mentors. This explains why PV views
legitimate science as a political enemy.
There are a million examples in the world, but why waste two good ones who
are already known so well by all MOQers?
Thanks,
dmb
P.S. Wim, this post was awfully fun for me so you probably ought not read
it.
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