Conceptual Normativity

A rough-and-ready guide to what the deal is with philosophy, sort of

2008-07-17T10:16:00.003-06:00

I agree that a lot of people have misconceptions of what philosophy does, or should do, or what its methodology is. This isn't helped by some philosophers who are arrogant (although this problem can be found all across academia and beyond), or write obtusely (especially in the "continental tradition" and "critical theory"). But a lot of the problem comes from the way in which philosophy is apparently either (1) unreasonably difficult or (2) remote from a potential student's actual life. These latter problems probably arise because philosophy, the real stuff, is difficult, and serious study is required to grasp the subtleties involved---but then electrical engineering is also difficult and requires intense study, and I don't hear anyone complaining about that---and because you have to care about something other than half-baked sophistry when grasping that what matters to your life is more than prescriptions for behavior in everyday situations.

So for instance meta-ethics is important because its subject matter is the foundations of ethics, and we care about ethics, so we should care about meta-ethics (a formalizable ethical theory would have to begin from axioms the existence and discovery of which is part of the meta-ethical subject matter). But not everyone has the time or interest to study meta-ethics; this doesn't make it not worthwhile. Again, this stuff is hard; you don't see people demanding that electrical engineers be required to provide brief and---because of their condensed size---inaccurate tidbits of useful electrical engineering knowledge.

The first point is that there are topics in philosophy that are valuable whether or not it's to your taste to study them.

Humans aren't by nature particularly good at deductive logic; nor are they quick with any sort of complicated statistical reasoning (Bayesian induction with lots of priors made explicit, say). Doing good philosophy requires learning how to understand and make good arguments, and that by itself takes a good deal of time. The fact that good arguments are hard doesn't take away from their effectiveness except in a practical sense. The subtlety and complexity of most good (philosophical) arguments makes them appear to people not equipped to handle them, that is, most people, obtuse, but that does not mean that the arguments aren't cogent. Nor does the difficulty imply that philosophers are doing something wrong; the reason that deep questions don't have easy answers is that the questions are hard and require a lot of work to even understand properly. To think otherwise is simply to demonstrate superficial knowledge of the subject.

The second point is that difficulty in doing philosophy does not in any way make it less than a legitimate research paradigm.

As to what philosophy should do, as a third point, all I'll say is that at the most general level, philosophy attempts to understand and answer questions that can't be answered by the special sciences.

That relationship is interesting. Historically, all branches of inquiry fall under philosophy until an area of investigation is singled out for investigation by empirical means ---philosophy is, broadly, not different from the sciences in that it seeks answers to questions, or truths. (IIRC, Kant was the "Queen of the sciences" guy, and he said it of philosophy, not mathematics.) More recently, probably due in part to positivism, philosophy has come to be seen to be divorced from the physical sciences, but this was not always the case (see for instance that astrophysicist Malcolm Longair is a chair of "Natural Philosophy" at Cambridge). Aristotle did physics and biology as well as ethics and metaphysics; after the Renaissance the "scientific method" was more or less introduced and a priori inquiry was suddenly less relevant to physics, chemistry, and so forth. But note that for example thought experiments are still a methodology philosophy employs in common with these fields. Similarly, psychology began in the 19th century to diverge from philosophy (James might be the last point of genuine convergence). Despite these separations, philosophy is still relevant to understanding the underpinnings of the physical-scientific endeavor; example problems are with respect to physics the problem of induction and the nature of natural laws, and regarding biology the study of natural kind concepts. The latter are interesting because it shows there are topics that can yield truths that the special sciences can't themselves answer. I think these considerations indicate that philosophy in general is not sui generis but is better regarded as one of the sciences, if a peculiar one in some regards.

But because the questions remaining to philosophy are often of an a priori nature, it may seem that the subject matter of philosophy is different from that of the other sciences. I posit that the strongest reading of such a claim is obviously false, since mathematics and logic overlap with philosophy in such a way as to make any distinction among them arbitrary. MPhil has suggested that the subject matter of philosophy is concepts, or perhaps more broadly language and concepts, exclusively. I've suggested to him that he read Timothy Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy, and I recommend it to anyone else interested, although you should be aware that it's directed to an audience of philosophers and addresses them as tending to isolate themselves; the introduction and first chapter are a fair taste of what he's up to, if you haven't the time or inclination to slog through the whole of the book. It seems to me fairly straightforward, however, that if philosophy of science is relevant to our understanding of how "the world" is, and if our epistemology is relevant to what we can know about the world, and most especially if our ethical theories are supposed to ultimately issue in prescriptions for action in the world, then the subject matter isn't clearly bounded by what are "the conceptual questions" or to "relations between concepts" or to metaphysical questions, or ones about "analytic truths", just as the special sciences are not clearly bounded but blend into one another, even if there are some (many) questions that clearly belong to one or another of them.

So a fourth point is that it's not clear to me why I should regard a science/philosophy dichotomy as legitimate for any but purposes of crude approximation.

Finally, the purpose of what looks like verbal gymnastics is for the most part either (in good philosophy) required for accuracy, or (in poor philosophy) just as annoying to philosophers because it hides poor arguments. Telling the difference takes work (I think MPhil mentioned the example of P. Churchland's demonstration that the (original) Mary case involves equivocation). "What do you mean by ___ ?" is a perfectly legitimate method for clarifying what's at issue; surely no one advocates beginning a discussion the topic of which one doesn't understand.

[Context: crossposted over here (mostly).]

Causes and effects: some reminders

2008-04-11T12:54:00.003-06:00

There's much made of two arguments for the existence of a god. The first is the argument from design. This nefarious piece of bad reasoning is behind the immensely silly intelligent design "science" (lies) "movement" (insurgency). The idea is supposed to be that the world displays such intricate order that it must have a designer. Yet there is no reason to suppose this is true. Why couldn't matter at high energies self-organize? It doesn't require a will in order that regularities and patterns should arise. A variant of this denies the weak anthropic principle (that clearly we are in this universe because if it were otherwise we couldn't exist, which implies nothing about how "likely" it is that our universe could exist), claiming that we must be living in a designed universe, for how else is it that things could be so supposedly friendly to us? Part of the answer is to point out that almost the entire universe is inhospitable to humans. Another part is simply to point back to the weak anthropic principle: in universes where observers can't exist, they don't. And finally, ask yourself how the universe would look if there had been no designer. (I borrow from Wittgenstein, who once asked how it would look if, instead of the sun going around the earth, the earth rotated.) If you think the universe is designed, then you can't say what a nondesigned universe would be like: you've never seen a nondesigned thing. But if that's the case, why suppose it would be somehow different than what we do see? If you can't make sense of the alternative, there's agood chance you're working with a tautology or circular reasoning, and indeed the assumption that order requires a designer functions in such arguments as just such an implicit circularity-generating premise.

The second argument is the supposed cosmological argument, according to which, briefly, there must be an ultimate cause to the universe, and that cause is God. Let's set aside the obvious question why, just because there is a cause, that cause is anything like what major religions claim God is like. (You just can't get, for example, Allah or JHWH or Vishnu out of "ultimate cause".) The argument goes like this: every event has a cause, therefore there must be a cause of everything, the only thing that could cause everything is an omnipotent being, therefore God exists. Let's ignore the fallacious use of definition to support the reasonableness of the third premise, since if the universe isn't infinitely large it doesn't need an omnipotent cause, and if it is in fact just one thing ("a universe") you would only need a cause that can cause one thing; similarly we ignore the gerrymandering of the definition of "omnipotent" since it's not at all clear what that would be, if coherent. Instead focus on the second and first premises. The logical form of these two items is: (1) for all x, x has a cause; (2) there exists some y such that for all x, y causes x. (I'm ignoring intervening causes for simplicity, but that makes no matter.) But this is just terrible logic, for the (1) does not support (2): this is like saying, "There are three things, and all of them have a cause, therefore there is one thing that caused all of them." It just doesn't follow, unless "has a cause" really means "is caused by the original cause", but that would be circular. So, even if we grant that everything has a cause (and it's not clear we should, in light of the facts,e.g. quantum mechanics), the argument falls at the first fence. Now we might question whether something can come from nothing. Fair enough, but this truth, if it is one, says nothing about God, since it might be that there is some non-god causal chain that goes infinitely in both temporal directions. If on the other hand Hawking is right that there is a beginning to time, then it's not clear what it would mean for the Big Bang event to have a cause. If it means a nonphysical cause, then this will end up being question-begging again.

The problem with both arguments is reliance on some principle about the willing of Creation as an implicit premise of the argument, in each case one that makes the argument turn out circular and so worthless. Clearly the causal order of things is nothing to which we can appeal in discussing the positive evidence for the supernatural. Note also that improbability in a very large universe over a large time scale in addition to various other factors such as human gullibility and a misunderstanding of probability explains the occurrence of supposed miracles, and these too can therefore not be thought of as anything like positive evidence of the supernatural.

Always good to know...

2008-03-04T16:15:00.000-06:00

Groovy.

Weather Report

2008-02-21T06:58:00.001-06:00

Depression, like a stalker, waits impatiently in the dark alleys behind everyday life; the brain, unable to cope with its own processes and products, turns inward, criticizing; like hot stale phosphoric rain, smelling of burnt hardboiled eggs, it faintly sickens and permeates each nook and cranny of thought; there is an 80% chance that a chance encounter will induce panic, and the panic self-recrimination, and the self-recrimination obsession, and the obsession loss of focus; rapidly dropping barometer readings indicate a high likelihood of hangovers in the near future, assisting in no positive way; self-destructive behavior to follow on the weekend accompanied by showers of meaningless gestures, posturing, and other hypocrisies; next week, expect a cold comfort front accompanying renewed but hollow work-related successes.

Long-awaited non-update

2008-02-10T08:44:00.000-06:00

Hello internet. We've been neglecting you. We promise we might publish something here in the near future. That is all.

(Twitter: internet crack.)

Eau de toilette: because you haven't bathed in months

2007-08-10T12:19:00.000-06:00

There Is No Reason to Believe a Reason Is a Reason

2007-07-25T13:20:00.000-06:00

Abstract
The views of H. A. Prichard and Philippa Foot are compared in regard to their responses to a certain type of skeptical problem apparently central to metaethics: the problem of giving reasons sufficient to show or justify the claim that moral reasons are, in fact, reasons for everyone to act. Both authors do not address the question directly but rather aim to show that the skeptic has not asserted anything about the ground, or lack thereof, ultimately justifying the reasonhood of moral considerations. I agree that such a question cannot be formulated, and trace the problem to a need for certainty, rather than the pointing out of some heretofore obscured fact.

1The purpose of this essay is to compare two disparate ethicists in the hope of finding an appropriate general answer to the question “Why ought I to act morally?” Whether the question is asking for a reason to do what is right or a reason to aim at the good, or something along these lines, whatever the answer to the question it must not be given on moral grounds, for that threatens to become circular immediately. The question in the form I want to ask it here does not rely on a particular formulation; the question is the one that arises when our self-interest indicates acting contrary to what is morally correct, and it requests some fact or argument that will convince the interrogator that she has most, overriding, or even only reason to do the morally correct action.[1]

Let us call the problem rising from a request for such rational persuasion the
“justification problem.” It is formulated by H. A. Prichard as a request for proof that one has reason* to do what is morally correct (to do “what one ought”). Prichard’s intuitionism holds that a primitive moral sense is the origin of our regarding an action as right; and he accepts a negative answer to the justification problem: no proof could be given. The discovery of what is, in fact, morally correct to do informs the development of the moral sense, which may be more or less correct in normal adults, presumably according to the quality of their moral education, but this is a question whether an act is really right—obligatory—not whether one has reason to do right. (We shall assume that agents are correct in their judgments of the rightness, or goodness, of actions.) Philippa Foot formulates the justification problem in terms of how it can conform to practical rationality to do what is morally correct when this conflicts with self-interest. Her solution positive in that properly a functioning faculty of practical rationality recognizes relevant reasons for acting virtuously rather than otherwise; but she, too, does not aim at providing a proof that one really has reason to act as one ought. It is my contention that Foot’s response is superior to Prichard’s in that it provides an explanation of reasons for acting rightly rather than appealing to a primitive, motivating moral sense triggered by the recognition of the rightness of an action.

In the next section I will examine Prichard’s version of the justification problem, then compare his argument with Foot’s. I conclude that their responses, which
dissolve or remove the question rather than treating the justification problem as a
genuine problem, are appropriate. The worry behind the genesis of skeptical formulations of this nonproblem is, I suggest, one about confidence or a sort of psychological causation that will result in rational agents hearing the answer to the question actually acting well or aiming to do right. I begin with a well-known and notoriously difficult paper of Prichard’s, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” (1912).

2
Prichard’s formulation of the justification problem is one about knowledge. Specifically, the knowledge that one really has reason to do what one feels obligated to do. Assume for the sake of argument that we happen always to be correct that what we feel obligated to do is in fact the morally right action, so that “what one is obligated to do” carries also the claim that one feels so obligated. A morally right action is contrasted with a good or virtuous action. An act of charity may be good an virtuous, for instance, but it is not moral unless it is also what one is in fact obligated to do and one does it because of a feeling of obligation to do that act. That is, an act is done morally when it is the right action in the circumstances and it is done from a sense of duty or obligation. In actual circumstances it may turn out that we feel obligated to A-ing, while our self-interest or “happiness” (1912: 2) apparently gives us a prima facie reason for B-ing. Upon reflection we might ask whether what we are obligated and feel obligated to do is something that we have most, only, or as I shall say overriding reason to do. The question “Is that really a reason?” is supposed to push past morally significant facts (e.g. that A-ing is just, or that it is the only thing everyone would assent to) and require as answer something that appeals to rationality: a “proof ” (see e.g. 1912: 1 and 16). Such a proof, it would seem, proceeds from some self-evident premises and by deduction shows that what one has reason to do is what is morally right whenever doing the right conflicts with pursuit of happiness. A reasonable conjecture seems to be that one might begin by analyzing the notion of a reason for action in searching out the premisses for such a proof; the knowledge that one really has overriding reason to A-ing consists in it, if there is one, which according to Prichard there is not.

The central negative claim of Prichard’s article “there is no such knowledge”
(1912: 16) because the very formulation of the problem is confused: the question
is “Illegitimate.” He explains via an analogy with an apparent regress problem in
epistemology, the question how one knows whether a state of knowledge is really a
state of knowledge. A clearer formulation of that problem shows that what is at issue is really “doubt whether our previous belief was true, a belief which we should express as the thinking that [Φ(α)]” (1912: 15). It makes no sense to question whether a state of knowledge is a state of knowledge, but it does to question whether a certain state was one of knowledge, and the former question is illegitimate, which is to say not a question at all. Similarly, the demand for a proof that one has reason to do what one is obligated to do is no demand at all: the question cannot be formulated. In short, there is no justification problem. I want now to turn to Foot’s version of the justification problem.

3
The exposition in Natural Goodness is plainly not aimed at the exact problem—or nonproblem—that Prichard addresses. In fact, she is concerned most centrally with “subjectivism” and the views of those who have good reason to be in sympathy with Prichard on the question of the source of reason to act correctly: emotivists and prescriptivists (2001, see Chapter 1 “A Fresh Start?”). For an intuitionist like Prichard claiming the moral rectitude of A-ing would proceed from an expression of a feeling of obligation to A. Unlike the later sub jectivists Prichard would back up the having of such a feeling by pointing to publicly available facts to be taken into consideration in the circumstances; in other words, it can be ob jectively correct that one is in fact obligated to do as one feels one is obligated. The subjectivists on the other hand would claim that since feelings (or attitudes, or other psychological features) cannot be justified on rational grounds, there is a point beyond which one has nothing to appeal to in order to prove that one’s expression of approbation or prescription for action is ob jectively correct. The similarity between the views ends after the claim that moral motivation proceeds from a feeling or attitude with an ethical or moral character. Still, the subjectivist position can be interpreted as rejecting the possibility that one can give reasons of a nonmoral kind which constitute knowledge that one ob jectively has reason to do right.

Moreover, that is the sort of objection behind this problem, which arises out of pseudo-anthropological considerations yielding information about what sorts of things are conducive to human flourishing—i.e. excellence qua human being or eudemia—that provides the objective standard grounding evaluation of behavior: that “human beings as rational creatures can ask why what has so far been said should have any effect on their conduct” (2001: 52). When we ask this why-question, what is asked for is some consideration that, if rationally accepted by an agent, constitutes knowledge that what she has reason to do is what all things considered she ought to do. Morally good actions in Prichard’s sense, duties done from a motivating feeling of obligation, are only a small subset of actions that are good (virtuous) in Foot’s sense, constituting actions displaying the virtue of dutifulness. Right actions on Foot’s view are a function of “full practical rationality” (2001: 14); they are what one ought to do “all things considered” (2001: see 56-59).[2] Full practical rationality will never yield, all things considered, reason to act viciously, and so to act contrary to dutifulness when duty is, in fact, the relevant virtue in the circumstances (circumstances in which no virtue is to be or can be expressed we leave aside). So is Foot’s claim that there is something that goes on with full practical rationality, some process of reasoning about what to do, that yields knowledge that what one has in fact overriding reason to do is what is “right” (trivially), what is good, whenever that conflicts with self-interest? If so, her view would conflict with the considerations Prichard brought to bear.

The answer to that question is, in a word, no: she, like Prichard, uses limits on the intelligibility of the skeptical question to show that there is in fact no demand for reasons being made. The argument runs parallel to the claim that one has overriding reason to do what one ought whenever this conflicts with self-interest. For Prichard grasp of the relevant considerations yields via “moral thinking” the conclusion that A-ing is right, and this produces the motivating feeling of obligation. Feeling a moral obligation is a product of apperception—of immediate, which is to say un-reflective, even “unconscious,” reaction to information processed by the general reasoning faculty. A properly functional moral thinking faculty therefore in its nature produces a motivational[3] state. For Foot grasp of the relevant considerations yields via “practical rationality” the conclusion that A-ing is not vicious; prudence—a virtue sometimes considered one of self-interest—may sometimes trump other virtues. So the precise question Prichard is concerned with turns out for Foot’s view to be a question which of the virtues is the one that all things considered should be exemplified in the circumstances. I do not examine how she would handle the possibility of such a conflict. Rather I mean to have her view address a related problem brought by a “skeptic”: why one should do what the virtuous person “must” do (2001: 64). The skeptic rejects that she must accept that she has reason to do right—i.e. to act well—because she sees no fact treated as a relevant consideration, from which to conclude that she has overriding reason to act well.

Foot does not claim that there is a way to gain knowledge, or proof, that one really has reason to do right; she, like Prichard, treats the relevant question as unintelligible, that is, as no question at all. The skeptic’s demand for reasons, that is for justification, might be answered with (M) facts in light of which a certain act is virtuous or vicious in the circumstances, which is not really skeptical in that it is looking for mundane information: moral reasons such as that A-ing redresses a wrong done and is thereby just, or (R) facts about why acting fully practically rationally just is acting well, or (P) something else, perhaps a proof in the transcendental, Kantian sense. Foot provides R by pointing out that practical rationality is the sort of thing that takes relevant features of the circumstances as practical considerations (call them prima facie reasons, see 2001: 58-9), so there is no need to give “reasons” for taking relevant facts into consideration. If one has the faculty of practical rationality at all one will be taking facts into consideration. It follows from examination of the concept of practical reason that if one’s practical reasoning is working properly, it will not (in ideal circumstances) leave things out, consider irrellevancies, or mis-“weight” the prima facie reasons. That is what practical reasoning consists in. Further skepticism, however, becomes senseless, for to “ask for a reason for acting rationally is to ask for a reason where reasons must a priori have come to an end.” There is no non-rational and non-irrational standpoint from which to ask for rational justification of acting rationally; acting more or less rationally is the mode of action for humans. If another type of justification is required, i.e. non-moral and non-rational “justification,” the burden will be on the skeptic to explain what this might be a demand for.

4
So far we have seen two views aiming to answer a single type of problem. These
two views reply to that problem in the same fashion: by dissolving the apparent problem rather than attempting to answer a non-question. I shall for convenience
call it a skeptical question regarding the ultimate “justification” for doing what one ought. Both Prichard and Foot address skeptical questions, and give similar answers. Prichard answers a narrower skeptical question than Foot; his topic can be seen to be subsumed under hers. Prichard’s skeptic appears to request justification of type P, that is a proof of some kind and not a mere fact, while Foot’s skeptic appears to ask for reasons that are perhaps M, perhaps R, perhaps P. The similarity betweenthe views becomes more apparent if Prichard’s skeptic is rephrased as asking why her moral sense is reason-giving. Their replies to the skeptic are the same in that both regard demands for P not as demands at all but as failed attempts to pose a
question.

Prichard denies that it is possible to give a relevant non-moral justification. The
ought of moral judgments must come in as part of a premiss of a moral justification (it does not appear in the conclusion ex nihilo). But no such justification is necessary since obligation isn’t the sort of thing that demands independent justification; the feeling of obligation is motivating and thereby a reason—it makes no sense to request a reason to accept that a reason is a reason. In her (1977) Foot put forward the claim that all moral judgments take the form of hypothetical imperatives; in effect, claims that one ought to do this or that take the form “If you aim to be virtuous, and A-ing is the virtuous action in the circumstances, then do A.” That is, there is nothing that will cause one to aim at virtue, as it were, that constitutes a justification for doing so. Foot’s (2001) method of getting around this apparent difficulty is, like Prichard, to accept that there is no non-moral justification for doing right, for again there does not need to be. It makes no sense to request a reason to act on reasons; one accepts a reason as such as soon as one notices that it is a reason.[4] Asking for a reason to do so would not be to engage in a regress of the kind Prichard disparages in the theory of knowledge, but rather not to ask a question at all. One might as well ask whether the piece of paper in our hands as a piece of paper.

5
There may still be skeptical tendencies amongst moral philosophers, expecially those of a Kantian bent, because they may have been trained to attempt a priori proofs, and so are perhaps persuaded that one can show why someone who rejects that one has overriding reason to do what one ought has simply missed out on something. I regard the denial of the existence of a problem in this connexion as the correct response. It is difficult to imagine some way to prove that the premisses of such a proof should be accepted, and so forth. Rather, we should see that it is a part of human action, that complex, however theoretically described, of considering facts, concluding that some action is what one will do and doing so, that we think there are justifications to which we can appeal which make our actions “rational”—reasons. We might for instance notice that Anscombe’s analysis of the intentionality of action (1963) in terms of a possible appeal to reasons allows for a variety of mechanisms by which facts come to be taken as reasons and to be weighed against each other. It does not seem disputable that intentional actions, the kind for which we are most often morally culpable, essentially involve reasons (even if these turn out to be “mere” facts that explain only a causal relation between a past event and an action).

The quest for reasons to accept that one has overriding reason to do right in most circumstances (if not all) is, I think, misguided. At least some of the skeptics have confused a justificatory relation for a causal one. That is, the request for “reasons” to believe that one has reason to act well is in fact a request for something that will actually cause the skeptic to believe that she has such reasons. One can imagine a pathology the symptom of which is claiming to accept some fact as a reason for A-ing but nevertheless claiming that she does not have reason to A. The skeptic, similarly, wants something to make her certain, and this we need not supply, for such facts as we have at our command are not “a sort of medicine which is taken in the hope that it will work” (Foot, 1977a: 104). Our best strategy, then, will be to give everyone a proper moral education, so that by the time a child reaches an age where she can formulate the skeptical pseudo-question, she does not feel the worry which prompts it.

Notes:
[1] In the interest of avoiding unnecessary complication I shall waive discussion whether moral reasons (i.e. the immediate reason prompting a particular action) are overriding, decisive, greater in some magnitude, or exclusive. I adopt the terminology ‘overriding’ with the caveat that I regard it as neutral on the question (once one has accepted that one has reason to do what is morally correct) what the relation is in which one’s reason to do what is morally correct is more than one’s reason to pursue one’s self-interest.“What one has reason to do” may be cashed out in any of those ways without turning the thrust of the present argument, since it is concerned with the question whether one really has reason to do what is morally correct rather than how that reason stands to one’s reasons to do otherwise. I take “self-interest” not to include some ultimate self-realization or telos of which the agent is not (and often could not be) aware of; it has to do with such mundane things as love, money, and power.
[2] Here Foot appeals to Davidson’s “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (2001) in her account of what it means for all things to be considered.
[3] That is not yet to say "reason-constituting."
[4] I take it that accepting a reason is a sort of “mental act” not dissimilar to mentally, which is to say without speaking or using pen and paper, adding two and two.

References:
* Anscombe, G. E. M. 1963. Intention, second edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.
* Davidson, D. 2001a (1980). “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” reprinted in
Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Foot, P. A. 1958. “Moral Arguments” reprinted in (Foot 1977), pp. 96-109. Origi-
nally published in Mind, vol. 67.
* —— 1972. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” reprinted in (Foot
1977), pp. 157-73 with additional material. Originally published in The Philosophical
Review, vol. 81, no. 3, July.
* —— 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* —— 1977. Virtues and Vices, and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
*Mackie, J. L. 1998. “The Sub jectivity of Values” reprinted in J. Rachels (ed.) Ethical Theory 1: The Question of Objectivity, pp. 59-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Prichard, H. A. 1912. “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Mind, vol. XXI,
no. 81, January. Repinted in Prichard, H. A. 1968. Moral Obligation, and Duty and
Interest, pp. 1-17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. References are to the 1968
pagination.

You can tell it's good 'cause it gets all milky when you leave it out overnight.

2007-07-25T10:04:00.000-06:00

...superball.

Barbara

2007-06-30T18:08:00.000-06:00

04:30 woke me to spattering
furtive rain
low clouds and the aftermath of a
storm someone else experienced
to the North. Late.
Dad says, she looks gray as gray.

I had to book another flight
the distance to the first one was now
out of reach by car. So I
spent, lifted, drove, checked
slid through security.
Not even my buttons are metal.
(They say the Sidhe abide neither
iron nor tune, and a pitchfork's
handy at a New Oleanian wake.)

After these rusted hours
I saw my matriarch in her
cloud pale green bedsheets
deflated
like a punctured volleyball her skull
stands out from the pillow
flesh laid back by planetary mass
liquid inside the skin, her arms bones
wavering as she gestures.

She waves at her guests, their words
low hollow loud over the blow
of O₂
and hers thin like river rushes
an oboe playing Taps
when she says she's
bored (tired)
in this place without even
televisual hypnotic medication.

So this, I think, when looking down
––Mother and pastor praying with her––
on her supine grace, slate eyes
overwhelmed and lungs
near to giving up wind and psuché,
is what staring ten thousand miles into an
uncertain reward is. Jehovah I wish
I believed in you so my curses
would have a chance to prick and pierce.

She and I have naught to discuss
as we have not been so close
as we use to be, but
still she is, lying there, my ancestor
and besides even if I didn't owe her
something I oblige myself
to try magic for loved ones.

Her flesh is warm and dry, feels
like a soft tortilla over hard
veins, pushed by ever-increasing heartrate
as gas exchange fails
and the antibiotics may save her
long enough for tumors
to finally
do her in. And if I want to
scream at the sky
motherfucker
that's nothing beside what
boils behind her slate colored
eyes, hair, skin.

If I could pray, I would pray for her
to go before it's too late.
If I could cry, I would shed sugary
water on the drooping blooms of a
lily growing from a mound of limestone gravel.

She has a tray with cold tea,
a styrofoam ice cup and pencil.
On the counter by the wall, a small
jar of baby food: apple sauce,
eaten just down to the label
no spoon in sight.

Cytotoxic chemicals yellow flowing
from one of four IV bags
and piss dripping yellow-brown
from a catherter,
these tubes are now outside
vessels and veins
for the water between her hair
and toes, her lymph––blood––
mucus––sweat system;

all regulated
filled to overcapacity
to saturate her tissues
with life-preserving elements
just long enough
to enter hospice,
where it's a little nicer to die than
here overlooking a parking lot
and thunderheads
from the top floor
no one wants
to pass by the terminal
elderly on their way
to visit their
recovering
kin.

It's time's falling quarter rainbow
––in a fading daguerreotype––
a piebald horse leaping from a whitewashed
platform under wet skies
while a street orchestra
blasts its horns drunkenly,
to the tune of Bachhus' suicide,
and sounds like watching a rocket fall
on a child in a gods-forsaken desert,
and emotional stability
approaches Ø. But the horror
of it stays behind the eyes
out of lips' reach.

Her hand is still warm
I grasp it to make my goodbyes
at the end of visiting hours the sun
sets temporarily while the solstice approaches
she smiles so sweetly that I can't help but fly
away inside while my face cracks and cleaves.
My eyes convey happiness in seeing her
before I laid eyes that wax simulacrum
recumbent in a ponderously floating box
on its way downstream into
black northern soil where the giants live
and her husband waits with a cigarette.

driven by a tempest, or at least a rainstorm, writing strikes

2007-06-23T23:20:00.001-06:00

hello words
you are appearing like auto-
magic beneath my eyes and finger-
tips, like kisses' lips
in my mental space
I'm a basket case
but at least my hips
support and trace a graceful swell
between myself and
whatever else
like sleeping, tucked
birds, these words
slip slowly smoothly sinisterly
from my right
---in the rearview---
onto a timy page where,
unpaper though it may be
a shy mystery from my wine-
softerned grip falls
and splashes
kohl-coloured and fine
precious as well
into these thirty (?) lines
in glyphs so familiar
the semiotics can never be parsed
to the root, for a pillar
stands over them stone
and standing and ever
over, for never over it tips
but, having fell,
slips itself into erotic
imagery brought about
by speech through a screen
labial and soft bending
out of these electrons bursting forth
like Her Wisdom from
and unworthy brow
to enter in and once gaining purchase
reverse, guage, and magnify
all the thoughts I allow
and do not allow
will come by and by
back to words

Your inner nerd needs to change inner underwear...

2007-05-25T21:00:00.001-06:00

...nnnnnnow.

Your pre-existing beliefs influence your attitude toward allowed levels of coercion falling short of Date Rape.

2007-05-12T15:37:00.000-06:00

This study suggests that having certain beliefs and attitudes toward women and sex, specifically relating to justifications for interpersonal violence and levels of trust toward women as a generalized group, is strongly correlated with acceptance of behavior norms that are (arguably, if you're an ass) conducive to perpetuation of the patriachically-approved culture of rape in this country: the "she wanted it" (secretly, once I had forced myself on her) because "she didn't complain" (because she was terrified of me) excuse.

Sexually aggressive men who reported a cognitive style that distrusted women and justified interpersonal violence (i.e., calloused sexual beliefs) took significantly longer to stop the date rape than either sexually aggressive men without this rape supportive cognitive set or nonaggressive men, who did not differ significantly on decision-making. Laboratory judgments also corresponded with naturalistic decisions as the sexually aggressive group was nearly 3 1/2 times more likely than the nonaggressive group to delay stopping the tape [simulating a date rape] until it reached intervals containing verbal threats and forced intercourse within the scenario. Although this study did not manipulate character alcohol consumption per se, it suggests that dispositional and cognitive factors, such as sexual aggression history and rape supportive cognitions, are important determinants of judgments and decisions in sexual encounters.

Yes, Virginia and Victor, there are such things as rape-supportive cognitions. One wonders whether any of the ~~gentle~~men in the study stopped the tape at the first sign of coercion? Via Jill at Feministe.

Slaughterhouse Life

2007-04-12T06:09:00.000-06:00

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut. One of the most sapient of Homo. Now that he's dead, I'm sure you'll all be more willing to take his advice.

'Ware the ides of Avril

2007-04-09T06:14:00.000-06:00

Listening to Explosions In The Sky's new one: "All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone." It's no "The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place." But then it isn't clear anything could be. To use a widely recognizeable analogy: the argument is somewhat like questioning whether the white album is better than Sgt. Pepper.

It does, however, have its good (better) points. It's more diverse in instrumentation, something Explosions has grown into quite appropriately. It's also more subtle in terms of the emotional content. "The Birth and Death of the Day," the first track, will certainly remind listeners of the previous album. That's not to say it's a rehash––far from it: the work is far more ambiguous, and as such works as a piece of art to be admired far more than the previous album. "The Earth..." had the admirable but limiting quality of sucking the listener into an emotionally devastating, potentially revelatory, repoire with the band. "All of a Sudden..." on the other hand sets out a more mysterian, and to some extent more remote, series of sounds that speak both to universal experience and to dislocation, without quite keeping its feet grounded in the tangible reality of the audience. One has the feeling that the album is doing as much as it can to allow the audience to bring to conscious contemplation the warm agony of contemporary ennui without pandering or resorting to that most plebian of pop devices, the lyric. I'm not knocking Explosions for this, far from it. I want to point out the relative difficulty of grooving on this album. "The Earth..." is the musical equivalent of Ecstacy: a blasting, wailing catharsis and outpouring of love, far greater than any auditor's anticipated reaction, and thankfully so. By way of contrast, we can say that "All of a Sudden..." is much more a listener's album, much more a work of art in the gallery exhibition sense. It still, finally, has the ability to draw one in as a musical analogue to an intense short story, with a vague, but powerful, psychic insight, and in doing so shows the band to be maturing––or at any rate, mastering––through its third full album.

And yes, I do have a vast, muted, expanding pain in my chest and in the base of my skull, a pain caused by the entirely unnecessary but unfortunately ubiquitous alienation and unwanted chrysalis of solitude imposed by any attempt to bridge the gap between material striving and the Outer Darkness that is true counterculture, a pain familiar to everyone who loves someone that can't be reached, just now, a pain familiar to everyone with a heart in a world made for spendthrift automatons, the same degree and intensity of bittersweet ache one grasps and gasps at knowing when one's fondest wish and worst nightmare are one and the same, and true.

Lorca said:
El olvido estaba expresadoo por tres gotas de tinta sobre el monóculo,
el amor por un solo rostro invisible a flor de piedra.
Médulas y corolas componían sobre las nubes
un desierto de tallos sin una sola rosa.

Yet this will be a good year.

Bed, Bath & Beyond... Fuck Yeah!

2007-02-28T21:47:00.001-06:00

Go Wes, Go!

6' 20'' f*cking killin' for fun

2007-02-19T10:06:00.000-06:00

Still the single funniest internets ever:

artastic roundup.

2007-02-18T14:37:00.000-06:00

Psychosexual pictures, other more surreal but still psychosexual paintings, some more tone deaf compositions, some decidedly interesting portraitlike paintings, design-y Italian pseudosurrealism, and last but most excellent & feministish psychosexual digital images.

A leftist speaks out for increasing U.S. forces in Iraq.

2007-02-14T10:09:00.000-06:00

As I type this, G. W. Bush is laying out his positive case for us (the citizenry) to both allow and approve of his strategy in Iraq. This is largely a pile of bull.

That said, I will now lay out a positive case for increasing the number of forces in Iraq from the perspective of a realist (let's say, me) who also happens to be way to the left of the mainstream of the Democratic Party (I do not self-identify as a Democrat, although I sometimes side with them in political struggles: they are somewhere between the lesser of two evils and the better of two poor choices).

What is a troop increase? Not a mere 20,000. This is a paltry gesture. We ought, in a perfect world, to have better planned how to carry out the task our forces are now supposedly carrying out. Look: I don't approve of anything about how we got into this situation, but now that we are in it, we have to try to resolve the problems we've caused in the best manner possible. So, to protect the Iraqi people, we should raise the number of forces in Iraq by at least 150,000, while more rapidly pouring money into that country.

Here then is the central rationale: we owe the people of Iraq for screwing up their country so bad.

1. The security of the country is not going to be secured by the number of U.S. troops now present in-country.

2. The security of the country cannot now, and will not in the near future be achieved by Iraqi forces. This is the case for a variety of reasons: (i) there are not enough of them; (ii) there are poor control structures; (iii) they cannot be guaranteed not to themselves fall into "sectarian" or ethnic violence (corollary: they are not as well trained as one would wish); and so on.

3. The reconstruction of Iraq cannot effectively and rapidly proceed without improved security.

4. A pullout of troops, as envisioned by many well-meaning Americans, will if carried out in the near future cause a much worse humanitarian nightmare than even what we see now. Think Afghanistan.

5. The Iraqi people's lives are worth just as much as American lives. I'm sorry, America, but it's true. Their worth is equal to ours.

6. The fact that even more than the current 300,000+ Iraqis who have died so far will be put through the chaos and violence that would ensue, should motivate us against a draw-down of troop levels.

7. (Not to be flip but) We broke it: we bought it. That is, it is our responsibility to see this thing through. Not for America's interest, though it might serve that; not for Democracy--whatever; not to "protect" or "support" the troops, that is a completely inane rationale which entirely ignores the reality of the situation; it is in the Iraqis' interest, that is, it will be better this way overall. (Damn the cost.)

The military leaders who were originally supposed to plan the invasion were right: we ought to have put three to five hundred thousand pairs of boots on the ground. That didn't happen. A 14% increase in troop levels, even if they manage to eventually secure Baghdad, is just not going to do it.

Having said all this, let's not be foolish about the actual situation with our military. We probably just don't have the troops to do this. (Thus the 20,000: this is probably the minimum number they thought they could secure Baghdad with and near to the maximum number that they could get at all in the present tour/deployment configuration.) And the will of the American people is not such that they are readily willing to stomach a large-scale low-intensity guerilla war of indefinite duration. This is not a failing: no one should want that. There are also budgeting issues. After all, we don't need to be spending $600 billion/year on the military.

But if we're going to have will, we might as well have the will to face up to our responsibilities; and I shouldn't be repeating that point ad nauseum but I apparently am. So what's wrong with pointing out the ideal plan is what I've promoted above, even if what our options are probably don't include it? After all, given all other considerations, maybe the number of troops we're getting is the best we can hope for. I just wish the Commander in Chief weren't so awful.

Lite-Brite animation. Yes.

2007-02-08T08:24:00.000-06:00

well 'tisn't hexameter, exactly

2007-02-01T20:56:00.000-06:00

meh.

Cyrano mask lies unused under laundry.
Band sells out, fan grows up.
Tree grows, neighborhood dies, geriatric remembers.
Girl sold to circus for elephant.
Embezzler loses shirt, dignity in divorce.
Film critic killed in premier melée.
Mistaken identity yields sex, romance, irony.
Twins disfigure one another, make up.
Student seduces professor, no one believes.
Accident! Astronaut's remains recovered from family.
Wife kills ants, other woman, tomatoes.
Confederate flag found in attic. Lawsuit.
Worker doesn't tell boss: fuck off.
Medals of honor lost at airport.
Conversation, date fail. Private investigator succeeds.
Child sees Daddy, mailman, psych ward.
Young woman secretly retains self esteem.
Poor couple eats trash, each other.
Chateau LaFitte '68 bottle broken, swung.
Divorcée sues for intellectual property: son.
Carpenter builds boat, following, allegory, debt.
Two strangers have vindictive sex twice.
Collapsed plantation manor hides young runaway.
Vacationer warned: some apparent statues aren't.
Never caught, pedophile laughs on deathbed.
Business venture succeeds despite incompetent entrepreneur.
Woman anthropomorphizes cats, fills another evening.
Shocker: magic realism interferes with relationship.
Union formation complicated by sexual politics.

etc.

Scheduled Maintenance

2007-01-19T00:00:00.000-06:00

Intermittent to nonexistent posting for an indefinite period. Certain exigencies of TRW™ make regular updates unfeasible, perhaps until June. We apologize for any inconvenience.

but what if you don't want 'em?

2007-01-18T13:23:00.000-06:00

Current targeted add in gmail:

How To Get Your Ex Back - InsideAGuysMind.com - Learn The "Secret Psychology" To Getting A Man Hooked For Good.

Fuck that. Here's some secret psychology for you: the secret is sex. But he won't respect you for it. P.S. it's not a secret: Alanis Morissette wrote a song about this like ten years ago.

icarus ii

2007-01-17T22:06:00.000-06:00

it was an ordinary gathering of fools
gentry'd up and strutting
at the opportune moment alex spoke
just the wrong words
–she took the fools lightly–
from lips curled into themselves
in contempt

like a murder of judges
fools in flashing noses flourished
rubber knives, kung fu taunts
swooped together on an imaginary
carcass–alex's soul was gone
chased by self examination

more on chemical dependency

2007-01-16T18:03:00.000-06:00

some admittedly disjointed thoughts.

orgasm suffuses the human brain
with a certain chemical
–it's oxytocin, for the record–
which facilitates affectionate
behavior and feelings which
are associated with such behavior

ethnic groups associated with
cultures in which alcohol consumption
is not known show relative inability
to cope with the potential addictivity
of ethyl alcohol: this is genetic

feelings of wellbeing are accompanied
by relatively high levels of
serotonin, that same structure massive
release of which is the main
product of the ingestion of lysergic
acid diethylamine, and SSRI's

every natural stimulant known is
used by at least one indigenous
culture in whose home habitat
the plant is endemic

alarm

2007-01-15T05:45:00.000-06:00

1. Waking far too early for dawn
head and neck curved just wrong
I am not identical to I.

2. Please explain this lump in a
dream breast; I entreat you, O
Demeter and Fortuna, wake me.

3. Several small killers
kidding in a cave and grooving
on a riff: doze during Sleep.

4. Wrestle with too many ideas
which all indicate giving in
to sleep indefinitely.

5. It all goes to prove
your chemical dependency
is no longer charming.

6. Today is the greatest day I
will ever regret being alive so
you are able to love me and I you.

7. &

8. Don't forget, me, to listen
for music. This boy's elaborate
anguish is worse than possible.

9. Shower. Coffee. Coke. Speed.
Sweet sweet diphenhydramine sniffles
or big-N little-y bigfuckin'-Q.

10. An accelerating heartbeat
does nothing for a frustrated libido
as your crotch floods ever so.

11. I can't believe this but instead
of the horns I seem to be throwing
the shocker. Insert bitter chuckle.

12. Waking far too late for breakfast,
confused and struggling into today's
pants, rush past superfluities.

13. You and I keep busy and ignore
all the things which make us dead,
and stay alive together that way.

the view from

2007-01-14T15:50:00.000-06:00

my mind is embodied, extended ever so far from
the center of me, long lines of kin-
aesthetic distance, the continuous reach of my consciousness
of self, the projection I make of my sensory surfaces, the inner
and outer, distance, which is the physical me
confronting this jagged angry weathering world.

from the center of me, the 'I' place that
point behind every pointing
back through which traveling leads nowhere but to itself no
distance later, and outside the infinitessimal self
there extends the space in which thoughts are exhibited
flickering and vivid brightly colored and rarely black and
chalky, where 1+1=2 stretches high as the jovian
atmosphere above, or the height of a space
elevator to an and, in which nothing feels like anything.

The sensory surfaces float outside this place my mind
black and back underneath everything where the watcher
watches and interprets the feelings out there at
the nose and muscles and in the tightening hurting
place just in front behind around inside but separate from
a fast-beating heartache. I feel the surface of my eyes.

short

2007-01-13T15:04:00.000-06:00

abandoned cradle
stands quietly rotting in
sunlight and aspen

take this, nanowrimo

2007-01-12T17:38:00.000-06:00

Well I'm no road-hog speed freak with an endless roll of typing
paper and contempt for corrections or even looking back.
(Dylan had his back pages, too, I recall)
Nor am I a wannabe writer or even a writer without motivation.
(Who was it who said you write in a gutter or your bullshit day
job, while the Man wrings you out a bit each day, even when
your little tiny crunched-down humped-down landlady kicks you
out for leaving all those wine bottles in the hallway and
not paying a dime of rent?) But I digress–
your eyes are the least enchanting shade of evening, my deer
–and I ask whether you can Beat your way to a romance novel
or perhaps should stick to short-form
slashfic?
::page 46
had been hungry all day. Todd finally spotted a deer through
the lush summer foilage, a beautiful 14-point buck with bushy
white tail twitching as he scented a doe who was no doubt nearby
with brown spots on his hide to camoflage him from wolves. Todd
knew better how to take out this magnificent creature. He raised
his Hollytown A-46 compound bow with its twisted blue-and-white
nylon string and pulled back until the fletchings on his hand-made
::page 48
Charlene, her blonde hair stylishly lifting up and back from her
brow, crumpled her brow in worry, "Don't leave me Todd," she said,
"I'll do anything you want," she said, reaching for his hefty
::
but look maybe you shouldn't wait until the month of
publication nightmares
and a blank page waiting to chew your ideas from shit into visible
shit
but instead retreat with your pencil and yellow lined legal pad with
its useless punched trio of voids around which you can doodle
to the outhouse and amidst the flies contemplate the hurt
and pointlessness and injustice of the universe and distill with
your flexing bowel a thought which squeezes itself bloody
from your forehead, bits of you gray matter still clinging to
it, postmodern Athena clothed in graphite dust cyphers and signs,
and bury that pad then, in the earth, and return your idea to the garden
from whence it came: that compost heap where you
grow all those tomatoes and yams
and blackcurrants
from which you make the ink which you use
to ghostwrite bedtime stories told by your grandmother to your
nonexistent children, in the voice of Samuel Clemens and Goethe's
love child, from the viewpoint of a drug-addicted autodidact with
cerebral palsy and gender identity issues and also schizophrenia
on alternate Wednesdays,
and every story is both a murder mystery
and a meandering meditation on modern life
both a self-referential and endlessly clever send-up of contemporary
fiction and a sober re-invention of the drama;
and all of it poolry edited,
before you fall asleep with your significant other holding your
shoulders gently and cooing to you when you say you didn't
do anything as spectacular today as yesterday or the day before that
or even last week when you were the best new composer of
garage rock since what's-his-face, and happy
you will be, and you'll sleep.

thousand, or, how it was the wrong season to write with a pounding heart

2007-01-11T14:29:00.000-06:00

she sounds like dragonfly wings
sapphire-drenched clustering dis-gemini flashing
four directions, four sounds, four windy
–above my water-logged ears, a reflection–
lofting vessels of chitin and light:
is how i saw her humming
in the swing
out back
today.

try reading your diary aloud

2007-01-09T17:02:00.000-06:00

on the occasion of the adoption of moxie catherine azazzel rutabaga, &c., Bukowski's the cat:

the hunter by my window
4 feet locked in the bright stillness of a
yellow and blue
night.

cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in
gardens–
the yellow and blue night explodes before
me, atomic, surgical,
full of starlit
devils...

the the cat leaps up on the
fence, a tubby dismay,
stupid, lonely,
whiskers like an old lady in the
supermarket
and naked as the
moon.

I am temporarily
delighted.

nerd... core?

2007-01-09T11:45:00.000-06:00

Another in our ongoing series of filmic recommendations, sure to please the eye and the ear. But mostly the ear, seeing as the shoestring budget for Nerdcore Rising [trailer] won't allow more than a rudimentary documentary style. Just kidding, maybe. Ups as well to MC Chris and the Boogaloo Jam Band. Via J-Ro.

covenant

2007-01-08T17:27:00.000-06:00

c'n i jus' say that th' film 'the covenant' is the most godawful POS.

on a day like this or that they separated though having never met

2007-01-07T21:12:00.000-06:00

Bukowski, a division:

I live in an old house where nothing
screams victory
reads history
where nothing
plants flowers

sometimes my clock falls
sometimes my sun is like a tank on fire

I do not ask
your armies
or
your kisses
or
your death
I have my
own

my hands have arms
my arms have shoulders
my shoulders have me
I have me
you have me when you can see me
but I don't like you
to see me

I do not like you to see that
I have eyes in my head
and can walk
and
I do not want to
answer your questions
I do not want to
amuse you
I do not want you to
amuse me
or sicken me
or talk about
anything

I do not want to
love you

I do not want to
save you

I do not want your arms
I do not want your
shoulders

I have me
you have you

let that
be

Enlightenation

2007-01-06T15:53:00.000-06:00

Since we're on course for a "bracing" week of political action (or something), why not just whip this little S.C.U.M Manifesto thang out?

It's been a while since I'd read it, but the scumm is still fresh. And, rhetorically pungent as it is, more likely than not to provoke actual thoughts. That is, its accusatory style and substance are such that any quarter-way intelligent person cannot sink immediately into a that-dyke-hates-men-shes-crazy thoughtjerk reaction, since it specifically singles out the most likely groups to do so (i.e. men and their admirers) a being incapable of rational thought. Clever, that. Excerpt:

The affect of fatherhood on males, specifically, is to make them `Men’, that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother; he gets to fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to not be a sissy, to act like a `Man’. The boy, scared shitless of and `respecting’ his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of `Man’-hood, the all-American ideal — the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.

Via the inaptly-named womynkind.org (scroll way down for link).

Stop with that faith stuff already.

2007-01-05T11:52:00.000-06:00

No, seriously. [See also: flyingspaghettimonsterism/pastafarianism. --f]

So yesterday I included the following

"(WHAT?)"

in a post mostly focussed on the sad state of godbag/queer relations. I received a couple (someone actually reads this thing?) of angry emails about the importance of faith as a firm foundation in life, from admittedly ambiguously "spiritual" folks who do not self-identify as Christian. Congrats to them on that. The point, however, is that atheism isn't some kind of, you know, paucity of spiritual fulfilment or something of the sort. We don't need to be coddled as psychological/emotional cripples. Quite the opposite: if faith is a crutch that gets you through hard times, if your god carries you across the sickeningly teacle-y beach of life when the going gets tough, aren't you (that's the midwesten 'you', meaning 'one', folks), to put a rather blunt point on the matter, the one with the emotional problem? That is to say, doesn't it indicate that one isn't strong enough to handle some aspect or other of life alone, and simultaneously one is unable to turn to one's fellow people for support?

More to the point, however: I am not going to rehearse arguments in favor of atheism (or, better, just not discussing the matter, since it is, you know, just false). Those who don't want to allow themselves to be swayed by sound arguments will always find a way to cut off their intellectual noses to spite their intellectual faces. Wanting is of course the key here. The leap of faith is such a powerful cultural tradition in this country that it sometimes seems hard to imagine a faith built on, for instance, natural phenomena, or on supposed rational arguments (cf. Catholicism). So let's address it in particular.

I claim someone you have never met exists. However, there is no evidence available, besides the professed belief of large numbers of other people, that she does exist. Now believing other people to be generally reliable, you are inclined to accept this. However, I also tell you that you must demonstrate that you accept the existence of this person despite an acknowledged lack of any evidence. That is, you can't even take others' beliefs to be prima facie (at first glance) evidence for the existence of this person. And the reason that you should accept the existence of this person and furthermore follow the rules this person endorses (according to a document written many years ago in another country by an unknown author) is that (1) at some unspecified point in the future you will be rewarded or punished to an unreasonable magnitude for your (non-)compliance with those rules and/or (2) you owe the person you have never met your loyalty. Sounds very familiar, no?

Is this starting to look ridiculous yet?

Beside the truly laughable (ha ha) nature of the claim just outlined as it pertains to the invisible cloud being, there are a number of other reasons for thinking that faith, leapt, blind, or otherwise, in said noodly Lord is to be avoided. Let me mention only one: that it distracts individuals in a rather unfortunate manner from dealing with the actual problems facing humanity. It is, in other words, negative in the sense of providing a reason why things are the way they are and in so doing justifying all of the bullshit we see (see also capitalism, patriarchy, and their associated discontents). Yes, much charity is inspired by "divine" guidance etc. But will that outweigh the many religiously motivated crimes of the past present and (probably) future, and the ongoing crime which is the perpetuation in the minds of unsuspecting human populations of a blatantly false view of the universe? A right does not cancel a wrong.

So, "Dogma" fans and dogma fans, think about having faith for a while. Perhaps you'll be open to changing your opinion. Someone once pointed out to me, back in knucklehead times of church youth group, that challenging one's faith can make it stronger. I should say now that if you've made it stronger, the challenge wasn't difficult enough--kind of like asking Tiger Woods to take on a golf course he's never played before: he's just not going to fail to make 18 holes. Okay, I've made a golf analogy. Time to quit while I'm marginally ahead.

Everyone's gay today!

2007-01-04T09:29:00.000-06:00

...not happy.

Let's think about queerness for a second. Maybe a little more. There you go. Apparently, if you're like the fine united statesians over at the family research counsel, you were contemplating the various tortures Ted Haggard will suffer when he finally makes it to Hell. Which is, you know, fine, except for the fact that he'll be going there for hypocrisy rather than his (hot) sexual behavior.

What's really flabbergasting, at 9:30 on a weekday morning, is how much hate some people can pack into their tiny, silky-smooth brains. I don't mean anger here, which is healthy and such, but actual hate. Irrational (and when have Invisible Cloud Being worshipers been anything else--they take pride in it for chrissakes), hyperfocussed, self-righteous in that annoyingly bad way: these are the hallmarks of someone in such deep delusion that they make a lifestyle out of a silly (seriously: silly as in absurd) ingroup-outgroup distinction.

And what about that, it's th' American way, right? Spaniards, Reds, Germans, Anarchists, Suffragettes, Japanese, Germans again, Reds again, Islamists, welfare mothers, ethnic cleansers, Bill Clinton, Islamists again. Is any of this ringing a bell? The creation of a mostly nonexistent menace is a standard of the infantilizing social structure I've had occasion to criticize in the past. The standard belief seems to be that if you can come up with a plausible threat, you can both conveniently "solve" all of the various woes one can identify or manufacture and galvanize betas, gammas, and deltas into mass (read: mob) action. Goebbels was apparently right on that score.

Speaking of which. Question: what do 'homosexual' and 'Juden' have in common?

All one can do is continue to point out the folly of fools, while not personally identifying any of them so as to be able to perhaps persuade their sheep that maybe a flock lead by a blind ram (it's always someone with testicles, ain't it) is not the place they want to be. Continue to point and laugh at the blabbering japes of people who wouldn't know who they were without a vicious ad insideous Other to contrast themselves with. Always with the "I'm not that guy, thank" deity. Continue to hope beyond hope that the completely insane notion that "what's important is that you have faith" (WHAT?) will become an extinct meme in a culture surpassed by one a little more humane and, you know, live-and-let-live.

I mean, really, whose ass do I have to fuck to get that accomplished?

basic visual

2007-01-03T14:04:00.000-06:00

And a fine laughy laugh to you, too, my fine visual html jokes-loving friends.

Two deaths

2007-01-02T13:57:00.000-06:00

Ford and a terra-ist. TV content: hangings yes, well-shaped titties no? Goddamn you people are stupid. How sad is it to say Michael Moore was right? Fuck.

up and at... oh hell with it, where's my coffee

2007-01-01T09:02:00.000-06:00

Pulled apart

2006-12-31T19:31:00.000-06:00

Pictorial accompaniment for Sis' recent post.

What may motivate?

2006-12-30T13:20:00.000-06:00

Some draft material* for thought, since 'tis the season for New Year's Resolutions.

Prichard’s Fork divides the justification of moral theories from their normative power. The argument may be summarized this way. Say that ΓN is the set of statements (call them axioms) which justifies a moral theory N; these are statements within the bounds of normative discourse. Let us use for an example the deontological theory of Kant’s Groundwork , abbreviated name ‘G’, where the categorical imperative of that theory implies (in conjunction with those statements which give all relevant aspects of the situation S:{xh, …, xj} in which the rational agent required by the theory finds herself) the actions recommended by G: A₁, A₂, …, &c. Then presupposing the argument of the Groundwork ΓK, for an action An, since ΓK⊢G and {G ∪ S}⊢An, we may say that the axioms plus the situation (which is really superfluous for us since all ethical theories rely on a specification of the situation before recommendation of an action) imply the correct action to be taken: {Γk ∪ S}⊢An. Since the situation’s specification is, for our present purposes, superfluous, we may abbreviate this by saying the axioms of the theory imply the actions to be taken, as Γk⊢Ai.

Transcendental argument or no, it is not the case for any known ΓN that ⊢ΓN. That is, none are generally agreed to be true “in virtue of their form,” as it were: to be true on the basis of their logical structure. So there is no logical necessity attached to the supposed truth of any known argument for any ethical theory. Prichard’s point may be put as saying that if we do not presuppose a theory, as we did with G above, then there is a strong sense in which none of the recommendations of the theory are justified. But say that we take the arguments for each of the axioms: the axioms are the basic statements that justify a theory we are concerned with (and here I do not mean the example), and these, as basic, are not justified within normative discourse. That is to say, there are no moral reasons which show these premises to be true, whether they are in fact true or not—they are themselves unjustified. And on Prichard’s account they are unjustifiable, since any justification of them (or argument for their truth) must be given in terms that are not themselves within “normative discourse”: they must be justified by reasons that are themselves not within the realm of moral discussion. So justifications of Γ are not justifications on morally significant grounds, and the contention is that this then is no justification at all; for the sense of justification is wanted is the kind of justification that will motivate an agent to follow the prescriptions of the ethical theory Γ grounds. But justifications from without the normative (moral, ethical) realm of thought cannot so motivate actions. They could motivate only in conjuction with normative (within the realm of the ethical) beliefs such as, for a particular agent, “I ought to act upon the dictates of pure rationality insofar as it can be applied to rational actors.”

Here we have, however, reached the crux of the problem, and I want to move beyond Prichard’s specific challenge (which is itself aimed at deontological theories of morality). The problem is, either the ultimate reasons (the axioms, or whatever presumptions are made and taken as assumptions) for acting according to a moral theory are themselves unjustified, indeed unjustifiable, and therefore no case can be made that one ought to do one thing rather than another (follow one theory rather than another), or they are not justified on normatively significant grounds, in which case the “justification” can be dismissed as having no normative force (e.g. “Yes, but why would I want to be perfectly rational—I’m certainly not built that way?”). Suppose ΛN is the set of claims that justifies acceptance of ΓN, then whatever relation it is such that ΛN⊰ΓN, it (⊰) is not a relation that grounds acting upon what follows from ΓN. That is, {ΛN∪ S}⊬Ai for any action Ai. If it remains mysterious why this might occur, it may only be suggested that because A-ing follows from B, and we accept B on the basis of C, we may not have ground for A-ing on the basis of C alone. That kind of justification, logical justification, may be transitive, but what is wanted is normative justification, which does not appear in C (so to speak). Analogously, I may accept that the definitions of ‘2’, ‘4’, ‘+’, and ‘=’ justifies the claim that 2+2=4, but it does not follow that I must, in any sense, add two and two. Whereas, if I accept that addition is what I am doing, then if two and two arise, I shall (must) produce four.

I assume that this division between normative (specifically ethical) justification and other kinds of justification, and that the general problem extrapolated from Prichard is intelligible. That is, that the objection is not a phantom. Another way of putting the problem is to ask the following question, one fundamental to meta-ethics: even given that an agent is aware of some sort of necessary (or, one might say, objective) constraint on her behavior qua moral, what can be said or shown that will motivate that agent to act within those constraints? Why, in other words, ought we to be ethical rather than not?

A virtue-ethical framework for justification of acting morally (rather than not) may effectively answer this question. The aim is to produce a general schema or set of necessary (adequacy) constraints on what an effective answer is, and show how modern virtue theories may meet those constraints. A specific answer is not to be proposed herein...

[That is to say, we have only the introduction of a problem here, not a whit of solution.]

In the previous characterization of the transition from logical justification of the axioms that give rise to an ethical theory to the actions of an agent aware of that theory (if the theory is true, an agent acting in accordance with the right), practical reason was characterized as though it followed sentential reasoning in the predicate logic. That formulation ought not to be misleading, for this is merely a convenient way of characterizing the chain of justifications, by showing the disconnect between logical justification (implication from known truths) and normative justification (what happens when that which when given as input to the faculty of practical reason results in an action). It is not as though a practical syllogism is in play, though Aristotle’s mechanism is a useful metaphor....

An ethical theory must not only be true (and, likely, its truth must also be epistemically accessible) but it must actually result in morally good behavior. That is, it is a condition of adequacy on an ethical theory that one who understands the theory is moved by it to act in accordance with what it dictates. This condition makes a characterization of the motivation of “purely rational” agents from the statements that compose an ethical theory so perspicuous in the example case used in the first section. According to such a theory, motivation to action results from reasoning, which can be modeled as logical implication in the sentential calculus, thus it literally follows from the categorical imperative that agents like that act in accordance with it. But this psychologically unrealistic condition on morally good action was untenable even for Kant. Another failed attempt at changing human psychology so as to guarantee morally good behavior is psychological egoism, which despite its other problems is worth mentioning here for the fact that it has no explanation how anyone could fail to act well. An ethical theory needs an accurate philosophical psychology, in order to provide a proper explanation why an agent does anything, let alone act well or badly.

Here is a motivation test, then:
(M) Will a normal adult human who understands the ethical theory be
moved to act in accordance with it subsequent to the time
understanding begins?

The test does not imply that only one ethical theory can be true, but it does limit the field. The question that embodies the test, however, is full of philosophically loaded terms (‘normal’, ‘understands’, etc.), and it is part of the aim of this section of the essay to explain the conditions under which the answer to that question is “Yes.” If that is the answer with regard to a specific theory, it satisfies (M), which is merely one necessary condition upon its being a moral theory that applies to (has normative force over) humans.

*Those for whom the symbols here are not found ought to install Code2000 in their browsers.

quiet, dark, slipping into the quicksand of sleep

2006-12-29T23:39:00.000-06:00

forceful kitty:

once i wanted 2 be the greatest
no wind or waterfall could stall me
an' then came the rush of the flood
stars of night turned deep 2 dust

melt me down
into big black armour
leave no trace
of grace, just in your honor

lower me down
to culprit south
make 'em watch
a space in town

4 the lead an' the dregs
of my bed i've been sleepin'
lower me down
pin me in
secure the grounds
4 the later parade

once i wanted to be the greatest
two fists of solid rock
with brains that could explain
any feeling

once i wanted 2 be the greatest
no wind or waterfall could stall me
an' then came the rush of the flood
stars of night turned deep 2 dust

thx c. marshall

At the seams

2006-12-28T12:46:00.000-06:00

This is a time of year for burning the Yule log at both ends, ramping up for an otherwise lackluster election cycle by deciding to do something you'll never do, and making resolutions you don't really want to make in the face of an omnipresent self-doubt brought on by late-empire America. Like the degeneration of the traditional culture of the Romans as they became richer and more powerful and more remote from the striving for survival that is the lot of the average human in all of our species' history, we are breaking down. I'm not calling for a raturn to traditional values. I'm saying, civil society is coming apart, breaking down, dissolving. Dripping out the bottom of that handbasket everyone's always talking about.

No one interacts with anyone anymore, except by remove behind the walls of an electronic world in which physical harm is made to seem at once both remote and continually threatening. An electronic cocoon whose inner atmosphere is like the Scarecrow's fear-chemicals... I've railed against infantilization of the citizenry of, well, everywhere (elsewhere), and this is a part of it. A child needs the protection of the parent figure, but the adult doesn't require this support: she gives it. Thus in order to keep the people docile and dependent the ever-present threat of harm must seem real, must be lurking behind every shadow and person whose appearance isn't like the appearance of one's own ancestors.*

But this is obvious--see also basically anything N. Chomsky's said about the power structures of Western culture, especially since the end of the New Deal. After the establishment of (somewhat) effective social support systems, elites needed a new method for maintaining power. Thus the Cold War, thus crack addicts, thus single mothers, thus Slobodan/Saddam, thus Terra-ists. Thus liberal media. Thus democracy. But that last one isn't mentioned. To keep the people from trying to figure out what's good for them (though, they must be too busy with their lives to be able to figure that out anyway, right?), elites ought to do it for them. Gives everyone job security, as it were. Win-win.

Corporations fight corporations, trade groups fight trade groups, strongarms wrestle strongarms for the keys to slaves' chains. And what have we got? Bread and Circus. Or, obesity and "pop culture." And it's all coming down, by which I mean the facade by which elites maintain control of the purposefully mislead populace. That doesn't mean the revolution is coming. No, it means, more likely, that the revolution won't come in time, in our lifetimes. And then it's climate change and the end of fossil fuels and the end of clean water and finally the collapse of those precious structures which the aging and obsolete top .000005% are busy protecting.** A return to a township-style societal structure, anyone? Thus the "end" of capitalism is not a quiet dissolution of government, as perhaps Marx predicted, but a firey collapse. Not a whisper but a cry of agony.

*Thus mixing of the races (as it were) must be subtly discouraged. Thus mass media stereotypes by effete elites in (perhaps unknowing, see **) service to their cause.
**Class consciousness being what it is, I can't in good conscience accuse anyone of doing more in service to the elites than acting in their own (material) self-interest. Certainly usually not in their moral self-interest. Bill Gates' philanthropy is not a balance to his misdeeds or those of his issue (corporations) if any. But the net effect is very similar to what would expect if there were a conspiracy in the WTO or Trilateral Commision or Illuminati/Masons, or whatever. It's those advocating for lower echelons of society who know just what they're doing, whether futile or not. And this is itself commendable. The mutineer captain has committed to going down with the ship even if she succeeds in her coup.

20061227

2006-12-27T16:24:00.000-06:00

continoo 2 get own up-ah:

u said, u said u got tha
u said tha feelin'
u said tha feeling u got 2 get
u give me tha fever 'n' a cold sweat.
tha way i like, it is the way it is
i got mine 'n' don't worry 'bout his

thx JB.

20061226

2006-12-26T21:38:00.000-06:00

get up (ah)/ a-get on up:

wait a minute!
shake yer arm, then use yer form
stay on the scene like a sex machine
u got 2 have tha feeling sure as you're born
get it together, right on, right on.

thx 2 the godfadder, now a soul.

James Brown Is Dead

2006-12-25T13:36:00.000-06:00

he's dead y'all. dead. happy jesus day or whatever. damn. dead.

you best get up on it one last time 'fore the year is out, yo. UP on it!

Tags:

Redact Bush!

2006-12-24T08:14:00.000-06:00

What can I say? (That won't be censored...)

Pathetic how instead of outraged, the cowardly editors of the Times are confused about how their (they thought) gov't-approved dude got his words chopped. Here's an idea: publish it anyway. It could not be more simple. What are they going to do, start a war on false pretenses?

Weather Report

2006-12-23T06:59:00.000-06:00

Sweeping calm dark fogs and rainclouds will drizzle sloshingly down upon family rooftops from now until washing away under low-angled sunstorms and brainshowers, as the earth's northern hemisphere continues to cool even as the days grow longer; a 90% chance of ball lightning, marsh gases, and tornados in the bedroom over the weekend.

for those in the know

2006-12-22T13:32:00.000-06:00

Hey, have a link. It's friday. And Cephalopodmas.

nickelback iz my anti-fun

2006-12-21T12:18:00.000-06:00

hey yall this's kinda old but i ran inta dude th' other day who w's like, all up bumpin fuckin nickelback frm his SUV speakers like if he were inna trailer park stead a tha damn middle a'tha city n so i wanna let u all in on this comparison o' 2 singles ~NB put out this century n no matter how u dress it up itz all crap [turn on yer speakerz. u need flash]. i'm talkin bout givin corporate rock a bad name, damn.

e.r.i.p.s.a.

2006-12-19T10:52:00.000-06:00

Here, finally, is a badass video of a brain-controlled robot what can pick a thing up. Finally, you'll be able to get your remote control without getting off the couch or even leaning forward!

brain-o-matical puzzlerz

2006-12-18T12:17:00.000-06:00

wow so if u like popular media 'n shizzle u gots 2 check out tha game of office movie poster imitations. just like figure out what the movie is the poster is supposed to be of. mad funs, all.

what's in a book?

2006-12-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

SecondWaver posts a meme that seems "revealing." By which I mean neither personally revealing nor particularly difficult.

1. Go to the nearest book in your reach and turn to page 123.
2. Go to the fifth sentence of the book.
3. Copy the next three sentences, then tag someone else.

I decided not to go for the nearest book, since it's a logic text. Fizhburn's been grading a bit lately. So, instead:

For the above two reasons, coherence cannot be accepted as giving the meaning of truth, though it is often a most important test of truth after a certain amoun of truth has become known.

Hence we are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.

From Bertrand Russel's The Problems of Philosophy. I don't tag people though. Bird flu, and all.

Via Twisty.

Dirty it up, go ahead.

2006-12-16T14:59:00.000-06:00

You fuckers put style over substance in every imaginable way, but of course, don't really give a care about the substantial damage you're doing to everything with the trash and chemicals and what-not. Even the Steampunks. Boy howdy I tell ya (you POS) I'm glad all the infantilized kids have gone home to their infantilized parents to suck from the moldy teat of consumerism. I am.

Merry Fucking Whatever.

Fuckin' A Right

2006-12-14T13:56:00.000-06:00

Hey customers, please be reminded that at this festive season of the year you don't have the right to be an ass. So if you feel like your service hasn't been top-notch, consider whether you are contributing to the problem. If you have occasion to yell about the service, it's almost certain that you are the core cause of said bad service; so, STFU. Excerpt:

I have a theory about asshole customers: I think they only act that way because no one ever calls them on their bullshit. The poor kids behind the counter can’t stand up for themselves lest they lose their jobs and other patrons look the other way claiming ‘it’s none of my business. via digg

Scheduled outage.

2006-11-25T10:00:00.000-06:00

From now until next month the 14th. Happy vacation-days.

Hangedover

2006-11-24T08:47:00.000-06:00

She had black satin sheets, what the hell? A south-facing window too, on the second floor, where the low-angled winter sun was coming in across my feet, which I always keep outside the covers so they don't sweat. She was all curved and pale pinkish Irish Catholic and quietly dozing with a lopsided swollen self-bit drunken lip. Everything smelled of sex and whiskey breath. When my eyes focussed, which they did occasionally, as I tried to look at the pebbled plaster ceiling, they still hurt, and I spent a good portion of my time that morning wondering why I'd ended up at her place and not mine.

I had to spit out about six of her various hairs. She approached me the night before, and I knew her, I guess, at least well enough to get into her unmentionables, or whatever. More like she got into mine, now that I think about it. We were talking for far too long before I made a move, or she did, maybe. Is a shirt a move? She told me the same story every night. She told me the same and I listened because I heard the same thing I want you in her same story every day. And those sheets, with her body standing out, it was pretty tacky let me tell you. Like one of those black velvet Elvises except maybe with Miss America 1922 on it. She tasted like no-flavor, her mouth did, and I liked that.

The rest of the bottle we never got around to finishing, thank god, was on the night stand. How it made it through the night I don't know but it'd have to go anyway since the cap was off. Off-brand anyway. I never met anyone so open, she fucked like a man, that is, whenever wherever. Just slip in, practically. I was spoiled and I didn't really want to talk to her that much anyway because she told the same story every day when we clinked our knives in swordfish steaks at Casa Nostra. And because I didn't talk to her there was no problem taking advantage of her low self esteem, which manifested itself in those black satin sheets, where like Madonna she told bedtime stories, the same ones every night. She refused to touch her clit though, because she thought like all good catholics that pleasure is evil, but she wasn't thinking any such thing at the moment with her Irish Catholic hair in her blissfully unconscious eyes and her smooth curving arms tuck up under her pillow.

Probably she was thinking about her boss who she had wanted to fuck but didn't because she refused to have more than one lover at at time. Probably a paternity thing. I was thinking about my ex-boss who I'd fucked right before I fucked her over on the last project I worked on at that place over on Templeton, you know, that interior enginerring place with the unreasonably low ceilings and the superold rould clear incandescents like gaslight and ancient metal desks under which rolled those metal armed office chairs from before the second World War.

I tried to sit up but felt the blood rush out of my skull and into my esophagis, where it lodged and made me choke a bit as it was replaced by what must have been baking soda and maybe some insult to add to my injury. I hoped my liver was still intact anyway. She had this habit of giving me playful punched under my ribs and she was a lefty and she wasn't a little woman either which is one reason I'd liked her, because it didn't feel like nothing when I was humping away, let me tell you. I'm not a small dude, and a lady who doesn't move around, and she didn't, needs to make herself known one way or another. I guess physical, what do you call it, stature is one way. Besides it was strangely appropriate with that Irish Catholic skin on those black satin sheets with my feet freezing and the low-angled sun turning toward my eyes in a way that was going to become a problem pretty soon and the smell of sex in my nose mixed with old aired open whiskey, and everything so still. Even with my inner ear slopping about like I'd twirled in one of the ex-boss' office swivel chairs and tried to come to a rest and knew I couldn't stant, like you can't when you're dizzy. Like a still life in three dimensions. But I tell this story every morning.

oh... (!)

2006-11-23T18:21:00.000-06:00

so i walked in on you
tonight
with your arms around him
(y)our son
about six months old and passed
the fuck out
like a drunk
on Xmas.

and i stopped quick and caught
my breath
in
holy
shit
stop and
think
you drunk
i thought.

i turned into the hallway to look at my
sorry ass in
the mirror
showing my
ugly personality
to the
world
like Moses
in the
reed basket on
High Holy Day.

or, at least, I
saw everything Dad
never wanted me
to be because
he was the one
who was ust
like what
whe never wanted
me to be
which is to
say: i saw a drunk
with a flacid cheese sandwich
and a Natty Light
and a belly button swollen to Tangerine
size, winking
bulbously from beneath your
wattling wings.

and I smoothed back
my hair, though really
there isn't much there to slide
back over my
scalp.
then i hiccuped.
and i stalked in then
ninja like
i tip
toed toward
your mattress
and his
and stole
beneath sheets
i paid
49.95 for
when i was thinking about him instead
ouf you
the one who betrayed
your simplistic les
on the night of our "wedding"
when you said you
would love me
for as
long as you
knew i would be safe
for your child to
grow up around even
though i was the one
who encouraged you to
"acquire him" in the
first
place.

oh i looked at you in that
bed tonight
when i walked
in
and boy did i think i could have
made this life
go another way but
that wasn't
in
the cards
so i
let it go and in one moment
of clarity i gave
up.

so thank
him
for
that, would
you.

remember

2006-11-22T03:02:00.000-06:00

remember how 2 lose, yo. u do that 'n u know why u hold on so hard. "bird stealing bread":

tell me baby tell me
are u still on the stoop
watching the windows close
ive not seen you lately
on the street, by the beach
or places we used to go

ive a picture of u
on our favorite day by the seaside
theres a bird stealing bread
that i brought out from under my nose

tell me baby tell me
does his company make
light of a rainy day
how ive missed you lately
and the way we would speak
and all that we wouldn't say

do his hands in your hair
feel a lot like a thing you believe in
or a bit like a bird stealing bread
out from under your nose

tell me baby tell me
do you carry the words
around like a key or change
ive been thinking lately
of a night on the stoop
and all that we wouldn't say

if i see you again
on the street, by the beach
in the evening
will you fly like a bird stealing bread
out from under my nose

thx sam beam.

when u turn 2 malt liquor

2006-11-21T11:57:00.000-06:00

u be chillin' wif my freund j-gold:

it's going alright
it's going alright
i just wait by the phone
it's going alright
it's going alright
more insane by the minute

fake outs, yo

2006-11-20T20:08:00.000-06:00

sum hella badass hardcore band hella down emo type shizzle (but not really emo 'cuz that is teh laem):

You never loved me.
now i cannot lie down in that bed,
i cannot lie down in all of those old fears.
i haven't slept,
singe the colors from my glances.
If i was bleeding,
would you tell me?
If i was saying,
would you hear me?
You asked for everything but never loved.
If i was praying,
would you kill me?
you never loved me.
dead.

thx converge.

teacup circles Neptune

2006-11-19T10:52:00.000-06:00

while looking up for the first time in a long
time i noticed the other day (tuesday?)
empty bright clouds like cheesecloth
straining the day into an overcooked porkchop
of a day: gristly and mean.
it was a day when Apollo, hungover, pissed
his mushroom pissings back down
into the nightsoil cities
glowering
and head wobbling cursed mortals all.

it's a deliriant, we delirious danced and screamed
"Oh God of Gods and God of Man, kill us
dead and make our bones
dance this three-step,"
but redcap magics kept everyone
gray and awash in uisce beatha

(we're in high lattitudes these days,ion
waterfalls above us make the colors
our pale skins soak in
our eyes see suddenly within pines)

and the empty clouds cried out in
our minds, or we imagined in those cities
we'd built to defy the goat
that a great minde entity looked down swiftly
choosing and separating the vulgar and
infested from the clear righteous but
really it was
only us
after all.

Weather Report

2006-11-18T07:00:00.000-06:00

Fully autumnal drafts do not permeate into top-floor hideaways or personal relations over the next week or so; we forecast a sweet melancholy of promises and loss, hopes and the expectation of unfulfilled expectations; 40% chance of bad decisions across the region; a low-pressure system in the area will be displaced, through loss of a friend, with a high-pressure system, bringing the kind of icy clarity that distracts the mind from the slowing metabolic functions of the body; long term projections indicate that there may be no perihelic solstice this fiscal year.

Nonreferring ontological terms: drop them.

2006-11-17T14:14:00.000-06:00

Frege distinguished sense from reference. But what might a sense be, given that it is what is supposed to determine the reference (if any) of a term or sentence, and what kind of thing is it that "presents" bits of the world in one way or another? The mirror of the telescope stands in some relation between observed and heavenly body; yet we cannot allow the relation to be characterized as such since we will be led on a regress trying to explain the relation of the relation, mirror, body, and star, and so forth... The thought is that we refuse to trat predication terms as terms that have sense when taken alone... which is to say, things like 'red' in English do not refer, and this is because they present nothing at all--and the move in the other direction is to make 'function' do something (philosophically) unusual, as well. (If you have trouble reading this, get the code2000 font.)

...a sense is importantly like a function. It might just be a function, on the obvious understanding of how functions operate which consists in bringing objects into definite relations–‘bringing’ here abbreviating the process of our noticing such associations. The relevant notion is this: Some function following the form ⌜ƒxy⌝ is such that what we might substitute in for ⌜‘x’⌝ and ⌜‘y’⌝, say sets or ordered sequences or the members thereof, or numbers, or names, are necessarily in the background of any understanding of this function, so that function-ness cannot be explained without essential reference to arguments and values: we shall say it is incomplete. For example, where ‘ƒ′’ is interpreted as a standard addition function we must explain what it does using the notions of number; viz. something like ‘ƒ′xy: x + y = … ‘ where our ellipsis is filled by an appropriately defined successor-function-dependent syntactic relation. Keep in mind how handily the active “does” fits the function notion, as opposed to a more static “is.”

Things like sets, numbers, colors, categories, laws, natural kinds, these have all been taken more or less platonically across the history of philosophy, and it has only been relatively recently that reductionism has attempted to do away with the jungles of nonphysical odds and ends various theories generate. Even the most parsimonious, however, have often felt it useful to adopt at least sets, and usually numbers into their ontologies. Once one has sets in hand, functions are a short step to reach. I will now argue that “a sense” is not an abstract object in the usual (philosophical) understanding. And here is the question, to begin: what is “a function” to be?

I pose the problem this way in light of Donald Davidson’s posthumously published lectures on predication, in which he argues persuasively that any account of predication in which predicates standing alone are taken to denote cannot escape inherent vulnerability to third-man arguments. Say we see ⌜R(a,b)⌝, as usually understood. The expression ‘Rab’, for instance, appears to consist of three names, that is ‘a’, ‘b’, and the name of some relation ‘R’. But this is a result of losing sight of the fact that the relation-term, a two-place predicate, is supposed to do the work of unifying the other terms so as to form a sentence (here one thinks of Russell’s claim that every sentence requires a universal ). One cannot just stick these terms together (if they are names) as 〈R,a,b〉 or the like, for then one merely has three names to one another: something else is needed to make this collection of names into a (unified) sentence. , The same problem will happen with 〈Q,R,a,b〉, 〈P,Q,R,a,b〉 and so forth, in infinite regress. Davidson takes this ubiquitous failure to be a reductio of views of predicates holding them substantial. Since any function ‘ƒ′′(ϕ)=ψ’ can be recharacterized as Fϕψ, functions do not stand much chance as objects.

I have followed Joan Weiner’s exposition and called senses of sentences thoughts. Further, a thought is not what a sentence means: that is its truth-value, on the Sinn und Bedeutung view. ‘Concept’ I hereinafter reserve for those things associated with noun-phrase terms, which present objects in various modes. Words for concepts act like words for objects, insofar as we are able to discuss what concept words denote when used in oblique contexts. While to say ‘Superman = Clark Kent’ is to say something about an object and to say ‘‘Superman’ ≡ ‘Clark Kent’’ is to say something about terms (i.e. that their denotata are identical), to say ‘Superman ≡ Clark Kent’ is to say something about senses. One says in this example that an object is presented in two modes, while what one means is true. , But must an object be substantial? No: “an object” need not be substantial to fulfill the roles a quasi-Fregean semantic theory needs senses to fulfill.

In order to elucidate, we take a detour into terms for other nonphysical “entities.” According to the well-known “Slingshot” argument, which has been attributed to Frege, every true sentence denotes one thing, and every false sentence denotes another, if sentences denote. Sentences express thoughts that map them onto truth values. But truth and falsity are not objects. The truth of a sentence, for Frege, is derivative from the truth of its sense, for only thoughts are such that the question of truth “arises” for them. Thoughts are the intensional entities, then, and it is expressing a thought that connects sentences via reference to truth or falsity. But truth and falsity are not concepts (functions), either, on that view. They are not things, to borrow a figure, but not nothings. So the cognate terms of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ are serviceable even though properly speaking they are irreferential.

So far we have seen that predicate terms may be characterized as functions. (A one-place predicate is a degenerate case: it takes only an argument, and when it does it expresses a thought, which is true or false, but one may say that in predicating an atomic sentence consisting of a completed one-place predicate functions as a two-place predicate with truth or falsity as its value.) Thoughts are also, in a way, functions. So when we talk about them we may characterize them as such, e.g. a thought about a sum, as expressed by ⌜ƒ′′′(+,x,y,z) = V⌝ where V∈{T, ⊥}. Similarly, when we discuss senses in terms of functions like Fxy, we implicitly treat the senses as incomplete in the fashion that functions were said earlier to be incomplete. As objects or entities, this could be problematic. However, functions constituting senses (and thoughts, but let us leave that discussion for now) are not objects, as I have indicated, though we must needs use language in a way that assumes they are such. As a first approximation to the idea, contrast what one understands by ‘It is a red coat’ with ‘∃x(Rx∧Cx)’.

. The basic motivation for moving away from characterizing senses as objects is to avoid the regress problem with accounts of predication. If one wants senses, they just cannot be entities. If the predicate does not stand for an object, there may not need to be a relation between what it is predicated of and something further in order for predication to happen. More generally, if one avoids taking terms’ concepts to be objects (in that ordinary sense) one may avoid similar third-man difficulties arising from relating senses to objects and utterances. Another motivation, for those who like it, though not justifcatory, is ontological parsimony. Further, the obscure nature of these entities, concepts and thoughts, can make them seem like stop-gaps rather than important and central features of a semantic theory.

Indeed, it seems to be the obscurity of Frege’s intensional entities that led Davidson to reject the idea that predication consists in anything further than satisfaction, which is taken to rest upon the simple notion of truth. Whether or not his view is correct I cannot say, but I have adopted some of this method, a sort of “deflation” of certain intensional entities. One needs an “aboutness” relation, in order to connect parts of the world: what’s “in the head,” what’s said, and the bits of the world answering to them, if any. Terms that act like names, such as predicates taken in isolation, would seem to be about something. Each meaningful term in an expression, predicates and names , would contribute to the sentence what it was about and the structure (or something) would unite these pieces into an expression of a thought, with a truth value. Here follows an example (failing) account of senses by which they are not entities.

To avoid the regression problem, predicates must be meaningless when taken in isolation—or to be more precise, concepts must be insubstantial. Though things may be red, there is no “color red.” ‘R’ does nothing by itself, but ‘Rx’ is useful, e.g. in ‘◊∃xRx ∧ ~∃y(Cy)’. So our senses occur in predication, that is, when something is predicated of something, the noun phrase or sentence thereby created has a sense (under normal circumstances). A term, for instance a complex term like the noun phrase ‘the black cat on the mat in the den of my uncle Charlie’s cottage’ presents a particular object(s) in a certain way, but it associates the cat also with other objects which are presented along with it. The phrase will be satisfied if certain circumstances appear, otherwise not. If one wanted the phrase to stand by itself as a sentence, one could insert the copula between ‘cat’ and ‘on’, and the truth-conditions of the resulting sentence would be the satisfaction conditions of the presentational phrase. The thought expressed by ‘The cat is on the mat’ functions to give some truth condition or other through the utterance. Which one is a matter best explored elsewhere. The upshot is that presentation of an object, e.g. by predication, just is the function—a presentation through concepts.

(Now some bold conjectures.) A predication is a syntactic activity, a singular event whose effects may persist, but only through the syntactic act does the semantic value of a syntactic object appear. Ostention is a primitive syntactic and semantic activity: the object and the term appearing together serves to introduce, roughly, satisfaction conditions for terms while establishing the syntactic identity of terms. (Homonyms and synonyms being complications of natural, which is to say non-ideal, languages.) Saying “‘Black’ ‘cat’” gets one nowhere, nor does “Black, cat,” as these are again mere concatenations of names (or name-like terms). Saying something along the lines of “That cat is Black” or “Black(Tabby)” is predication. The predicative act does not occur in the mind, as on Russell’s sometime view. Predication occurs in the linguistic act (on the model presented above, whole sentences could be treated as multiplace predicates per impossibile). The act expresses a thought, which is related as mentioned above to ideas one has; the ideas are “in the head” but the thought is not. A thought expressed by a sentence has to be “somewhere” however. I say it is in the world. A thought expressed by a sentence is some arrangements of spatiotemporal and abstract objects (like numbers). What is expressed, on this view, is not the ideas in the head but parts of the world itself. Expression and presentation are the same. Grasping the meaning of a sentence is not taking hold of an extraphysical object (usually ), but rather it is contacting the world through language. One can see through language to the world behind it. And this is because language names (presents) parts of the world.
Now for a moment imagine that all physical objects (including events) are labeled and put in sequence. Then primitive sensory information could counterfactually tell one about (the (indirect) effects of) those objects, whereby satisfaction of any utterable sentence could be ascertained. Since the whole world is sequenced, the sequence either satisfies a sentence or it doesn’t. Every satisfied sequence, on the familiar Tarskian model, is true if and only if satisfied. A sentence is about, on ordinary conceptions, regions of the world; but here we see that sentences are about the world in so far as they are satisfied by it, which is to say in so far as they are true. So if sentences are about anything, they are true or false. (On this view, however, we have not so far said that sentences mean truth or falsity.)

On the example view just expounded*, senses occur in physical locations, supervening on expressive utterances, and the senses are the onstention-based connections between syntactically developed names of objects and objects via presentation (“here is how one finds out whether the world satisfies the sentence… ”). This amounts, apparently, to a functional competence. There are sentences which are terms arranged in such a way that they express a thought, and the thought is some purported region of the world. This of course begs the question how it comes to be a unity, but apparently merely existing as an expression is enough to make it so. There are thoughts expressed by the sentences, as it turns out they to are physically located.

That view is unsatisfactory for any number of reasons, but let me mention two straw parts. First, the explanation that the very act (or event) of predication creates the intensional state is opaque as far as explanatory potential goes. Second, it is not clear what it would mean to express part of the world.

...and so forth.

*In order to show that it is possible for someone to hold a view with the desired consequences, and also to make clear which moves a subsequent positive view won't make.

(Those who care can email us for bibliographical information.)

Scheduled Outage.

2006-11-09T12:02:00.000-06:00

Until 17th November.

...Except McFly

2006-11-08T13:06:00.000-06:00

How come it is that people think vandalism is funny? I have no damn idea but I will tell you this IT IS NOT ALWAYS FUNNY. MUTHAFUCKAS. In fact there are times when you know you should like recognize that destroying shit isn't so cool. Like Wikipedia. STOP FUCKING IT UP OR I WILL PUT AN ARTICLE ON THERE ABOUT YOU AND HOW YOU ENJOY SYPHALITIC WIENERS. & Have I mentioned that there is a time and a place for vandalism, because sometimes defacing some supposedly serious thing is hilarious? Because I'm doing it now. So, "people," why don't you take some good advice from a canadian--yes, he is REALLY A HUMAN I SWEAR--and just mess up one thing that if it were serious would be absurd but vandalism of which is even more hilariously absurd and wrong because everybody already has a pretty damn good idea of what stuff is true about it. I.e. edible farm fowl. with beers.

ahhh... hh. ahh. er. hhh. ahh--mm.

2006-11-07T08:33:00.000-06:00

the ache of tired muscles after sleep is the xylem to pleasure's phloem while stretching early in mornings after an accomplishment or a job of work, warm honey running both directions from scalp to shoulders, wrists to neck, spine to ass, glutes to toes, crotch to pectoralis, is the ache and bracing comfort of living.

Vote!

2006-11-07T07:14:00.000-06:00

Well, that's all I've got to say.

notable kwoatz

2006-11-06T21:18:00.000-06:00

fr. tha lair o tha main proety man harold chinaski: Dinosauria, we

born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this
walking and living through this
dying because of this muted because of this
castrated
debauched
disinherited
because of this
fooled by this
used by this
pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this
made violent
made inhuman
by this

the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat
the gun
the knife
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

the fingers reach for the bottle
the pill
the powder

we are born into this sorrowful dealiness
we are born into a government 60 year in debt
that soo will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
and the banks will burn
money will be useless
there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
it will be guns and roving mobs
land will become useless
food will become a dimiishing return
nuclear power will be taken over by the many
explosions will continually shake the earth
radiated robot men will stalk each other
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground

the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
trees will dies
all vegetation will die
radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold

the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
the petering out of supplies
the natral effect of general decay

and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

born out of that.

the sun still hidden there

awaiting the next chapter.

fr. 'last nigh of the earth poems', ecco 2002. thx old man.

haik**

2006-11-05T11:53:00.000-06:00

careful darling, sharps
must be disposed of properly.
i will help you.

why do bruises come?
was it a tussle, in the wine
before we screwed?

washed in report ink
ties and pinstripes underground
wish London ill, now.

and two short stories:

teen boy loves cock, boyfriend doesn't.

Rabbi: "Abel left everything to Cain!?"

Stretching

2006-11-04T06:54:00.000-06:00

Here I am in the morning sitting leftward spine curled in a swivel chair typing avoiding. The work, that is, I'm avoiding it. Here with the computer age equivalent of a tiny leather fake crocodile narrow lined with no dates pocket notebook, scribbling in tiny type of ink from a rounded tin nibbed fountain pen in sweat greased fingers. Cry out, fingers, as I lean into you and strike these plastic letters like Bukowski advised in the title of a book of poetry I saw once while acquiring another rough paper board bound paperback well glued floppy bright colored big lettered new poems volume of his. The other day. In a well known bookstore, while drinking one oz. of free complimentary may I please entice you to spend money at our in house coffee shop strangely (syrup) flavored latte or mocha or whatever in a tiny cup that could not possibly have been Dixie, waxed, or reminiscent of the bright wide avenues of libraries in childhood with books so wide as to be hard to hold all around amongst gigantic comfortable chairs, when in fact I was looking–I swear–for a volume on tensor analysis, I came across the poetry section which I like to visit sometimes when I am waiting for the mall shops to open at the shopping mall two blocks down from this one. I can't wait for LED lighting to become a reality even if I do have to pay U.S.$50 per bulb just because they are more efficient still than flourescents and do not have the drawback of buzzing, which is what I'm hearing underneath the sad morning music I put on to get in the mood to work when it is a dreary Saturday or Sunday or Thursday and I must study and memorize something or else compose something or evaluate something and need to be appropriately somber instead of stripping down to my skivvies and running manic wet through the rain while my soles are torn on concrete sidewalks. Today, I need to write a creative composition of not more than 500 words.

For the H monstar.

2006-11-03T21:14:00.000-06:00

butt
what.

for what's falling.

2006-11-02T04:04:00.000-06:00

Twins

It rains.
The sky is like ground-out cigarettes.
It's heavy and slow, sloppy
like last night's leftovers,
like last week's sullen laundry,
like a quiet whispered lie.
I buried my sister today.
I haven't eaten in two days.
My skin: brown, worn, weathered.
Thick.
The malamute it sniffing for rats
in the leftovers of the back porch.

The old machine–
stolen from the high school–
with the brand name on the plastic–
sign glowing to advise everyone soda–
is reasonably priced–
lies on its side obscured–
in the turkeyfoot and thistle–

cozying up
to empty forty bottles.
I'm guilty, unashamed. She
focussed on others and I focussed
on my plate
its contents decided before our
births, wichtig in Jupiter's light. No,
in Europa's light.

I'm wearing what she would've
told everyone in her video
before martyrdom
to don. A quiet knit, a
shawl, a cap against rain.
Her stone was born this morning
while I stood over shoulders
of thickwristed women
who spelt, excellently,
her life.
The great trunk's, branches
blooming like its vines, outlasting
over our tattered roof.

These, these, these are October flowers.
These are November seeds.
Like a necklace strung with rusty
potted meat tins swarming
–overloaded and doomed–
with larvae. It's possibilities
she saw in skies like these.
Eyes like these. Thighs like--

Drives by, the dark sedan,
the young man who
chose the beautiful one.
Looks at me his lips her name
silent in the oilblack engine
noise and the overflowing gutters,
and the malamute follows–
baying–
like she knows curses to say
on her mother's behalf, in
her way. Plastic bags
dangle hanged upon maples'
empty arms in its wake.

I've got
this bit of silver mirror,
from the ancient clapboard on Jackson Street,
from when we broke in
because of a dare; she
coveted it. I took it for
to give, and now its given
back, like a letter with its address
washed away, by the page scrawled out
for a paralegal in the living room
last March. Equinox. Oh will
she kiss me from the
other side just one more
time? I know the Red Queen's
journey in my barefoot bones.

Creak away, ghost of mine,
in Momma's rocker–
under the kitchen window where
you put it–
with its busted seat you don't need.
Love, it's streetlamp time.
Well say to the malamute,
"Come!"
So I can go before that boy
comes by to take her
tomorrow morning.

hm. cold out.

2006-11-01T13:58:00.000-06:00

bicycle. check.
scarf. check check.
gloves. flexed.
goggles in place,
boots strapped 'round in seven strong buckles with nickel tongues.
check.

leaves on the hoods of dusty hoopties. check.
empty flasks of
backberry schnapps. check check.
cobblestones negotiated casually. check.
creak trees--ten-four.
fly, gray rolling banks above.
done and done.

it's november. it's december.
it's Ultima Thule in reverse, ascending into
a cold cave's heart in the sky
where i spy la lune peeking
. check. flexed.

What is your Halloween costume?

2006-10-31T18:27:00.000-06:00

I am going as an 80's style olde skoole rapper, like maybe a reject from Heavy D who was too much meshuggeh to hook up with the Beasties.

Weather Report

2006-10-30T07:01:00.000-06:00

Warm, sunny breezy, with a hint of grit from crumbling leaves, this weekend is an excellent time to catch the current meteor showers, and to experience a final evening with friends before one's breath begins to mist; forecast models are uncertain, but predict heavy thunderclouds and freezing brain-drain-rain.

'Tis the season to Vote The MFs Out.

2006-10-29T12:01:00.000-06:00

Some have asked, "Pray tell, fair lady, why thou dost not protest this electoral season?" And I reply, "Forsooth, I cannot but think it entirely obvious that one must needs VTMFO, and so am resting on my sunburned-in-shantytowns-of-Guatemala confidence that a roadblock will be put in the way, "The Road Warrior"-style, of the runaway neofascistic juggernaut Mac Truck that is Christian-theocratic Neoconservative Corporatism."

I mean, really. You would have to be absolutely rabid, really just out of your mind with fear and rage and possibly some kind of mental illness such as denial that reality is reality (sorry, Bible-thumpers, but reality really is, you know, real--not like your fake hocus-pokery with the Invisible Cloud Being (TM Bartcop.com)), to vote for these people once again EVEN IF your Republican representative has done some nice stuff for your district. I mean, the basic point of Congressional spending is brinding home the bacon, so, you know, the Dems do a pretty good job of protecting us and creating jobs (objectively, you must support terrorism if you support the party that weakens our nation by weakening the economy and disenfranchising the citizens while whipping them into an emotional state in which they are willing to cede power to exactly the sort of imperialists that our enemies already claim we all are) and will continue to do so, if not in the form of longer jail sentences then maybe in the form of jobs programs that keep people from doing things that might get them sent to jail in the first place. Now that I actually respect the national Democrats, what with their business-friendly miquetoast weaseliness, but still they are bette than the alternative. And if you don't like picking between bad options, maybe you should have decided not to be born. So anyway I'll be at the polling station on the 7th, and You'd better be there too. I'm sorry but a symbolic protest against voting isn't like voting for someone whom you think ought actually to be in office (Pat Buchanan, Nader, Perot, The Body, Christopher Walken...)--it just means you abdicate your right to complain to me or anyone who did vote about the shittiness of the govt. I am tired of people thinking that whining is citizenship. It just isn't. So do what you have to do, but get your voting done. Otherwise you'd better not come running to me when your daughter gets gang-raped by her platoon mates in the communal shower of the barracks of her battalion near Kirkuk just before she is killed by mortar fire. I don't want to hear it.

eye uv tha tygar

2006-10-28T13:02:00.000-06:00

i prolly aint mentioned the adrian legg whose gots the made guitar fingers + he bends a string like nobodys biz + he can work a tuning knobb like goddamn the crystal method on their first album his twiddling is so tight(YouTube), butt u know his work be hella new-age 'n shizzle so like take a listen but i do not recommend much considerations of a buy or nothin' 'cuz the boy do nots got a songwritin' talent. boy needs some composers'r sump'm.

bonuz: holla-ween aproacheth

Catchphrases to Watch Out For

2006-10-27T23:55:00.000-06:00

So I'm at this party, right, and this woman (well, chick really, but let's not get into that, k?) in this extremely awful strawberry-blonde wig is talking about her lack of being able to get a boyfriend for more than about 3 months. So of course I figure she doesn't know that, you know, brain chemicals released during the initial "honeymoon" phase of a relationship tend to dip at about that time. I mean, figure why--three months of fucking is enough to (a) get preggers and/or (b) figure out if you can stand to be together more longer. I mean, if you are like a hunter-gatherer or whatever. So the rush of falling in love and all that may go bye-bye. So sad. On the other hand, the chemicals that cloud one's judgment may be clearing right about then, too, so perhaps at that point one can make a more sober assessment of the situation. My assessment of this person was, you know, frankly that she was crazy (she's like this actress or whatever) and she probably picked Bad Dudes--and not Luke Perry-type Bad, either. And so this vapid complainance was going on for a bit. And I had never met her before. But so some friends and I were at this party, which was a house party, and we were there on a thirdhand invitation via a boyfriend of a friend of one of the hosts who happened also to be an acquaintance. Also along for the crash were some unmentionable people about whom I shall defer complainance until a later date, if not postpone it indefinitely. Some matters are best left sweaty and calling for beer at the bottom of a stairwell. What I decided to do was, to say, "Have you considered the fact that you really shouldn't trust your own judgement," and some similar remarks in that line. I really just wanted to shut up this ultravapid line of talk, right? So but anyway she pulls this face like I thought you were hot until you didn't treat me like I'm special because I am so goddamn thin I could pick off pedestrians from inside the book depository flagpole. She says, I mean she's all like, "You don't know me!" and all of that. So she you know tried to walk away, and fortunately she didn't try one of those talk-to-the-hand moves because that was just too much and she knew it, but then so I bummed a cigarette off her and went to collect an ex of mine who was too plastered to stay off a roof. Yeah, I don't know her. Right.

Irish Evil.

2006-10-26T20:42:00.000-06:00

30% more awesome than regular evil.

In boxes in bags and

2006-10-25T16:23:00.000-06:00

Malvina Reynolds sings like that ol' angel, yo. plus Kev. Neal.on. izzle the shizzle. pluscharacterspluswriting doubleplus awe-summ. song for cred.:

little boxes on the hillside
little boxes made of ticky-tacky
little boxes on the hillside
little boxes all the same

there's a green one and a pink one
and a blue one and a yellow one
and they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same

and the people in the houses
all went to the university
where they were put in boxes
and they came out all the same

and there's doctors and lawyers
and business executives
and they're all made out of ticky-tacky
and they all look just the same

Sounds better in French.

2006-10-24T21:44:00.000-06:00

Hey malePOVpr0n-luvrs: don't watch a movie with this in it:

"I'm speaking about my amazing hard fucking sex and you're thinking about pizza!"

It's about a Good Girl and her fantazie adventure and shit. By Erika. Not for the "manly." You fuckin' apes.

Nostalgia.

2006-10-23T13:11:00.000-06:00

I've long maintained
that awesomeness accom-
panies only the young-
minded.

Also I like playing and
your life is not as good as
mine, so: HA!

Scheduled outage.

2006-10-15T12:08:00.000-06:00

Until Monday (20061023).

Meanwhile, silence.

There must be something good

2006-10-14T21:19:00.000-06:00

faraway from heeeeeeere....

i've got my leather
sheepskins on my back. vines
twining in my satchel--woven from last
year's reeds and bluefinger.
i'll find three or four signs of them today
i swear they can never excape
my hopeless vengeance
against your new husband
even though you never knew i
loved him again after all these
seasons, hunts, prarie fires, stampedes
and wars. and when i kill
him for taking you away, my
dear, they will flay me but
good--and you will still stay.
so my futile search is already over
you see. you see.

Today is a good day I think to watch a movie.

2006-10-13T10:13:00.000-06:00

Hey person with whom

2006-10-12T15:54:00.000-06:00

I don't get along, apparently:

Your sunglasses make you look like a bug. Which makes sense. Maybe you could buy some fashion sense when you purchase your sense of humanity? Or do they not sell that at Gap for Followers?

Where's your Coleridge now?

2006-10-12T15:41:00.000-06:00

A request.

2006-10-11T15:02:00.000-06:00

Here is button for your posts about politics. Sneaky Sis requests you use this power wisely. I say, fuck shit up.

Mystification

2006-10-10T15:30:00.000-06:00

A video for your consideration, in the
i don't know what to say zone.

Perficĕre: inaestimibilis.

2006-10-09T13:02:00.000-06:00

"By authority of the Board of Trustees of the University of _______
and upon recommendation of the Senate
at ________
Mr. __________
has been admitted to the Degree of
Master of Arts in Philosophy
and is entitled to all rights and honors thereto appertaining."

... :D

U no 1t guD qu0t d00d3r, u roxzxorZZ!!!!

2006-10-08T22:08:00.000-06:00

Wtf is with U humans YOUR A BUNCH OF DRAMA-WHORES. Because social intrique literally gets you off through your brain chemicals. And nobody said it better:

Myspace is the internet version of a Wal-Mart parking lot at 11:45 on a Friday night

--J-r0 t. m4gn1f1c1nT

Weather Report

2006-10-07T07:01:00.000-06:00

Sharp, sunny, chill, blustery, 40% chance of anything at all, tiny flakes of snow pervade the zone of personal extent, neurotransmission will overclock, expect intense explosive dervishes and ball lightning in the social sphere; something Wrong is airborne.

with apologies to My Bloody Valentine

2006-10-06T20:48:00.000-06:00

Hey my lovely cliche,
hey sweet cherries and plums.
Called twice on Sunday
just to say, say
I'm alone, but not for long
I've got some singing.

Why don't you enter
nice an slow
at my window,
while my head's on a pillow
my hips are like jelly
and I won't stop them.

Come on, come on, you
grow & shimmer like chords
within this clouded mind.
I'll bend towards what
we said we'd find,
for you're there awaiting,
when we came together.

What leads one down the garden path.

2006-10-05T15:32:00.000-06:00

From my notes while reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations sec. 388-414.

Hypotheses
Language L1 expresses the (set of) concepts C1.
“expresses a set of concepts”: all noncontradictory, coherent combinations of concepts are possible in grammatically acceptable sentences of Ln.
“noncontradictory combinations of concepts” are those which do not contain an impossibility of imagination or alternatively an implicit logical contradiction in any appropriate formalization of the terms of Ln.
Call such a formalization ƒ(Ln). [e.g. ‘x is a square’ becomes S(x) ]

Example of an unimaginable:
∃x(x is a square ^ x is a circle)

Example of an implicit logical contradiction (that is, a semantic one):
∀x(x is a circle only if x is not a square)
∀y((y is a square only if y is not a circle)
∴ ∀x∀y(x is a circle ^ y is a square iff x≠y) [steps omitted]

Second such example:
∀x(x is a number ↔ x has no color)
∴ ∼∃y(y = 1 ^ y is red)

Third (further) example
∀x∀ y(x is an elephant ^ y is a zebra iff x ≠ y)

Ln may express more, and more complex, concepts than necessary to express Cn. This includes concepts (e.g. cj) contradictory to concepts (e.g. ci) in Cn. E.g. ci = |square| and cj = |circle| we can express |square & circle|. Similarly for |elk| and |fox|, e.g. This leaves open the question just what a simple concept being “contradictory” to another might mean.

“coherent combinations of concepts” are complex or complexes of concepts that do violate the exclusivity constraint
It is impossible to express a concept cn two parts of which are such that:
being-F (= ci) and being-G (= cj) are mutually exclusive
[ ∀ x ∀ y (Fx.Gy only if ◻x≠y) ]
for some sort of combining function ƒ, cn = ƒ{ci, …, cj} or perhaps +ƒ〈…, ci, …, ck, …〉+.

Though note how the noncontradiction rule and the exclusivity constrain amount to the same demand for coherence or intelligibility. (“Making sense.”) Question: is it possible that there are concepts that it is impossible to express? "Expressions" qua literal, demonstrative utterances of a language probably cannot express every coherent noncontradictory concept of, say, Ce, the concept set expressed by my current (American English of the early 21st century) ideolect, Le.

NB: and Ln can be used to attempt to express some concept set Cm; I have used the alphanumeric symbology to indicate that, as in point 1, Ln expresses Cm iff n=m.
Poetry seems to allow the expression of complex concepts not expressable in Le. –A controversial claim. It is possible that poetry expresses cns which are inexpressible in demonstrative sentences by we limited beings—which is to say that it affords an alternative method for “expressing” some Cn. In a sense, poetry has a different meaning than prose, because of some feature of its structure, specifically that it associations of concepts available for ƒ [see above] that we cannot properly concatenate (before appreciating a poem). [Those are nonlinear or “nonlogical” associations… whatever that means.]

We have assumed that there are
Primitive concepts–some might call these “simple” concepts or ideas.
Complex concepts–the other ones.
These foregoing concerns commit us to the view that ∃x(x is a concept ^ x is structured).
So on this view I owe an account of how concepts are structured, and why (process).
Connectionism is an attractive move here...

One wonders what sort of vile epithets W. might have resorted to upon hearing such a claim.

one week, left right on

2006-10-04T18:44:00.000-06:00

a ramblin' blind, a friend in need, an a soulful evening of rain

can i come home with you
baby can i come home with you?
yes id do anything in this god allmighty world
if youd just let me come home with you

baby let me follow you down
baby let me follow you down
oh id do any thing in this god allmighty world
if youd just let me follow you down

much thanks r zimmerman 4 whom everything whats old is new.

Older, but Revived Nonetheless.

2006-10-03T11:10:00.000-06:00

(The best resource in the last few decades for understanding modern global skepticism is probably Barry Stroud's book. This essay is in part inspired by Ebbs-style semantic antiskepticism.)
...
On Putnam's [one-time] view of meaning, a word's meaning is not some feature of or thing in the mind, but rather an object to which the word applies. The thing to which the word properly applies is that which is typically and causally related to thinking/uttering the word. As an example, the word 'water' applies to (portions of) water. A word is correctly applied just in case the thing it is said of is indeed what the speaker (implicitly) claims it to be. So if I say that that puddle over there is made of water, my use of 'puddle' will be correct if the thing indicated is a puddle and my use of 'water' will be correct if the puddle is composed of water. The proposition I express by saying 'that puddle is water' is true just in case the thing about which I am talking is a puddle made up of water. This is of course an example of the disquotational principle, where supposing 'x is F' has a unique meaning: 'x is F' is true (when uttered by A) iff x is F (in the realm of objects to which A can refer). The reason for this seemingly odd formulation is that the realm of what is (can be) mentioned by words will vary to some degree with language. For instance, a brain in a vat under certain circumstances will be speaking a different language from our own (English) and will refer to (at least some) things such that a string of words will mean something different from that string of words in English so that the truth-conditions of what is expressed by the utterance of the string will be different for the brain than for we English speakers.

Putnam denies the Cartesian thesis that meaning is determined by a mental image by counterexample. Briefly, if A and A's identical Twin-Earth counterpart A* utter the same word, it may be the case that even though they have identical mental images what they mean differs [I derive this version of the example from in large part, Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning' " with many thanks to discussions with Gary Ebbs]. Supposing that on Twin-Earth there is a liquid, let us call it Twin-water, that in all respects (in A*'s experience) is identical to the liquid H20 (that is, water) on Earth (in A's experience) although Twin-water is chemically dissimilar, and that when A and A* utter 'water' they have the same mental image: it will be the case that they are mentioning a (portion of) something different in all cases, and the word 'water' refers to different things despite the similarity of the mental images. (I will set aside complications and take it that this is sufficient for our purposes here to show that meaning of a word is not determined by a mental image associated with its use.) Putnam's view, very roughly, is that the meaning of a word is determined by the circumstances under which it is used.

Anthony Brueckner reconstructs an argument that superficially looks like Putnam's but has certain important differences. What seems relevant to me is not that he relies on the idea of sense impressions to do a great deal of work that Putnam doesn't have them doing, regarding (dis-)confirmation of whether one is a brain in a vat [A. Brueckner, "Brains in a Vat" 151]. Rather, the telling blow can be dealt at the point at which Brueckner tries to undercut Putnam by claiming that one is not allowed to assume that we are speaking English in making the anti-skeptical argument. His claim is that application of the disquotational principle to A's statement 'I am a brain in a vat' by A will not work since A would be assuming that A spoke English even though this may not be the case [Brueckner 164]. If something seems wrong here, good: it seems appropriate to ask now how could actual-world-interacting A not assume she is speaking English, and how B could not assume he is speaking 'English' (which we can call Venglish)? Finally, Brueckner claims that, under the conditions he has described, in which what language used to show that 'I am a brain in a vat' is false is unknown, it cannot be shown that we know what we mean by our words [165-6].

Now the actual results of Putnam's argument. The problem that Putnam's argument seems to me to raise for the skeptic just is whether the skeptic about knowledge of the empirical world can even raise the always-in-a-vat case as in intelligible possibility. As he says, the point is to consider "the preconditions for thinking about, representing, referring to, etc." (Putnam 16). But we have been assuming all along the the skeptic about empirical knowledge raises an intelligible possibility, which seems immediately gripping as the skeptic who employs arguments about dreaming seems to raise an immediately gripping intelligible possibility.

The skeptic cannot raise an intelligible problematic possibility using the words 'brain in a vat'. Now, since B's words 'brain' and 'vat' cannot refer to actual brains in vats, he cannot in fact raise this skeptical possibility, because his words just can't mean that. If B formulates the argument using the words 'vat', 'english', 'Venglish' and so forth, we can see how B fails to raise a skeptical doubt. Now since B's mental images are just like A's (and A is in our actual world) is seems that B can picture what looks (to A) like a brain in a vat, and B will call it 'brain in a vat', but B's words will be about a brain in a vat in the image. Similarly B will refer to Venglish in the image by 'Venglish'. Note that whatever theory of meaning one uses, for B 'Venglish' means a language other than his own, just as what A means by 'Venglish' is a language other than English (her own language). In B's realm of reference, 'I am a brain in a vat' is false because 'brain in a vat' refers to something that is obviously not the case with him. There is (ex hypothesi) no evidence that he gets that would indicate that he is a brain in a vat, but there is also no evidence that he gets that would indicate that he is a brain in a vat in the image (what he calls 'brain in a vat'). But given that one's beliefs (that are expressable) are limited to what one is able to understand the meaning of, there is no way, in the situation under consideration, for B to believe, and worse even to understand, the proposition that he is a brain in a vat, since he cannot mean in interior expressions brain in a vat, but is limited to meaning brain in a vat in the image. What this amounts to is that whatever one can mean by 'brain in a vat', this possibility is false of oneself.

For A, speaking English, can talk about brains in the image and about actual brains, and so forth. B can talk about brains in the image in the image and about actual brains in the image, and so forth. But it doesn't matter what language the proposition that one is a brain in a vat is expressed in–whatever the content of that proposition is will not be true. It seems to me that Brueckner gets himself into trouble by making a great deal of noise (only mentioned in a footnote) about language while trying to use a "metametalanguage" to describe what's going on in his argument (ft. 20 on 162-3). But we can express the idea in plain English: whatever it is that I mean when I say 'I am a brain in a vat', I am not that, so the proposition is false. The application of the disquotational principle seems to fail because the skeptic about knowledge of one's own beliefs tries to look at the statement 'I am a brain in a vat' from a "metaliguistic" standpoint, while not realizing that, even from that standpoint the proposition that one is a brain in a vat must be false, again because whatever is meant by 'brain in a vat' is not the case of one's own "brain". What this shows, if it is right, is that the skeptic about knowledge of one's own beliefs cannot raise an intelligible alternative to the case in which I do know what my words mean.

A further step is required to see why. B is limited to understanding (and believing to be true or false) just that which B can express. This does not include the proposition that B is a brain in a vat, but does include the proposition that B is a brain in a vat in the image, which B would express by saying 'brain in a vat'. Suppose we assume that A can by analogy believe herself to possibly be in a situation akin to B's. Then what we would be saying is that she, unlike B, can understand some kind of (imagined) uberwald-vats in which her uberwald-brain resides. However, B can imagine things that appear to B just as these imaginings appear to A, and he can say 'uberwald-vats' and so forth, but he cannot mean what A in the actual world means by them. What this seems to show is not that we have superior powers of intuition and insight, but rather that we do not understand what we imagine. That is to say, if the situation is really supposed to be analogous (one, after all, proposed to be "a brain in a vat"), then what the skeptic about empirical knowledge attempts to assert as a possibility is unintelligible; and the skeptic about knowledge of one's own beliefs relies on this alternative. A skeptic in a vat could not raise the possibility that B is a brain in a vat, because that would be unintelligible to both skeptic and B. Similarly, the skeptic about knowledge of one's own beliefs cannot raise the possibility that she thinks she understands related (somehow) to "uberwald-vats" and so forth. 'I am a brain in a vat' is unintelligible or false (no just false since the string of words might fail to express something one can understand). So in order to get this skeptical argument off the ground–based on the "results" of Putnam's argument as Brueckner construes it–the skeptic now has to assert that what is shown to be unintelligible, and necessarily so, is in fact intelligible. And even assertion of a super-knower cannot make that less than utterly wrong.

[This discussion does some violence to Brueckner in the sense that his argument is not fuly exegized with quotations and cetera, but any careful reader of the work should see that my interpretation is not malicious, quite the opposite. Of course I do (I now realize) have certain systematic reasons for wanting some form of epistemic externalism to work with.]

on a cape

2006-10-02T10:08:00.000-06:00

hex uv sun up in this, what. leefs changin &c. so get money, squirrels.

sweet euphoria, mine is tha heart u stole
touched & broken are tha things u love
using stars to light yer candles
warms my face, but i cant remember yers
gone are u dandelions, falling like mine
falling like daydream mangos
diving swallows
save my love for tha lasting one

thx mr cornell.

we dont exist

2006-10-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

thx best sad lady evr.

It's damned if you don't and it's damned if you do
Be true 'cause they'll lock you up in a sad sad zoo
Oh hidy hidy hidy what cha tryin to prove
By hidy hidy hiding you're not worth a thing

septender

2006-09-29T22:13:00.000-06:00

u see war on tv 2? fux. i gotsta get mo flagz a-pinnin' on me jacquet.

i need to watch things die
from a good safe distance
vicariously, i live while
the whole world dies
...
(like blood to a vampire)

plus

ma please, wont you flush it all away?

thx. maynard et al.

Conceptual Normativity

A rough-and-ready guide to what the deal is with philosophy, sort of

Causes and effects: some reminders

Always good to know...

Weather Report

Long-awaited non-update

Eau de toilette: because you haven't bathed in months

There Is No Reason to Believe a Reason Is a Reason

You can tell it's good 'cause it gets all milky when you leave it out overnight.

Barbara

driven by a tempest, or at least a rainstorm, writing strikes

Your inner nerd needs to change inner underwear...

Your pre-existing beliefs influence your attitude toward allowed levels of coercion falling short of Date Rape.

Slaughterhouse Life

'Ware the ides of Avril

Bed, Bath & Beyond... Fuck Yeah!

6' 20'' f*cking killin' for fun

artastic roundup.

A leftist speaks out for increasing U.S. forces in Iraq.

Lite-Brite animation. Yes.

well 'tisn't hexameter, exactly

Scheduled Maintenance

but what if you don't want 'em?

icarus ii

more on chemical dependency

alarm

the view from

short

take this, nanowrimo

thousand, or, how it was the wrong season to write with a pounding heart

try reading your diary aloud

nerd... core?

covenant

on a day like this or that they separated though having never met

Enlightenation

Stop with that faith stuff already.

Everyone's gay today!

basic visual

Two deaths

up and at... oh hell with it, where's my coffee

Pulled apart

What may motivate?

quiet, dark, slipping into the quicksand of sleep

At the seams

20061227

20061226

James Brown Is Dead

Redact Bush!

Weather Report

for those in the know

nickelback iz my anti-fun

e.r.i.p.s.a.

brain-o-matical puzzlerz

what's in a book?

Dirty it up, go ahead.

Fuckin' A Right

Scheduled outage.

Hangedover

oh... (!)

remember

when u turn 2 malt liquor

fake outs, yo

teacup circles Neptune

Weather Report

Nonreferring ontological terms: drop them.

Scheduled Outage.

...Except McFly

ahhh... hh. ahh. er. hhh. ahh--mm.

Vote!

notable kwoatz

haik**

Stretching

For the H monstar.

for what's falling.

hm. cold out.

What is your Halloween costume?

Weather Report

'Tis the season to Vote The M*****F*****s Out.

eye uv tha tygar

Catchphrases to Watch Out For

'Tis the season to Vote The MFs Out.