Now I realize some of you will say that REH brings these two issues up every time: Art and Indians and I do but a pattern is a pattern. You're using the same patterns over and over again. The Americas were not the first to have mass murder and re-education in the tens of millions but they are the most in your face on this list. When Pol Pot did his re-education of the Cambodian professional classes he used the same words as the Europeans did here. Hitler used the same examples of our concentrations camps in the state of Georgia with my people to justify his. Patterns. Ignoring the underlying abstraction and geometry of an act allows you to perpetrate it again as a totally different act. It also allows one not to seek a solution through identification of a toxic viral philosophy.
As for Art. I could just as well use Medicine now. That's different from when I was last on this list. Today the same economic principles of "productivity" that cut my voice teacher salary in half from the salaries of my teachers, is cutting the doctors incomes. Same pattern. Same process. Even have a name. Productivity and Productivity lag. Adam Smith be damned. Keynes be damned. It's plain as the nose on your face. You don't need an authority to argue over. Look at your neighbor bleeding and admit that you have no empathy or that it scares you to death. Adam Smith also wrote books on morals and Keynes spoke of morals. What you are describing here is organized theft. If Keynes knew both of Adam Smith's "invisible hands" as David Kay points out in Culture and Prosperity then he was speaking of balance and not Game theory. But zero-sum is murder and tit for tat is a kind of entropic state[as I understand entropy]. Stories are powerful. Note the stories of John Locke about "waste land" that were used to kill 98% of the original population of the Americas and destroy all of their technological cultural advancements other than food. Did you watch the URL I posted about Machu Picchu? http://video.pbs.org/video/1392958573/ The technological stuff was amazing. The creation of the largest stone sculpture on the planet was almost unbelievable but then they posited a history timeline that was impossible given the accomplishments, the altitude and the need for coca to survive. And then there is the fact that all of those stone workers were the size of women and their skeletons were mistakenly identified as women in 1913. Does that mean women are truly the strongest physiques on the planet and the greatest stone workers? How about that Sally? I'm beginning to believe that the West is great at collecting data but can't organize a story so that it makes sense, (except for some on this list.:>)) To justify genocide in the Americas the best Western scholars today use the excuse, "they weren't the first so we had the right to take them out." Which brings me back to my Gestalt training where "guilt = repressed rage." Topdog/Underdog shit again. Individual psychological pathologies. Is it any accident that the market is called "Sociopathic" and the perpetrators seem even "Psychopathic?" And then there are the group pathologies that excuse all of this crap. "Groupthink" and for viral action "Spreadthink" and to announce its history "Clanthink." How can people stand the smell? It must be hell to admit that the rules of the world are arbitrary and that we must construct systems with our minds that are humane if we are to deserve the term human being. I don't like Smith because he posits a monetary elite that is charitable and spreads the wealth as if it were equal. Worse, he claims he's just an observer and not an advocate. That's the same rules executed against the Art world in America and they practice mass murder killing all but 2% of the talent that they find and ferreting it off into things that are good for them and bad for the 10,000 graduates that we graduate every year just in singing alone. The angry mutant zombies they leave walking wouldn't do anything for the world that they were denied. That is parasitical. I would agree with Tom here that we are speaking not of a system of life but ultimately a nihilistic exercise. When one's Ultimate Concern is so temporal, nothing truly substantial can be discovered. Certainly none of these people would build a sculpture the size of Machu Picchu or take the responsibility for making an entire continent a garden as the network systems of Native Nations accomplished on a yearly basis. One more thing. American Indians were people. They fought. They cursed. They tortured and they had all of the foibles of all of the rest of humanity but they created a network that was two hemispheres wide. You might call it the precursor to the Internet since information from Peru made it to Mexico and the reverse and feathers from the Amazon made it to the Inuit. A common patterning pedagogical thread runs from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. That is no accident and that internet was stopped cold in its tracks by a pulse from Europe. The Chinese who came here a few years before left peacefully. It was the Europeans who destroyed the architecture, burned the books, built churches on the holy places, rewrote the rituals to be Catholic and then denied that we had ever existed at all except as poor hunter gatherers. That kind of denial is still going on in the U.S. except the lower 98% of the population are the current Indians. It's all about patterns. When you become tone deaf or lose your sense of geometry then you are free to continue to believe the world is a straight line and history is what you say. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 4:02 AM To: Sandwichman; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes the convert At 00:01 12/07/2010 -0700, you wrote: On 7/11/10, Keith Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > Although Keynes went off the rails by > rejecting Say and Smith, he had the courage at the end of his life to admit > that he'd been wrong. That counts for a lot in my view. You really need to be more specific about precisely WHAT Keynes repudiated. He famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Is that admitting he'd been wrong? Well, yeah, but in a non-specific way. He specifically said a few days before his death -- as I've already quoted -- that the 'hidden hand' of Smith was the way that the market worked (and, by implication that any other demand input would not by itself restore an under-performing economy). Adam Smith said a lot of things, some of them brilliant, some wacky and not all of them consistent. One can BOTH agree and disagree with Smith. One can also agree with Say, provided one picks the occasion. Say, too changed his mind. Both Smith and Say (like Marx, Keynes, Hayek and Freud) were victims of posthumous cults that took trivial sound bites from their works, twisted them and elevated them to holy scripture. Did Keynes reject the cant of the vulgar classical political economists of the 19th century and mistakenly attribute it to Say or Smith and then later retract the unkind attribution? This is not to say that Keynes wasn't wrong in some respects, but possibly these were not the things that he admitted were wrong. By the way, for a critique of Keynes, I would go to Fred Hirsh rather than Fred Hayek. If you mean Fred Hirsch, yes I agree. His "Social Limits to Growth" is, like Veblen's "The Theory of Business Enterprise", one of those 'sleeper' books that have yet to have their day. Both of them are saying extremely important things about the modern economy and are the only ones (I would maintain) who have lifted the discussion above that of the classical economists (and Ricardo's 'comparative advantage' of the 19th century). (I frequently mention Schumpeter in the modern pantheon but I don't think he has added anything really new, only his observation from history that economic systems change in great destructive lurches and that today's industrial-consumerist model is ripe for change.) It is so hard, when people's names become an ism, to separate what they were about from some wholly amorphous and mostly incorrect image of what they proposed. Even most of the popular quotations attributed to famous people were actually said by somebody else. Agreed, and the more famous the original utterer the more unlikely that he/she ever said it. I doubt whether Einstein or Churchill said 10% of what they were supposed to. I included "she" because the best known wrongly attributed statement of all was "Let them eat cake" by Mary Antoinette. She didn't even say; "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche' -- being invented by Rousseau of an unknown "grande princesse". Keith -- Sandwichman Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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