Brad Elliott Stone's dissertation discusses Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy and has these interesting bits on distress:

[T]he lack of distress is “the utmost distress”. This lack of distress takes several forms, including what Heidegger calls “the epoch of [the] total lack of questioning”. This lack of questioning is due to the lack of impossibility. Heidegger laments that “[e]verything ‘is made’ and ‘can be made’ if one only musters the ‘will’ for it”.

Progress, Heidegger explains, keeps us from understanding the true nature of distress. In our age, Heidegger writes, “one esteems lack of distress as ‘good’ . . . sustained only from the unbroken supply of what is useful, enjoyable, and already extant, which can be accrued through progress”. Eventually, nothing is deemed “impossible.” Any “impossibilities” are due to not yet having the means or technology to perform the needed task.

That for me resonates with the book I'm finishing, Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. Five hundred years from now, on their space ships, humans can produce whatever they need. Species off-shoots become less human. Until the day they are harassed by the inhibitors, machines left by earlier races whose purpose is to destroy civilizations when they learn interstellar navigation.

When the inhibitors start destroying the inhabited star systems, the refugees running from them begin to run out of essential supplies. Everything is not longer immediately available to them. They have to make choices again. Should the group escaping to the next start system they trade some of their weapons with the group prepared to fight a rear guard action? Which star system should they head for? They land on planets without metals and have to manage their resources. Is it impossible to escape the inhibitors? So they revert to being typically human again by the decisions forced upon them.  ¶ 7:54 PM 0 comments

  Found this article from the beginning of the century, Country House Anarchy, about the anarchist punk band Crass trying to buy the house they had communed in for decades. So much for "Property is theft", and all that. The sound of irony is made by Proudhon spinning in his grave. A sound that would fit in somewhere in Crass's recorded oeuvre. In the vault I have a fair selection of it. Everything from out of tune punk, to beerhall piano, musique concrete, and Yamaha DX-7 noodling. Someday I'll unload it to a serious collector and get my own country house.  ¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments

  How to kill communism? Move it to the USA. Here are the pertinent facts from an article on the Decline and Fall of the First International:

But the bombshell at the 1872 Congress was the startling proposal, presented by Marx and the General Council, that the seat of the General Council of the International should be transferred to New York. It came as a complete surprise to most of the delegates, although they voted for the proposal nonetheless. What Marx's motives were for such a move has been debated, but it effectively killed the International. But at least, by removing it to New York, he had saved the International from the influence of Bakunin.

The First International, saved and killed by Marx. Talk about you inner contradictions. I went down this path, looking up a reference to Bordiga, who was involved in the Third International and was full of contradictions himself.

campaigned against freemasonry as a firm advocate of secularism

he was attacked by Lenin in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”

expelled from the PCd'I for taking the defence of Leon Trotsky

produced a theory of the Soviet Union which presented it as being fundamentally capitalist

whilst remaining pro-Lenin, he was a constant critic of Leninism

Bordiga once wrote:

[U]nion bosses parade a democratic mentality, and it is necessary to point out their contradictions

If anyone, Bordiga would know all about contradictions.  ¶ 6:59 AM 0 comments

  Demonstrating that there's a Heidegger for everyone, here's the New Age Heidegger:

Come, come, whoever you are, return to the root of the root of the root of yourself. - Rumi Ancient rooting of language leads us back to Origins, providing us with what Martin Heidegger called 'a pointing to', a 'showing', a lighting-up. In What is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger illuminates the common rooting of the words thencan and thancan.

But than again, enowning prefers it's Can straight from the then days.  ¶ 8:27 AM 0 comments

  Interesting post, Managed MAPI? Not today, at an Outlook Add-in blog on Business Contact Manager (BCM). Sane individuals stop reading now!

If you haven't tried this before, you may be amazed by how much source code can be reconstructed from .NET IL. With managed code, Microsoft is effectively sharing their source code with developers.

Alex notes that to write good Outlook Add-ins you pretty much have to use MAPI. Unfortunately, MAPI was written in the days of COM, and writing a MAPI provider for Outlook in managed code is not a trivial exercise. Not that writing an straight COM MAPI provider was easy. Arguably it is easier in managed code, because once you are past the inter-op layer and into pure managed code, you can change in higher gears than are possible in unmanaged C++ development.

Can anybody tell me why Microsoft creates BCM with .NET?

That's easy. A managed component will have shipped while its unmanaged component will still be stuck in debugging the inevitable memory leaks, buffer overruns, and so on.

They have a plan to include MAPI to .NET or they wish to show that no impossible for .NET?

I don't know Microsoft's plans for MAPI, but Office components are written to address market requirements, to sell stuff, and not to show or demonstrate things. And I expect that explains why BCM only implements some MAPI interfaces instead of all of them. Microsoft is only going to implement the interfaces that BCM features require and ship the product.

Now you can understand why IMAPISession have only 2 methods from 19 — it is really hard to code such wrappers .

Hardness apart, why would BCM implement MAPI interfaces when there isn't a feature that needs those interfaces? In a world of limited resources, they would then have to test those interfaces instead of features customers use. And they would also unnecessarily increase BCM's attack surface. Not implementing unused interfaces makes BCM more secure.  ¶ 9:34 AM 0 comments

  There's an article this morning's Spectator on what's wrong with major labels that repeats sensible advice:

Sales of CDs might be tailing off as the market becomes sated, but there is an awful lot of good music in company vaults that has never been issued on CD. Most collectors can reel off a list of records that are long overdue a CD reissue, with original vinyl changing hands for obscene prices. This music could and should be out there earning much-needed revenue for the poor, becalmed record moguls, not to mention the musicians. If a CD issue isn't viable, make it available as a legal, paid-for download. We have the technology.

Finally, the record companies should be reducing their prices, increasing their royalties and accepting lower profit margins. They might be surprised by the results - "We'll make it up on the volume" is an old industry truism when it comes to explaining discounts, and it's now more valid than ever.

Will the record industry recognise these opportunities or will it continue to fight non-existent threats in an effort to hide its own greed and inefficiency? With a little effort and imagination, record companies could make cheap music extraordinarily lucrative once again. Don't hold your breath, though.

Plus the usual blathering on about MP3 downloads.

It's a good thing the young'uns have scared the nasty nabobs that run the labels with their hijinx. But they don't know how easy they have it these days, browsing genres, picking what goodies to download, and burn it to CD with a mouse-click. In my days, we were analog, and didn't have none of this digital fancy pants stuff. We laboriously had to rip vinyl and burn it to tape. We couldn't sit at our PCs picking what songs to steal. If I wanted to listen to a new tunes I had to trudge ten miles through the snow to the village store and shoplift it myself. Genres!?! We didn't have genres! We had a choice of Herb Albert's Greatests Hits, Best of Ray Conniff, or fifty copies of the recent LP of marching tunes by the local high school band. Today it's all: "I couldn't find any new Cologne Techno on Gnutella this evening." You did hear such mithering complaining in my day!  ¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments

  There is superb introduction to Andalusian music at the Afro Pop site. A long interview with Dwight Reynolds which takes 80 pages to print out. You will want to peruse it online because it is illustrated with a bunch of great pictures, including album covers.

In the interview they refer to María Rosa Menocal's book The Ornament of the World which I've been curious about. A review has this line:

Long gone, however, is the Córdoba library--a thousand times larger than any other in Christian Europe?

Which makes me wonder if the book is a history or a romance. Libraries were a Mediterranean institution. Greeks had started using a flexible alphabetic method of writing which allowed them to write about anything, produce collections of writing about many things, and collect them in libraries. The Romans decided that was a good thing, invented an alphabet for their own language, and wrote some more; enough to fill the libraries of Alexandria, Thamugadi, Ephesus, Halicarnassus, Pergamum, Caesarea, Athens, Rome, and Constantinople. The Eurasian peninsula north of that was illiterate and had no libraries.

The Romans introduced Latin in the European lands they colonized, and that later served as a conduit for the Latin bible, but libraries remained a Mediterranean thing. They were first destroyed along the north by the barbarian invaders, and then by the spread of Islam along the south. Islam demands fealty to a single book, and it was along the Islamic frontier that some of the Arab invaders were able to exercise their curiosity about these libraries. Cordoba is one example and Damascus another. It was also along the frontier that the ratio of Arab rulers to locals was highest and where the greatest accommodation with other cultures happened.  ¶ 8:03 PM 0 comments

  Enowning defined! Apparently Viriginia Woolf is involved:

Laura Brown lived her whole life inside 'the moment', the impossible, bent space of philosophical enowning (coming into her own, taking ownership of a self, a life--this is the 'moment' of import), lived in a way that no one could, or would see. This intellectual-emotional struggle was the crux of Woolf's own contemplations, the endlessly receding Moment of becoming, the strange process of facing fact, and finding that more than real, the world is thoroughly absurd, disturbed.

  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 comments

  I thought it was just me. The big local "alternative" radio station has been playing Wilco for a few years. I only listen to it sporadically because of large geological things that promote mixed reception quality, but pretty much any time I listen for more than an hour to their pop shows they'll play some completely lame and instantly forgettable song, that turns out to be Wilco. Sure they take risks and the station, to their credit, plays all kinds of stuff that doesn't work. They play it once, it fails, and I never hear it again. The Wilco songs are in high rotation though, and the DJs are really enthused about them. The only other band they are similarly excited about for no good reason I can understand are Radiohead, but they're for another post.

Today I'm delighted to find that I'm not the only one who thinks Wilco is as exciting as the damp towel I used to dry the dog after he frolicked through the sprinklers. Stephen Metcalf in Slate graces us with: What's So Great About Wilco? - How a spineless rock band became known for its nerve.

Some consumers, of course, still need to feel as though the music they buy merits, if not exactly landmark status, some claim to cultural importance. Wilco is the band for such consumers; and to help them along, critics have provided the word 'deconstruction.' Deconstruction is now rock-press shorthand for the crumbling of the traditional Intro Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Solo Verse Chorus song structure. But its real significance has gone unnoticed. Deconstruction is currently doing for Wilco (and Radiohead before it) what it did for literary studies in the '70s and '80s: providing a sense of pomp and excitement during a period of near-total marginalization.

Amen. You want good music? Stick to the professionally marginalized like Nick Cave, Marianne Faithfull, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits, who are all threatening to release albums this year. With PJ Harvey and The Fall having already returned to form and delivered, 2004 may turn out to be a good year for marginalized music. The albums won't win them any pap and jizz awards, but future generations will have a reason to go down into the vault and sip from a good vintage. Don't consume culture, imbibe!  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments

  Today, while reading about Plato's Cave in Sophie's World I remembered the lyrics Ian Curtis wrote for Shadowplay:

In the shadowplay, acting out your
own death, knowing more
As the assassins all grouped
in four lines,
Dancing on the floor,
And with cold steel, odour on their bodies,
made a move to connect
I could only stare in disbelief
as the crowds all left

In the early 80s, browsing through a Lisbon bookstore, I came across a small book of Joy Division's lyrics. Every song in English, and translated into Portuguese, and, as an appendix, Plato's Cave Allegory from The Republic.
  ¶ 7:40 PM 0 comments

  The knowledge base at Microsoft has a fair number of entertaining articles like this one: SATAN Causes High Memory Utilization. Of course, in many cases only the title is mirthful, but kudos to the inventor of the acronym for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks.

It takes all kinds to get software working. There are those that enjoy fixing bugs, those that enjoy implementing new features and the few that are good at designing new software to meet a need that no one had envisioned before. That work is mainly driven by customers. Customers report bugs ("it's broken"), express a desire for new features ("please add a button here"), and sometimes express a desire for something that, although difficult to articulate, is the germ for a new type of software. An engineer would say that you have to know how to parse what the customer is saying, or, in another manner of speaking, the devil's in the details.
  ¶ 10:25 AM 0 comments

  The NYT has a story on Online Battle of Low-Cost Books. The allegation is that selling used books online is similar to file sharing on the internet--a la napster, et al. That analogy can be discarded fairly quickly because the books being sold have substance (ousia) while the files shared are just the bits of the content, the form. When you buy a book, you buy the physical book, and not merely the words. That's the way the marketplace works. If someone buys a book and they decide it's not a keeper, then they sell it on to someone else who's curious.

This morning I sold a comic book via Amazon, Miracleman Boook 1, for ~$60. Why would someone pay that much for a comic book? Even one by Alan Moore? Because of supply and demand; the book is not available from the publisher any longer. I expect the publisher is probably not available any longer. I've read it and don't care to read it again. The book is in demand and there's no supply. On the other hand if someone doesn't want another book cluttering up the house any longer, and the publisher flooded the market with copies, the price goes down. This is also true of other media. Leaving aside file-sharing, there is a legal market for music albums and movies on video tape and DVD. My dad, turntable-less these days, gave me his copy of Sergio Mendes Trio's first LP. It's worth over $100--and it's a keeper; no emailed offers please. If the mega-corporation that controls the music wanted to re-release the LP, they would lower its value to something reasonable. It's their decision not to. For some reason they don't like to release LPs that wear out after they are played a certain number of times and instead prefer to release digital copies that consumers can make perfect copies of and thus will never wear out. It has also been publishers' decisions to flood the market with remaindered copies of books and music that they can't sell, instead of pulping them. I'm not in favor of pulping media, but it is the publishers' decision what to sell at what price, and what not to, and then the market decides what something is actually worth.

A few years ago I decided to sell my fluid mechanics books that had sat gathering dust for a couple of decades. I discovered that some were worthless and others were worth hundreds of dollars. Why were some so pricey? Publishers had decided to stop publishing them, and had instead published newer books. And consumers of fluid mechanics books had found the newer books to be not as good and they were ready to pay a premium for the better, out of print, books. Publishers made mistakes, their choices were unpopular, and the prices on the newer books had dropped below the retail price because consumers preferred the older books publishers had decided to drop. This market is merely a mirror that reflects back the decisions made by publishers.

What is really going on is that the market is becoming bi-directional. Instead of publishers pushing product in from one side and customers passively consuming at the other end, today customers are pushing the products they don't want back into the market. Perhaps some bidirectionality is needed at the other end to; publishers should read their products more critically and ask themselves if it is really worth publishing much of the dross they push into the bookstores. If you look on Amazon you'll find books that sell for less than the cost of shipping, and probably less than the price of the paper, ink, and manufacturing. There is not too much supply because of pirated copies, but because publishers have flooded the market with more supply than demand can sustain at the prices publishers desire. Some publishers will get it right and prosper, and other publishers will be failures and, if I understand the grousing in the NYT article correctly, demand that politicians protect them from their ineptitude.  ¶ 9:18 AM 0 comments

  I've been reading Sophie's World to the eldest. She can now read, and devours books, but she still likes to be read to, and I'm not reading another Potter book. We're on chapter nine, on Plato and immutable ideas. There's some commentary
here, but unfortunately it is not very readable. Next session we're due at Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which is online in a nice bilingual version.  ¶ 10:12 PM 0 comments

  Was Socrates an atheist? Yes, according to the persecution:

Socrates: Or, do you mean to say that I am an atheist simply, and a teacher of atheism?

Meletus: I mean the latter - that you are a complete atheist.

The hemlock followed. After which, Plato learned to be discrete. He just wrote the dialogues and it is his characters that have doubts. Like Euthyphro who has a dilemma and Meno that learns that virtue is given, by God, to the virtuous. Plato has plausible deniability. Plato himself is not the one who says the things that are spoken by the stranger from Elea:

Socrates: Is he not rather a god, Theodorus, who comes to us in the disguise of a stranger? For Homer says that all the gods, and especially the god of strangers, are companions of the meek and just, and visit the good and evil among men. And may not your companion be one of those higher powers, a cross-examining deity, who has come to spy out our weakness in argument, and to cross-examine us?

Theodorus: Nay, Socrates, he is not one of the disputatious sort-he is too good for that. And, in my opinion, he is not a god at all; but divine he certainly is, for this is a title which I should give to all philosophers.

The divine anthropomorphized as lovers of wisdom.  ¶ 10:45 AM 0 comments

  This passage from Dio Cassius
describes the Parthian King, Tiridates, paying homage to Nero:

Tiridates . . . was driven in the chariot which Nero had sent to him . . . and bending his knee to the earth and lifting his hands, he called him his lord and worshipped him . . . For he spoke thus: 'I, my lord . . . am thy slave. And I am come to thee as to my God, worshipping thee, even as Mithras . . .'

The cult of Mithras was responsible for Christianity as LaRouche has pointed out:

On the Isle of Capri, the Octavian who was later enthroned as the Emperor Augustus, sealed a pact with the priests of Mithra. Through aid of that pact, he overturned the reign of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and established the evil which was the Roman Empire. During his reign, Jesus Christ was born. It became the pleasure of Augustus' adopted successor, the Emperor Tiberius, also at Capri, to receive the news of his agent's, Pontius Pilate's judicial murder of Christ.

Karl Rahner, who was:

the most influential Catholic theologian of the second half of the 20th century. His thinking decisively shaped the Second Vatican Council's dogmatic constitutions on the church and on revelation

Rahner's revelation:

reaches its climax and fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Rahner started down this path while studying at Freiburg:

What separates Karl Rahner from even the most intelligent of conservative Catholic theologians and what makes his thought so radically innovative lies not primarily in his theology but in his philosophy, the theory of knowledge and being that he forged in the Thirties while studying under Martin Heidegger. In the spring of 1934, just two years after becoming a Jesuit priest, Rahner registered for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, and over the next four semesters he attended virtually every lecture course and seminar that Heidegger gave. He was in the classroom when Heidegger echoed Nietzsche's condemnation of Christianity as "Platonism for the masses" and when he asserted that "a faith that does not constantly expose itself to the possibility of unfaith is no faith at all but a mere convenience." The effect of Heidegger's teaching was overwhelming. Thirty years later Rahner would remark that "although I had many good professors in the classroom, there is only one whom I can revere as my teacher, and he is Martin Heidegger."

Another LaRouche tells us that:

It is impossible to graduate from a university in North or South America, or in Western Europe, without being forced to study one or another of the corrupt philosophical fads spawned by the ideas of Martin Heidegger.

...the guru of an entire generation of German students...

including

Fr. Karl Rahner, the Jesuit priest whose Heideggerian theory was the basis for "liberation theology"

Liberation from the worship of Mithra?

Now, Dio Cassius also reports:

that the Romans called Jews and Christians "atheists."

There's a lighting up ahead in the path. But is it merely a wegmarken on a holzwege? Or will the circle be complete? Stay tuned!

  ¶ 9:29 AM 0 comments

  New York Dolls member still alive shock:

Dolls frontman David Johansen is expected to make a statement on the future of the band

  ¶ 8:57 AM 0 comments

  I read the many comments at Samizdata that follow the article that postulates that Al-Qaeda are just bunch of pomo-romanticists. Like I said before, I believe there's something to be said for the notion that Al Qaeda and their ilk do owe something to Western thought and nihilism, but logical fallacies are not the way to make the case.

Plenty of commentators to the post have also emphasized and expanded on my basic point that there's much rubbish in Newell's original article and Goodman's reworking of it. And I agree with the commentators that state that redefining the Romantics to mean "people I dislike" makes of mockery of language. At least in so far as language is a means for disparate folks to have a rational conversation.

BTW, it's Enowning, and not "Enowing". Let's stick to the real and leave Middle-Earth in the world of fantasy.

Chris: [If you want to read an encyclopaedia article about Heidegger nobody is stopping you]

My point being: if you were to read an encyclopedia article on Heidegger you would find that Heidegger's works are mainly concerned with traditional philosophical matters such as ontology, logic, and phenomenology and so on. And not the Romanticism and Utopian ideologies ascribed to him by the ignorant.

Where is the actual romanticism in Heidegger?
[How about - for starters – his view that modernity destroys our the sense of feeling at home in the world and therefore we ought to seek to reconnect in a more authentic way with nature or his claim that it is poets not scientists who best reveal truths about the world?]

Is that what Romanticism is? Romanticism is whatever you think Heidegger meant? I think that Laon's comments, wherein he quotes from the dictionary definitions of Romanticism, should be taken as the generally understood usage of the word.
Heidegger never refutes scientists' truths. He instead questions the modernist notion that scientists are the sole authorities on truth for humans. He believes that poets can also speak the truth. Plato said that "Poets utter great and wise things". Should Plato then be lumped in with the Romantics?

Heidegger was not a nihilist, he criticized nihilism
[Which is why of course he joined the Nazi Party, the very embodiment of that nihilism]

He joined the party to advance his career. I expect that's why the rector of every German university was a Nazi after the elections of 1933 (ref.).
I'm not going to defend the Nazis, nor Heidegger joining them, but his pro-Nazi utterances around 1933 were of a positive nature: that the Nazis, and him providing their philosophy, natch, were what would drag Germany out of the funk of the Weimar years, that everyone should do their part to improve things, and so on. If you dig deeper, like Derrida (ref.), then one finds Heidegger using Hegelian words like Spirit--unusual for him, as Heidegger had his own vocabulary to differentiate what he was saying from the tradition. To me, this speech is clearly Heidegger darkest hour.

Marx and Fichte are Hegelians
[Fichte had died many years before Hegel had even started his professional academic career.]

Total cock-up on the German philosophers front here. I momentarily confused Fiche with Feuerbach. Silly bunt!

Rousseau barely appears in their writings
[or alternatively as Hegel put it 'Hume and Rousseau are the two points of departure for German philosophy']

Pay attention and read what I wrote with a little more care, it should become apparent that "their" in this context refers to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and not Hegel. Please provide references for tracing Nietzsche (an anti-Hegelian par excellence) back to Rousseau!

Can a single citation be provided for the thesis that Heidegger sought to replace bourgeois society with a new authentic order? Heidegger was a family man that enjoyed living with country folk.
[How about his address when appointed rector of his university "Do not let doctrines and ideas be the rules of your Being"… because to "make ones own rules is the highest freedom"…and "the Fuhrer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its rule"]

I have a couple of points. His Rectorship address is a speech he gave at the university when he was appointed as the lead administrator. It is not a philosophical work. It's Heidegger's attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis. Heidegger left over a hundred substantial works. Let's use those to map out his contributions to philosophy and not his asides. I've read that substantial portions of bourgeois society voted for Hitler along with Heidegger. Where does Heidegger attack the bourgeoisie?

Where in Fanon is Heidegger discussed?
[While at medical school Fanon studied Heidegger, becoming interested in the notion of countering the existential anxiety of alienation via a political commitment to freedom, understood temporally as orientation to the openness of the future unlike the past.]

"Fanon studied Heidegger", I understand, but not the rest. I don't believe anything in the popular Fanon books has anything to do with Heidegger.

"Heidegger may have 'inspired several generations of European leftists' but only in the sense that he 'inspired' thinkers on the left, right, middle, east, and west"
[In other words Heidegger did inspire several generations of European leftists]

Again, as was pointed out by other sensible commentators, his having influenced some leftists is only a consequence of being the most influential XXth century philosopher. If generations of leftists are by the Protestant peasant uprisings of the XVth century, then by applying the same principle, by that rationale, Protestants should be condemned for the worst any leftist has ever written.

Heidegger was a major influence on influence on XXth century theologians. Karl Rahner, a student of Heidegger's, was the leader of Vatican II. Perhaps then Catholicism, more than leftism, is responsible for Al Qaeda?  ¶ 7:34 PM 0 comments

  Italian philosopher in New Jersey politics shock: `Machiavelli' explanation twists, turns.

And there's lotsa sex, lies, videotape, and siblings too!

  ¶ 8:56 AM 0 comments

  Regarding the Samizdata critique I posted earlier.

I have gone back and perused the original article by Walter R. Newell that the Samizdata piece was a review of.

I now realize that all the details I objected to in the Samizdata article are from the Newell article. So I was really Fisking the article from the Weekly Standard. And that's surprising to me. There's a meme about in the media this year that the Weekly Standard's politics comes from ex-Trot neo-conservatives. And I would have expected the reputed Straussians to have a better understanding of Continental Philosophy.

I see from Laon's comment below that my critique has a response. I'll leave that for after work.

But I can respond to the Lin Biao reference. I don't think Lin Biao was influenced by Frantz Fanon. There is clearly a difference between what the defense minister of the PRC might have told an audience of Fanon's fans, and what was really pushing and changing the ideology in the Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s. My point is that Lin Biao did not depend on Fanon. Someone that had led the People's Liberation Army to victory and was a senior member of the gang that ran China did not need a hack like Fanon to motivate him.

Sorry Fanon fans. I read him when I was a teenager and formed my opinion of him. Nothing I've read since then has compelled me to revisit him. Here's a recap of his major work, The Wretched of the Earth:

To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total revolution, "absolute violence". Violence purifies, destroying not only the category of white, but that of black too.

Keep Frantz away from the matches!
  ¶ 7:12 AM 0 comments

  Got Raoul Vaneigem's The Movement of the Free Spirit, which gets a helpful review here. I recall liking Raoul more than Guy Debord, who I found too absolutist in a Hegelian sense, but I realize that their egos get in the way in roughly similar ways. They both disparage much that they don't understand fully. So I end up laughing out load at Raoul, rather than with him.
And I'm really enjoying reading Alastair Reynolds's latest. Alastair just keeps getting better. And look at his URL; that voxish feeling. Obviously a man of impeccable taste. He describes one of the art forms of the future: Zero-g glass blowing. If you want a piece, you have to move yourself to the art, because it doesn't survive any inertial force.  ¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

  I've been reading about the defense of Lisbon during the Peninsular War and came across this note about sensible folk preferring white wine over the red variety.

The Portuguese soldiers never would drink red wine if white wine could be got. When I asked the reason, their reply was they knew how it was made.

The following anecdote from a page on Torres Vedras provides a particular example supporting that thesis.

A few of us went into a wine-store where there was a large tun with a ladder to get to the top, in which was a hole about two feet square. There was not much wine in it, so we buckled our canteen straps together until a camp-kettle attached to them could reach the licquor. We drew it up once - we all drank; down it went again - it got entangled with something at the bottom of the tun - a candle was lowered; to our great disappointment, the corpse of a French soldier lay upon the bottom!

Demand transparency in wine!  ¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments

  One of the peculiarities of intellectual history is its effect as a distorting lens of the facts. Someone who misunderstood something is used as a source by another, and pretty soon discussions have no basis in reality and only serve to buttress prejudices.

I enjoy occasional polemics and links from samizdata.net but this article, The Western Roots of Islamism is riddled with so many half-truths and distortions that one is inclined to dismiss its entire thesis; and I believe that Islamism, the modern form of Islamic supremacism, is based on western thought.

So let us Fisk it. Notebooks out pseuds!

to understand Osama Bin Laden we ought to remind ourselves of the work of Heidegger

I would recommend actually reading something about Heidegger, say an encyclopedia article, before "reminding" oneself in a vacuum.

Heidegger may have "inspired several generations of European leftists", but only in the sense that he "inspired" thinkers on the left, right, middle, east, and west; i.e. he's the most cited XXth century philosopher in the philosophical literature of the XXth century. A quick search of Heidegger and Marx on Google would have revealed that Marxists tend to disagree vehemently with Heidegger.

Heidegger is part of a tradition of nihilistic romanticism

Now Heidegger had a soft spot for Hölderlin, they're both from the valleys of the upper Danube, and he sent romantic letters to Hannah Arendt. However calling Heidegger as a romantic is a common shibboleth often repeated in the Anglo criticism of him, but where is the actual romanticism in Heidegger? Dozens of his lectures have now been translated in English. How about some citations?

Heidegger was not a nihilist. He's the one that identified and criticized the nihilism inherent in Western philosophy starting from the Greeks. Plato idealism introduced nihilism through his idealism. Aristole weighs the arguments of the pre-socratics and Plato, and after that nihilism is locked into the foundations of philosophy.

[T]hat can be traced via Nietzsche and Marx and Fichte all the way back to Rousseau.

And a crooked via that would be. Marx and Fichte are Hegelians. Nietzsche and Heidegger are anti-Hegelians. Rousseau barely appears in their writings as an aside. They both trace their way of thinking back to the Greeks. Read Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, or the recently translated The Pre-Platonic Philosophers.

A key theme is the total destruction of existing bourgeois
societies and their replacement by a new authentic social order.

Really? Can a single citation be provided for this thesis? Heidegger was a family man that enjoyed living with country folk. Nietzsche was snob that wrote for other intellectuals. Where are their theses on social engineering?

Heidegger influenced French post-war Left apologists for Stalin and Mao such as Sartre,

This is a reiteration of the earlier logical fallacy; Heidegger influenced everyone that came after him, whether in a positive or negative sense. Sartre was influenced to write Being and Nothingness in the early 40s. When French officers occupying Heidegger's part of Germany brought Sartre to his attention, he responded with Letter On Humanism, repudiating Sartre's book; pointing out that it was Cartesian and hence a misinterpretation Heidegger's own Being and Time. Later Sartre drifted into Hegelianism and Marxism, writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which can't even claim to be misinspired by Heidegger.

and via the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon

And where in Fanon's texts is Heidegger discussed?

Inspired by Fanon, such figures as Lin Piao,

Apparently inspired by a book written in 1961, Lin Biao got into a time machine and set about defeating Chiang Kai-shek's armies in 1947.

Gotta go. The kids are shrieking for breakfast.  ¶ 8:56 AM 1 comments

  LA as hell. Has a nice ring to it. Found these great lithographs used to illustrate another edition of Dante's Inferno. In this case Virgil and Dante visit the different levels of Los Angeles. And it's also a cheap paperback.  ¶ 7:42 AM 0 comments

  A critic at Stylus rates his least favorite philosophers and Heidegger is in at #5. Where did he go wrong? For his top ten faves he starts with Parmenides and Aristotle, so you'd think he'd picked up the scent, but then at #9 is JP Sartre. Dead give away that. Bloody students. Anyone who thinks Code: Selfish is "on its own merits is an imperishable classic" has serious aesthetic problems. That album's at the bottom of the barrel, mate! Not counting all the re-issues and too many live albums, of course. They buy MES his pints, I guess, and that's not a bad thing.

Got the latest American release from The Fall: The Real New Fall Album. Actually says "LP" instead of album on the CD digipack. The album's sort of the same as the UK release (formerly Country on the Click) except the track listings have been moved about, it has early-Pavement-album style art (pseuds!), and has an extra track entitled "Portugal". Always different, always the same, always brilliant. What's not to like?   ¶ 10:12 AM 0 comments

  Informational philosophy websites and libraries are the great cemetaries of thoughts. Occasionally a librarian goes out to a grave, removes some link rot, notes a new edition, and tends the flowers.  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 comments

  Hey daseinsanalyse theologians! New term:

Unheimlich maneuver: dislodges uncanniness from the soul.

Use it on your next supplicant!  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 comments