by Brooks Riley

by Max Sirak

John Perry Barlow (JPB for short) died earlier this month.

And, in honor of his passing, but more in remembrance of his life, I want to dedicate my little sliver of cyberspace, a realm he was passionate about, to highlight three pieces of his writing and thought. First, a political document; second, a code of conduct; and lastly some lyrics.

A Child Of Boundless (Digital) Seas

JPB was a pioneer of an open, free-range internet. He, along with others, founded The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) (here), a "nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation" in 1990. He literally wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (here) in 1996.

For those who don't want to read it, it is what it says it is. It begins with, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone."

The Declaration goes on to lay out the foundational premise of what the internet should be. A "global social space" independent of past tyrannies and a natural emergence of human creativity to serve as a self-regulating web of communication free from commercial enterprise and regulation.

Idealistic? Sure. Naive? Quite possibly. But don't those two usually walk, arm-in-arm, like sunshine and daydreams?

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by Christopher Bacas

We never saw Billy again. There was a new management company. They moved in their super, a tiny Mexican guy. He was always cheerful and had a female companion; daughter, sister or wife, who looked seventeen. He understood few English words and phrases. When possible, the young lady translated. If she wasn’t around (school?), I’d grab a dual-language dictionary for my requests. He always called me “Meester” and grinned sweetly at my poorly constructed and pronounced Spanish. Tenants’ collective languages: Krayol, English, Jamaican Patois, meant little real information passed to the super.

The Pre-War building crumbled around us. The steps to the 5th floor roof held small monuments: a bottle of cheap liquor, stubbed-out blunt, sometimes a slimy condom. On cold days, running the steps for exercise, dog in tow, I dodged the messes. The dog charged right through them, scattering nastiness. Sometimes, high school canoodlers, truants who left the ashen relics, blocked our path completely. Carrying my trash through the back door, I once encountered a teen couple, partially disrobed, going at it under the stairs. Another kid, holding his belt, stood nearby. As I exited with a heavy trash bag, he nodded rhythmically at me. When I returned, no one had moved. The kid in the on-deck-circle didn’t even look around.

During the coldest nights, our radiators hissed for a few minutes, then went silent for icy hours. We boiled water for nighttime baths. Small ceramic heaters crackled and hummed in the dark, blistering our throats and noses. The super looked on when we wildly pantomimed the conditions in our apartment. I’ll never know if his expression meant worry about our comfort or just our sanity.

We began regular calls to the city and our property manager, and stopped paying rent.

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by Ali Minai

A light went out in the world yesterday. Asma Jahangir — Pakistan’s icon of human rights and liberal values — passed away. In her short 66 years, she lived the length — and made the impact — of many lifetimes. If a person’s character is known by the enemies they make, her credentials are impeccable. Every dictator, every autocrat, every paternalistic preacher, every friend of the powerful hated her — and she welcomed their hatred as a badge of honor. Even in death, the barbs of her enemies ennoble her further for posterity.

In the Middle of Hosanna

snow’s piled against the generator
smooth white talus
at the foot of sheer thought in
arctic regions of mind

through glass the near tangle
of bare forsythia beneath draped wires
pole to pole is a snap of unchecked ruminations
that fold upon themselves in crazy chiaroscuro
a dispensation of light expected in a skull of whims
while further right the barrel arc of a stone wall
familiar now as arrays of spots on the back of a hand
is as solid as the conviction of crystals in a cool savanna
between here and the neighbor’s shed in the middle of
hosanna!
.

Jim Culleny
2/12/17

by Emrys Westacott

The concept of individual freedom has been central to political philosophy since the time of John Locke, who published his groundbreaking Two Treatises on Civil Government in 1689. Before then, other values were paramount—for example: conformity to God's will, the cultivation of moral virtue in the population, social stability, national power, material prosperity, the quality of the culture, or the glory of the sovereign. These are criteria by which a society might be judged and compared to other societies. The happiness of the population can also be added to this list, although this is usually assumed to be a direct consequence of some of those other goods.

But the modern liberal tradition, which begins in the 17th century with thinkers like Locke, is virtually defined by the central importance given to individual freedom and individual rights. And these come to be viewed as deal-breakers. It doesn't matter how stable the society, or how materially prosperous, or how happy the population; the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals should not be sacrificed just to secure these other goods.

Of course, who should count as an individual endowed with sacrosanct rights has, from the outset, been a topic of controversy. Even now, when no respectable thinker would defend the denial of equal rights on grounds of sex, race, or religion, there are still controversies over the rights of immigrants, children, prisoners, convicted felons, and animals.

The exact meaning of freedom has also never been agreed upon. John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" provides a basic starting point: each person should be free to do as they please so long as they do no harm to anyone else. But specifying what constitutes "harm" is difficult. Am I harming my neighbors if I erect a hideous sculpture on my front lawn? Am I harming you if I say something that offends you? Am I harming society, or a section of it, if I advocate racial segregation or deny the Holocaust?

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Rashaad Newsome. False Evidence Appearing Real, 2017. And Rozay, 2016.

Mixed media, collage on paper.

More on this amazing artist here, here, and here.

by Richard King

I was just four months old when the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, but I remember very distinctly the mixed emotions that ran through my mind when I first clapped eyes on that historic edition of the New York Times in my local library. For here was everything I loathed and loved in one incredible revelation! On the one hand, imperialism, war and corruption. On the other, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate. "Mother," I said, as she swiped the paper from the hands of a startled pensioner, "Mother, darling – mark this day! For though a dark cloud in the progress of our species, it has about it a silver lining that in future years will be as a beacon to good men and women of the press the world over! Dry your eyes, mother mine. Here, use my handkerchief." I was a precocious child.

It would be nice, would it not, to rewrite history in a way that made ourselves central to the story, and that made us appear more relevant and prescient and brilliant than we actually are. It would be ludicrous as well, of course, though that doesn't stop some people doing it, especially those who write for a living. I've grumbled before that the "media culpa" following the 2016 US election disguised a deep strain of self-congratulation, as the dead-tree press and major stations affected to glorify themselves with faint praise. ("If only we'd had our game-face on, this tragedy might never have happened!") Now I must return to the subject, one Steven Spielberg having entered the field with a film that polishes the MSM's image to a high and self-reflecting shine. The Post is rather good, as it happens; but it's also very, very bad.

The key points in the narrative are a matter of historical record, so I imagine we can dispense with the spoiler alerts. In 1969 military analyst Daniel Ellsberg made photocopies of ‘the Pentagon Papers', aka United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense. The documents revealed, inter alia, that the US government had lied "systematically" about the ongoing war in Vietnam and that it had secretly spread the war to Cambodia and Laos. Ellsberg passed the documents to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for the New York Times, and on June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts from the Papers, together with editorial commentaries. On June 15, the Nixon administration sought, and was granted, a court injunction preventing further publication, so Ellsberg passed copies of the documents to Ben Bagdikian at the Washington Post. After much agonising and internal argument, and in defiance of the Attorney General, the Post began running its own series of articles on the Papers on June 18. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the New York Times, putting the Post (and other papers) in the clear.

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by Brooks Riley

by Carl Pierer

Historically, formal logic and Hegel's philosophy's relation has been dominated by antipathy. Classical logic, developing from Aristotelian logic to the Frege/Russell logic of the 20^th century, has largely rejected Hegel because of his overt embrace of contradictions. Hegel, vice-versa, has not been too charitable to the formal logic of his day. In the second half of the 20^th century, however, formal logic has developed massively and in various directions. One of these, paraconsistent logics, have attempted to accommodate contradictions. Classical logic is anathema to contradictions, due to the explosion principle, a.k.a. ex falso quodlibet. A sketch of this principle is the following: since the classical or is non-exclusive, if we start with a true proposition A, the disjunct A or B is true for any proposition B. So, if we have A&~A, we get that A is true and hence A or B is true. But since ~A is true, too, from A or B we get that B must be true. Hence anything follows from a contradiction, or so the classical (and subsequently the Frege/Russell logic) claims. So contradictions seem to be a rather bad thing.

Now, paraconsistent logics deny this explosion principle. There are different ways of doing this, but we will stick with Priest's way in his (Priest, 1989). His is a dialethic interpretation, meaning that he thinks there are sentences that are both true and false. This has some interesting consequences. Note, first of all, that this does not mean that all sentences are true and false. Most importantly, most classical notions are indeed preserve. So, we have, for propositions A and B:

• ~A is true implies A is false
• A is true implies ~A is false
• A&B is true only if A is true and B is true
• A&B is false only if at least one of A or B is false

These are quite orthodox. Now, of course, on the dialethic point of view, A could be both true and false, and suppose B is true. Then A&B is both true and false. Next, we need the notion of logical consequence, which Priest defines also quite classically:

A is a logical truth just if A is (at least) true under all assignments of values.

A is a logical consequence of B just if every assignment of values that make B (at least) true makes A (at least) true.(Priest, 1989)

What does this mean exactly?

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by Mike Bendzela

Tribes

In the great class of mammalian vertebrates, antagonism arose between the egg-laying monotremes and the marsupials. Neither side could see the other on its own terms, each insisting it was the True Mammal.

An opossum (Didelphis) complained, “The platypus is a shameful pretender! It won’t admit that it is a failed duck, a builder of nests and hatcher of puggles, unable to fly!”

For its part, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus) sought revenge on the marsupials by sowing doubt about their child-rearing abilities: “We’ve seen the opossum abandon its newborn babies at birth! The poor things are doomed to forage for a nipple and live in a pocket!”

Moral: Steady misrepresentation is the chief hazard of tribal membership.

Monitor Lizard versus Cobra

Some monitor lizards (Varanus) that were opposed to the increasing presence of cobras (Ophiophagus) in their midst, held a public meeting to air their concerns. One outspoken lizard said to those gathered, “Fellow Lizards! The cobras intend to surround us, defeat us, and take our land. But they won’t stop there; we all know how snakes are. If we don’t do something quickly, they will swallow all our young!” Inflamed by this speech, the lizards quickly mobilized. They sought out the snakes, surrounded them, and defeated them. But for reasons no one has been able to fathom, the triumphant lizards then devoured every snake egg they could find.

Moral: The most depraved acts may be committed in the name of preventing depravity.

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by Dave Maier

A few posts ago I distinguished between philosophical and scientific/practical questions about the objectivity of science, and urged that we not get them mixed up. There’s a lot more to say about that, so here’s another chapter in our continuing story.

Philosophical questions about objectivity are metaphysical questions, and of course we invite confusion right away if we insist that as scientists we don’t do that metaphysics stuff (as if one could somehow avoid metaphysical commitments simply by saying so). A closely related question (or a different aspect of the same one) is that of the relation between fact and value. Whether they affirm it or deny it, all sides seem okay with calling this the “fact-value dichotomy,” so that’s what we’ll do too.

This dichotomy is also called the “is-ought” question. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a literal difference between asking how things are and whether they should be that way, but that doesn’t entail that the former questions are objective and the latter not (and of course this is where our question morphs into our earlier question about objectivity anyway). The natural context for this question (although not, as we shall see, the only one) is that of the objectivity of morality; and here too we see an obvious (if not conclusive) difference between scientific and moral questions. As Gilbert Harman points out, moral questions are not subject to experimental confirmation. If we want to know whether murder is wrong, we can’t just murder a number of people (under proper test conditions), crunch the numbers, and see. That doesn’t make sense.

As always, though, the problem with dichotomies is that they make it seem that if we’re not on one side of the fence then we’re on the other, and that’s all there is to it. (It doesn’t help matters that there are plenty of cases in which this is perfectly true; philosophy tends not to be one of them though.) Just because we can’t establish the truth or falsity of moral judgments experimentally doesn’t mean they can’t be true or objective or whatever you want.

But even so, how does this work? Not surprisingly, there are better and worse ways to think about this. Here’s a hopefully instructive look at one of the latter.

One sort of conversation I learned to avoid early on in life was one which pits Science vs. Religion. [Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying “skeptic” and subscribed for several teenage years to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, each issue of which features multiple insufferably condescending “debunkings” of this or that superstitious nonsense, whether this be the doctrine of transubstantiation or that Bigfoot is retired and living in Mexico (okay, I made that one up), so when I say I learned this “early on,” I don’t mean (*cough*) immediately.] I mean the sort of conversation in which participants may deem it significant that, for example, Isaac Newton (or some other certified Smart Science Guy) was a religious believer or that at one point the Bible seems to indicate that pi = 3. That sort of thing.

There are many reasons to avoid such conversations; one is that the fact-value dichotomy or its negation is often, as are many ideas in this context, used as a bludgeon.

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by Michael Liss

My father hated the Richard Strauss opera Ariadne Auf Naxos.

Dad obviously had his preferences, and they had a certain strongly expressed idiosyncratic logic to them: He liked “good tunes,” so thumbs up to Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Offenbach and Bizet. He didn’t like too much recit or harpsichord, which meant Mozart often tested his patience. Wagner was a no—too Wagnerian (I don’t think the Hitler thing helped). The Beethoven and Tchaikovsky efforts puzzled him: When you write symphonies and concertos as magnificently as these two, why waste your time with mediocrities like Fidelio and Eugene Onegin?

Dad was more than capable of clearly articulating, at length, the reasons for his dislikes (this was a quality he also applied to the world beyond opera), but he would not get specific about Ariadne Auf Naxos. Ariadne Auf Noxious was not discussable. It did not make his formidable collection of open-reel tapes. He actually walked out of a performance (between acts, of course, but our seats were conspicuous) and never returned. Milton Cross couldn’t tempt Dad. If, by some chance, it would appear on his subscription, he would give away the tickets (an act not lightly taken). Because of this, I had absolutely no memory of the opera, not even a wisp of a melody, so, as a public service to the reader, I subjected myself to about 15 minutes of it, and I think I almost blacked out. Dad was right. Very bad.

Yet, as we “celebrate” a year of Donald Trump, I can’t stop thinking about this ridiculous, over-the-top, oddball, play-and-opera-within-an-opera as metaphor. The Donald Trump Show is our Democratic Ariadne Auf Naxos (Clockwork Orange version). It’s like someone has tied us to our seats in the Trump-Lovers Section, and forced us to watch them leap up, screaming bravo, at his every croak. What’s worse is that we (especially those of us in coastal Blue States) had to pay double for the tickets. It’s driving us nuts.

One year is enough. Time to get off the feedback loop, because Trump-madness leads to electoral doom. Indulging in it is a fix, blaming it is a crutch, and frankly, with surveys showing more Republicans trust Putin than the FBI, it’s our patriotic duty to do better. We have to start thinking with our heads instead of our glands. So, here are my 12 steps to sobriety:

1. Let Trump be Trump. Why fight a hurricane with a five-dollar umbrella? Trust the public to judge. Recognize that there is a large group of bedrock Trumpistas who will never leave him. They really believe the Deep State, Secret Society, Globalist Conspiracy, #fakenews mantra and nothing is ever going to shake that. So, let Trump do his thing, because every time we voice our outrage … his people cheer. They have been waiting for a champion a very long time, and for whatever incomprehensible-to-us but clearly genuine reasons they may have, he’s their guy.

2. Learn from the situationally sycophantic. Not the true believers, but the ones we think are hypocrites; the professional preachers, the party apparatchiks and the uber-wealthy—those guys. Take careful notes, because they have much to teach. Of course it’s disgusting when Tony Perkins and Franklin Graham trade piety for power. Or when economic titans hold their noses with one hand while the other is palm upstretched. But bear in mind, Trump delivered for them. That’s how they judge him. On theocracy and plutocracy, Trump delivered. What are we going to deliver?

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African Americans protest against police brutality in Harlem, New York, 1963.

Protesting police brutality in downtown Seattle, 2015.

November, 2015 report by MintPress:

"As of Monday evening, U.S. police had killed 1,024 people since the start of the year, according to The Counted, a continuously updated database of U.S. police killings maintained by The Guardian. Of the total, 203 victims of police were unarmed.

In November alone police killed 10 unarmed males, including Jamar Clark, the 24-year-old man whose death led to in ongoing protests in Minneapolis, and Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old who was shot by police in Louisiana during a chase. (Body camera footage showed that the two officers involved in Mardis’ death fired recklessly into the car driven by Chris Few, the boy’s father, who was also injured in the incident. The two officers have been arrested.)

Despite claims America’s police forces need to be highly armed in order to defend themselves against a “war on cops,” just 34 police were fatally shot and three others died of assault in the line of duty so far this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks police deaths in the United States."

by Akim Reinhardt

Every time of year is ripe for bread and circuses in America. There is nary a day when you can't eat cheap fast food and indulge in aimless distractions. There are all the holidays, like Christmas, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, which used to mean something but now are little more than convenient excuses for shopping sprees and drunkenness. There's the endless streams of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon to complement the more traditional time wasters of cable TV and the broadcast networks. There's the Friday happy hours capping off a miserable week of work with shallow social relationships and cheap booze and finger food. And of course there's always your phone. Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, QQ, all those photos you took, all those photos people are sending you, GIFs galore, and tic-toc, tic-toc, text, text, text.

It never ends.

And perhaps it never did. Perhaps it's simply that society is wealthier than it's ever been before, leaving people with more leisure time, cheap food, and expendable income than prior generations could have imagined. Perhaps our ancestors pined for the chance to wile away their lives but simply lacked the time and resources to do so. Perhaps they were too busy laboring in factories and on farms, trudging and hustling, to become so thoroughly absorbed in nothingness as we do today. If our great-great grandparents could see us now, maybe they'd scold us for paying insufficient attention to the republic's affairs, or spending too much time on food and drink and idle entertainment, but not enough time in the House of the Lord, improving our souls and making amends for our sins.

Or maybe they'd just be jealous. Maybe whatever criticisms they lobbed at us would be born of anxiety and envy, designed to hide the sad yearning within them, the hopeless desire that they too could have so easily filled their bellies and wasted their lives.

Because maybe floating upon a lost cloud of minor hedonism is the best we can hope for.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Once upon a time, the world was full of miracles.

And oh, that was the miracle of those two spires of Chartres Cathedral! Separated in time by some four hundred years, the spires can still be glimpsed past fields of wheat, rising up over the low town; a town which itself has somehow retained its old medieval quality. Very much like the legendary first view of Mont Saint-Michel one gets from a distance, it is the unexpected vision of those cathedral spires arising out of the clear blue sky that makes arriving at Chartres so emotionally stirring an experience.

We were following in the footsteps of Henry Adams.

The son of Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to London, it wasn't just his father who was a great man; for Henry Adams' grandfather and great-grandfather were US presidents. A historian and man of letters, I had never realized until I stumbled on his book about Chartres that Henry Adams was a Harvard-trained medievalist. And an excellent one at that. His book, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres is written in the finest 19th century classical essay style. Engaging and filled with all manner of playful and dazzlingly-told medievalisms, the book became the blueprint for our own journey in Northern France this past summer.

So, since Adams begins his travelogue with Mont Saint-Michel–so did we.

I've already written about our stay on the Mont in my July post Benedictine Dreams. Even now, I cannot get the sound of the seagulls and church bells out of my mind: or of walking across the bridge of dreams toward that fairy palace shimmering in the summertime air. It was utterly otherworldly. Its infamous mudflats and quicksand, which pilgrims of old had to cross in order to reach the Mont, were known in the Middle Ages as the "path to paradise." And it's true. The Mont is, as they say, one of the great wonders of the western world. Everyone should try and go see it someday. Henry Adams was also much beguiled by the vision of the great fortress abbey, perched on top of a granite rock in the middle of the strongest tidal currents in Europe. He describes it as a monument to the masculine. And in his book, he sets up Mont Saint-Michel as a kind of "yin" to Chartres' "yang."

He has a point; for if the massively fortified Mont was dedicated to the archangel Michael, commander of the army of God and weigher of human souls; Chartres, by contrast, has always been dedicated to the Virgin Queen.

Indeed, even before there was a cathedral at Chartres, this place had already been known as a holy place in the Druid cult of the divine feminine.

[Joan Sutherland "Casta diva" from "Norma"]

But how did this cathedral survive intact for so long?

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by Brooks Riley

by Evert Cilliers

Hitler and Mussolini came to power because they were freely elected by their people, with the complicity of many in the established political class.

Can the same thing happen in America with the freely elected President Trump, who is being coddled by our established political class in the GOP?

After all, in true authoritarian fashion, Trump attacks the free press, attacks our courts, attacks the FBI and the Justice Department, and tells half a dozen lies a day.

Never before has so much crap been dropped from the piehole of an American president.

It's something we've never seen in all of our history.

Unprecedented. Bizarro. Weird beyond weird.

We now have a presidential moron who, in between his intake of junk food and junk news, spends his days shitting on our democracy.

Ezra Klein wrote at Vox:

"This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies."

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by Bill Benzon

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
–Samuel Delany

New York 2140, as many of you know, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, a hefty doorstop of a book at a few pages over 600. The title tells the tale, well not all of it by any means, heck, not much of it at all, but it tips you to the central premise: this is a story set in New York City in the year 2140. After the flood. Actually, it’s after two floods, called pulses in the book, a term suggesting that they’re but inflections in the global climate system, though Robinson clearly believes that human activity ramped them up. Consequently, the sea in 2140 is much higher than it is now, fifty feet higher. Manhattan below 50th Street is under water, but most of the buildings remain. People live and work in them and get around by boat and by skybridges. And it’s like that all over the world. Coastal cities have flooded, but people remain.

It’s called the intertidal, this vast worldwide coastal boondocks. It’s not fully wild, but it’s no longer fully civilized, whatever that means. It’s legally ambiguous, lots of off-grid activity, lots of informal mutual-aid living.

The two pulses have weakened nation-states in favor of private institutions and the world remains split into a large sprawling 99+% and a much smaller (fraction of) 1%, who rule over everything by speculating in real estate and financial instruments. New York 2140 is about how a small handful of 99 percenters living in one building in lower Manhattan manage to put a monkey wrench into the whole shebang and bring it to its knees. It is thus a comedy, in the literary sense of the word (e.g. Dante’s Divine Comedy), with an optimistic outlook.

I’m going to take a longish passage from about two-thirds of the way through and use it as a prism – or a Leibnizian monad – to examine the whole. At this point three of our central characters are spinning out a scheme to save the building where they live and do a few other things as well.

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