Thursday, July 30, 2009

Goods and services could neither be called just nor unjust

[My basic perspective on technology is that it must be understood on many registers... As for Heidegger, I empathize with the idea that we can embrace neither technofetishism nor luddism... Here I find McLuhan's invitation to investigate the properties of specific technologies to be liberating... not to mention a hell of a lot clearer! ... (As a sidenote, McLuhan does take things too far when he insists that the content of media doesn't matter) anotherheideggerblog Tuesday, July 28, 2009 Interview with Ian Bogost//anotherheideggerblog Thursday, July 23, 2009 Interview with Levi R. Bryant (Larval Subjects)...
technology studies have been pushed back a great deal as a result of his moralizing and Luddite attitude towards enframing.
1:26 PM]

[Thus you have right and left Hegelians. You have all sorts of different appropriations of Deleuze. You have hundreds of different versions of Marx. There is something about the style of these thinkers, its gaps, its allusiveness, its suggestiveness, and so on that makes it highly fit for cultural circulation.
Larval Subjects July 28, 2009
Design Ontology Posted by larvalsubjects]

[So is the hope that we can strive towards some higher level in which the fundamental conflicts of culture are resolved a pipe dream? Chris Bloor talks to Charles Taylor, one of the world’s leading living philosophers. Philosophy Now Jul/Aug 2009
Yeah. That’s a pipe dream. It’s a beautiful dream, but it’s not something we can possibly hope for. It’s a pipe dream in the kind of sense that Marxism in its original form contained. This means that Marxism’s a tremendously interesting philosophy to read, because it holds out an important definition of the main cultural contradiction – as opposed to its error of thinking that we can resolve it. It’s just as bad not even to see the contradiction – to have this bland neo-liberal view that there are no major cultural contradictions at all, and things will all go swimmingly, that we’ll all just globalise. This is the absolute nadir of blindness. Those neo-liberals have to be put to read Marx – and if they totally convert to Marxism, then maybe they’ll have to be corrected by a dose of reality!]

[But globalism's outsourcing in India today has produced a large population of cyber-coolies and call center operators who form the standing reserve for the world market. They are richer than Indians before, but their lifestyles are mostly pre-packaged. Their richer cousins are the software engineers whose lifestyles are hardly any less pre-packaged. This is what I meant by saying that modernity offers us liberty in one hand and insignifcance in the other. Re: The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard Science, Culture and Integral Yoga
by Debashish on Mon 27 Jul 2009 11:26 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link //Globalization kneads world humanity into a semblance of unity - but this is the unity of determined proceses, of lowest common conditioning. It claims absolute adherence from each individual in the name of liberty, and sticks the pretense of a name tag and a smiley on each shirt front while injecting with the lethal drug of comfortable anonymity. by Debashish on Tue 28 Jul 2009 06:05 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link]

[The welfare statists, led by Amartya Sen, want “distributive justice.” To them The Market is unjust. They call upon The State to correct these perceived injustices. My point is this: Amartya Sen’s “vision” is an exact replica of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “socialistic pattern of society.” The idea is an economic egalitarianism achieved by State force. This is the very same vision that India has chased for over 60 years – and which lies in tatters. The Hayekian vision is of a Great & Open Society: a society of numberless individuals interacting freely in markets, exchanging goods and services peacefully among themselves. This is a “catallaxy,” not a “community.” The individuals who engage in market exchanges usually do not even know one another – and it doesn’t matter. There cannot be economic equality in such a Great Society. As in a free forest, where there are tall trees, short grasses, bushes and shrubs, and vines, so too with the Great Society. Just as each living creature finds a “niche” in the jungle, so too with The Market – we all find “niches.” This is the “social division of labour.” Rewards are uncertain for all. The socialists and welfare statists want to replace a freely growing forest with a landscape of uniformly trimmed hedges - with their Supreme Leader doing the trimming. Further, the Great Society is one in which there is Competition. There are rewards for those who serve their customers best; and there are punishments for those who do it the worst. Without this “minimum pressure” the catallaxy cannot work. After all, the entire idea is that the Consumer is King. The welfare statists want to eliminate this minimum pressure. Their ideas only create a culture of dependency. They do not encourage enterprise. Amartya Sen has never supported Economic Freedom. Or Free Trade. The Debate On Amartya Sen Continues
from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik
Hayek is indispensable to this debate. And
Chandra has provided the most appropriate quote:
Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.]

[Also keeping in mind :-) that the mind itself is in a process of developmental change, a mind that is continually consulted in its growth, (that is a person who constantly engages and broadens out in self-reflection) would eventually lead one to the plane of the Supermind. Re: Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education in Contemporary Higher Education Science, Culture and Integral Yoga
by Bindu on Wed 29 Jul 2009 11:56 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link]

[Common Sense [1] is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine. It was first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, during the American Revolution... Paine begins this section by making a distinction between society and government. Society is a “patron,” “produced by our wants”, that promotes happiness. Government is a “punisher,” “produced by wickedness,” that restrains vices. Paine then goes on to consider the relationship between government and society in a state of “natural liberty.” Paine tells a story of a few isolated people living in nature without government. The people find it easier to live together rather than apart and thereby create a society. As the society grows problems arise, so all the people meet to make regulations to mitigate the problems. As the society continues to grow government becomes necessary to enforce the regulations, which over time, turn into laws. Soon there are so many people that they cannot all be gathered in one place to make the laws, so they begin holding elections. This, Paine argues, is the best balance between government and society. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

[Secularism is thus a political doctrine and not a social one. It cannot be counterposed against communalism as communalism is a social doctrine. It is not true that a communally tolerant population is automatically secular. Indian secularism - Place of religion in human life - The Statesman S K Chaube 21 January 1997 8:12 PM]

[I think liberty in Smith’s terms is more important than democracy as represented by mere elections which may be held regularly but are often, across the world, well short of being open, transparent, and an accurate reflection of the free choices of independent electors ( see Iran recently, as an example). Liberty expressed by free speech, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, rights of assembly, policing as a service - not a force of the politics of the government, and personal rights codified in law, is rare enough (as it has always been), and when its lack is covered up by farcical elections it is a disappointment for optimists for the human condition and a comfort for cynics and oppressors. Liberty More Important than Democracy
from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy]

Directing the flux of society while flowing and growing within it is the greatest folly the Leftists are fond of conjuring. [TNM]

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