Monday, November 30, 2009
Trying to Understand Faye trying to understand Heidegger
Undernourished: U.S compared to the Russian Federation
Undernourished is defined as the proportion of the population below the minimum level of dietary energy (calorie) consumption. According to these statistics and this definition, the Russian Federation is closer, on average, to being undernourished than the U.S.
RE: Are Rhodesian Ridgebacks becoming too tall?.
While it is true that dogs of every size, shape and variety were used by numerous white 19th and 20th century lion hunters in southern and eastern africa, Van Rooyen's dogs did eventually emerge into a *relatively* unique and uniform type. If you look at photos of the dogs he kept in his final years, you will see an assemblage of Ridgebacks that look incredibly similar to many of the Ridgebacks we see today.
With regard to Barnes, he was true dog man and his dogs were the real deal. Barnes pack was largely responsible for keeping a large group of men in venison on the trail.
As it relates to size, a reading of the written histories and photos from the 1910's to the 1930's reveals numerous complaints by the uninformed that the Rhodesian Lion dogs "were too small" for the liking of those who wanted large and/or fearsome dogs. Most notably, the first ever written description of the breed, the "farmer George" account written by a vet who had been observing the working Ridgeback for over 20 years, describes 60 lb males. Also notable, those whites in Mashonaland who were, as a group, the Ridgeback owners most actively engaged in lion hunting with the breed, tended to keep and prefer smaller Ridgebacks. In fact the minimum height was introduced into the early standard to end-run many of the men with working ridgebacks in the north preferred ridgebacks that trended towards 24" at the withers! Hard to imagine now.
Interesting comments, Matthew. I don't recall having heard that about Barnes. In regard to the complaints about Ridgebacks being too small, that must be weighed against the fact that the "small" Ridgebacks were doing their job against lions.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Alcoholism in the Russian Federation
From: ludwik kowalski
Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2009 7:13 PM
To: Lawrence Helm
Subject: Re: Further on Russia and the Communist Dream.
Further on Russia and the Communist Dream.
Michael,
Your continuation note follows. I'll make a few comments below it.
Lawrence
Michael_Kuznetsov has left a new comment on your post "Russia and the Communist Dream":
Lawrence:
I continue.
THE WEST IS HELL
Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on Monday morning, October 19, and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure.
It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her seven-year-old son along a path beside Williamson's house espied the naked householder and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a cop.
"Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was alone, in my own home and I just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."
The story ended up on TV, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behaviour. Hasn't a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case rented accommodation) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.
I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch keen to make his own plea deal, a faked police line-up, maybe an artist's impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Eric could end up losing his visitation rights and, if worst comes to worst, getting ten years in jail and being posted for life on some sex offender site.
You think we're living in the 21st century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the 17th century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women for being witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/55336,news-comment,news-politics,virginia-witch-hunt-the-naked-truth-about-american-sexual-prudery
These three shorts stories explain why I do repeat it over and over again: We Russians do not belong to the West.
Thank God!
Cheers!
Michael
COMMENT:
Michael,
Firstly I notice that what you offer in the way of an argument is "anecdotal." Anecdotal evidence is considered by logicians among the weakest kind. In fact if one uses it one is very likely to commit a "fallacy." The fallacy could be illustrated as follows: A man walks naked in his own house and is arrested; therefore all men who walk naked in their own houses will be arrested.
You can see, I hope, that one incident doesn't make a principle. You would need a greater "sampling" than a single incident to be able to establish a principle. The writer of the Virginia article may have an ax to grind. I have personally never heard of such a thing happening in California or any place else until you sent this article.
As to Americans having "food insecurity" - not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle," yes, we are enduring either a "recession" or a "depression," and many will be in that category. Notice that the article you posted doesn't say anyone is starving, just that they may not feel they are eating as well as they should.
The root of the issue is that we in the West have free economies. Liberal Democracies do not have socialistic control over the means of production. Only Communism sought to do that. Even National Socialism didn't seek that level of control. And as long as you have the "market" free to rise and fall according to demand, then there will be times when you will have recessions or depressions. These are unfortunate. But Liberal Democracies (nor any other form of government) do not do well trying to run businesses or farming. I can quote experiments conducted during the Stalinist period when many starved as a result of Soviet management of farming.
Also we read many anecdotes of individuals walking into Soviet stores to find the shelves bare or nearly so. That has never been true in the America I am familiar with. The shelves have always been full. People can't always buy everything they would like, but they don't starve.
But also, the sort of government that can control the market and farming is the sort of government that strives to control the people. At least that was true in the two famous 20th century experiments, Communism and Fascism. Would we willingly put up with that level of control so that we won't starve – oh wait, they did starve under Communism.
To move away from the anecdotal, here are some statistical comparisons we might discuss:
The Russian Federation:
Total population: 143,221,000
Gross national income per capita (PPP international $): 12,740
Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 60/73
Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2003): 53/64
Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 13
Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 432/158
Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2006): 638
Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2006): 5.3
Figures are for 2006 unless indicated. Source: World Health Statistics 2008
The United States of America:
Statistics:
Total population: 302,841,000
Gross national income per capita (PPP international $): 44,070
Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 75/80
Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2003): 67/71
Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 8
Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 137/80
Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2006): 6,714
Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2006): 15.3
Figures are for 2006 unless indicated. Source: World Health Statistics 2008
RE: on Russia and the Communist Dream.
Lawrence:
As you know Prof. Ludwik Kowalski wrote a book about my country Russia.
He entitled it Hell on Earth.
Some 20 years ago, when 90 percent of us Russians were ardently pro-American, that book might have been a great success in Russia. But not now.
At present it is evident for us that real Hell on Earth is the West.
Below are a few short stories (out of a great lot I've collected) that prove my assertion:
THE WEST IS HELL
USDA: Number of Americans going hungry increases
By HENRY C. JACKSON (AP)
WASHINGTON November 17 2009
More than one in seven American households struggled to put enough food on the table in 2008, the highest rate since the Agriculture Department began tracking food security levels in 1995.
That's about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households. The numbers are a significant increase from 2007, when 11.1 percent of U.S. households suffered from what USDA classifies as "food insecurity" — not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.
http://www.seattlepi.com/business/1310ap_us_hunger_report.html
THE WEST IS HELL
George Sodini, left behind a diary that makes everything as clear as can be – so clear, in fact, that the media is doing everything it can to avoid looking at what it really says. Because this massacre is really about the desperation and hate so common in America. You can't understand yesterday's health club massacre in Pennsylvania, leaving 3 women dead, 10 injured, and the male gunman with his brains blown out, without recognizing this misery and hate.
Most Americans' lives have grown worse over the past three decades: today, average American male workers earn less than they did in 1979 in inflation-adjusted dollars, while the top 400 richest Americans own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, a wealth gap only found in tinpot Third World kleptocracies, and not seen here since 1928. That alone is reason enough to hate.
Even Warren Buffet admitted it in a interview with the New York Times: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." For some reason, only the rich have the courage to talk about it.
http://exiledonline.com/revenge-of-the-nerd-what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-the-rampage-killer-who-attacked-a-pittsburgh-aerobics-class/#more-10894
to be continued
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
National Socialism, Mighty Leaders, and the Holocaust
Monday, November 23, 2009
Wolin on Arendt's Banality of Evil
Richard Wolin in his Heidegger’s Children, Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, 2001, in addition to being a critic of Heidegger is a critic of Arendt. He doesn’t believe that Arendt had the right focus in her Banality of Evil. On page 31 he writes, “The problem was not just Hitler of “Hitlerism,” but the fact that a vast majority of Germans had consciously and willingly met their infamous Fuhrer halfway. Hitler’s seizure of power was not some kind of unforeseeable ‘industrial accident’ or Betriebsunfall, as postwar Germans were fond of claiming, that befell the nation from outside and that left German traditions unscathed. Instead, the genocidal imperialism that the Nazis unleashed upon Europe represented the consummation of certain long-term trends of German history itself.”
Beginning on page 58 he quotes Arendt to say “The mob man, the end-result of the ‘bourgeois,’ is an international phenomenon; and we would do well not to submit him to too many temptations in the blind faith that only the German mob-man is capable of such frightful deeds.”
Wolin draws conclusions for her: “Therefore, to punish the Germans collectively as a people, as some were inclined to do, would be misguided and senseless. Rather than being a specifically German crime, Nazi misdeeds were symptomatic of the ills of political modernity in general. They were of universal significance and, as such, could have happened anywhere. In fact, one of their distinguishing features was that they had been perpetrated neither by fanatics nor by sadists, but by normal ‘bourgeois.’. . The malefactors, she argued, were typical representatives of mass society. They were neither Bohemians, nor adventurers, nor heroes. Instead, they were family men in search of job security and career advancement.”
Wolin then goes on to offer his objections to Arendt’s thesis: “. . . the functionalist thesis, as articulated by Arendt and others, tells only part of the story. What it fails to explain is the specificity of this particular genocide. Why was it that the Nazis explicitly targeted European Jews for extermination?’ . . . It was not only the result of a brutal and impersonal ‘machinery of destruction’; it was also the product of the proverbial ‘peculiarities of German history.’
“The main weakness of the functionalist approach is that it tends to underplay one of the most salient features of the Nazi rule: ideology – specifically, the ideology of anti-Semitism. . . By emphasizing the ‘universal’ constituents of the Final Solution at the expense of their specifically German qualities, she also managed to avoid implicating her country of origin . . . Margaret Canovan puts her finger on the problem when she observes: ‘By understanding Nazism in terms not of its specifically German context but of modern developments likened to Stalinism as well, Arendt was putting herself in the ranks of many intellectuals of German culture who sought to connect Nazism with Western modernity, thereby deflecting blame from specifically German traditions.’”
COMMENT:
In an earlier note I argued that it was more alarming to realize that what happened in Germany could happen in any nation than to see Germany, or parts of Germany, as being demonic. For if they are demonic then they are “outside” of “us.” We could never, or hardly ever (I take Wolin to be asserting), do what the German’s did. I also take Wolin to be placing the Nazi evil above the Stalinist evil because it was “racist.”
If Wolin were capable of removing his “politically-correct” blinders he might be able to see the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism. The danger is not in the demonic nature of the Germans but in the political form of government Arendt calls Totalitarianism.
Heidegger thought that a great “spiritual” leader could lead the Germans the correct technology-controlling path. Meanwhile, over in Moscow, the Russians thought that a great leader could lead them on the right path toward Communism. In both cases excesses, mass-murders, were engaged in for the “good of the cause.”
Wolin is wrong to want to demonize the Germans. He should instead criticize the idea that any leader is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to lead any nation in a “good” direction as a dictator. If he is an average dictator he will concentrate on preserving his power and the heck with the people. But if he is an idealistic dictator, subscribing to an ideology like National Socialism or Communism, then he may decide to “purify” the cause by putting “enemies” to death.
To imply that putting “this enemy” to death is more serious than putting “that enemy” to death misses one of Arendt’s point. And to imply that “racism” is intrinsically worthier of condemnation than “totalitarianism” misses another.