Month: October 2020
Right, Make Caution vrs Economy a Partisan Issue! Its BOTH, But In the Right Way
Indeed, avoiding famine is important, along with avoiding pestilences. That Don and the Trumpsters made mask wearing a partisan issue, and chose to take their stand for American liberty against the safety of their fellow citizens in a genuine emergency, while trumping up fake emergencies, at the cost of now a third spike- THAT might penetrate the thick Americans, where courting foreign election fraud is just too abstract.
Election Violence in the US?
I do not think violence will occur in any significant way from domestic causes surrounding the 2020 election. The threat, though, is not appreciated, and cannot prove the best campaign advertising. The law has made its position clear, as in honoring the idea of fair elections. Putin overestimated our corruption- which he used. The “deep state” was the attachment to liberty disdain of tyranny in the American character. Not the “media,” but the truth may be what is against Trump, visible now that 200 k+ are dead.
But if Militias take it as some moment, it is important NOT to riot or even demonstrate in response. Peacefully aside is how we will speak for a season. Due process and the moral high ground are the only productive ways. Ja, if they call a battle, and no one shows, they will be sure to start without us!
Tweets
Only able to tweet new WordPress blogs! Computer troubles. Anyway:
Middle America may finally step out from under the cloud of the Trump charade. Stick to the center!
Election intimidation wit fake accusations of fraud is the Trump M.O. We have to discern, and USE THE MIRROR!
Prepare Articles of Immediate Impeachment
If Trump should lose the election and become awnry, before he costs any more lives, Congress should prepare articles of impeachment. For the same reason that the war powers are difficult too leave to Congress in the past 63 years, the short time between November and January would be as long as an eight year term if a bungling Don gets us into a war that is, for example, to the advantage of Russian expansion rather than the common good of the United States of America.
The articles of impeachment are:
I. Election Fraud
2) Bribery
3) Obstruction
4) Emoluments, and
5) Oath of office
The obstruction in the Mueller investigation is extremely serious because it involves something like a passive treason, if unintentional due to ignorance of foreign policy, with the same effect on the nation. It is of course not Trump himself but his political effect that matters.
And this time Congress might recall that it is the House that is to decide what rises to “such a level,” while the Senate is to try the question or determine what corresponds in impeachments to guilt or lack of guilt.
Toward a “Scientific” Psychology
Greek political science is properly universal, a study of man for all men. The kinds of regimes, for example, and the teaching regarding the mean, are points of the science of man true independent of any particular law, time or place. The study of the soul that appears as universal in our age is the medical science, based upon the things of the body common to all men, while we do not seek a correspondingly universal or scientific study of the soul. It should not be surprising, then, that the first science of the soul to appear should be the medical model, with the first principles assumed on the basis of common sense, though this is of course not scientific. Freud, for example, thinks to measure the “normal” and the neurotic, but if one asks what the neurotic” is, one is outside the bounds of science. This circumstance has allowed modern secular man to give too much authority, over the spiritual things, to a medical neurology which cannot, as science, claim for itself such authority In practice, the result is the crisis of contemporary psychiatry and drugs, where the prudential choice of whether a certain addictive substance is next for a particular person, this choice is simply obliterated by profit motives and the pretentions of a pseudoscience. The crisis- similar to the oxy-heroin scam- may have sapped one third of the strength of the free world.
The only sane response may be to reset the foundation of modern psychology and psychiatry upon a philosophic base that authentically confronts our ignorance of the nature of man and genuinely seeks the knowledge of the human soul. The very things assumed for example in the categories of modern diagnostics, become questionable in light of the Socratic categories, and in practice psychiatry becomes much more moderate, emphasizing the rights of persons more than the authority of our treatments, and surely more than its own profits.
Just sayin.’
Antitrust: Default Setting for Collecting Data?
That Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon behave as monopolies is only the surface of the problem with the internet. How many times have I now stumbled upon Microsoft default settings spying upon me in my livingroom of my home? Congress did not think to regulate these things? We asked, What have we to hide? Now we find free government itself in tatters, and it becomes clear that our liberty is what we had to hide. The value of the data mined and sold turns out to be the majority of the hundreds of billions of dollars swelling these companies, and we should sue them for it, just as we did the makers of Oxy, if only the money could be returned to those from whom it has been taken.
Long ago, while using a computer owned by someone else, Microsoft- without permission- set me up a user ID- complete with my name, only they neglected to tell me the password. They have since apparently filled the “disk” with “updates,” knocking me off Twitter at the time of the election. If all occurred just as I say, there is likely no law forbidding it, and no way of compensating us for the political and economic damage. Their stock goes up, but that of each goes down.
Make money by producing value, not selling the security and liberties of your fellow citizens. Remember the phrase “rigged game” economy? These are the problems we can begin to address if we can get out from under the effects of the last election, which may well have been turned by the use of Cambridge data and Russian targeted interference. The rigged game economy, allowed by campaign finance, made us vulnerable to foreign attack. Our own vices allowed the failed Covid response and many other failures which demonstrate why we must choose one capable to be president. Not just anyone can “drain the swamp,” represent the common man against Washington, and such other grave concerns. The Trump method was and is to allow Russia to do things one could not legally do from US soil, such as have the internet security company used by 400 million accounts (Kaspersky) based in Moscow, interfere in ways that may never be determined. “Undetectable,” we think they told the Don, and then received the weakening of NATO, which Trump does not understand. Basic chess- Trump thought he was giving up a pawn to gain a kingship.
Google Antitrust
Google always was an advertising engine attached to a “search” engine, a data collecting and selling company disguised, and ripe for the promotion of tyranny without regulation regarding the sale of our liberties by algorithm.
The regulations correcting these abuses are not costly, but we must see the problem, and Congress has been utterly oblivious.
Targeting consumers allows targeting voter, and so is incompatible with free government. The collection of lists of the gullible and vulnerable has allowed the collection of the Trump cult in an information echo chamber to the imagined profit of a few scam artists who think those are the important things.
Election Tweets
Undecided? We came 10 minutes from a war with Iran just before the virus hit! All the worst responses are in nations with right-leaning Trump flatterers! 220,000 are dead, 90% due to our failed response.
We are off Twitter due to log in and computer problems with Microsoft: End monopolies and data sales! Pay us the value of our data collected, and internet economic inequality will be gone!
The Senate needed to ask Trump, in his impeachment trial, if someone told him the 2016 election would be turned for him, and if he did not then seek to reward Russia with concessions on sanctions and NATO. Maybe Biden will ask the Don in the debate tonight!
The election of Trump was illegitimate due to fraud by foreign interference which was decisive in both the primaries and the election. America is not that stupid without a bit of assistance. The Supreme court declined to take the case, in 2017. Now we have the threat of arms intimidating voters, and the voters STILL cannot decide?
On Hamlet
Freud and Goethe seem both oddly to speak bits of trash and nonsense about Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Freud especially: Freud says Hamlet’s desire for what Claudius has done causes an hysteric inhibition.Why, if some one had succeeded in robbing a bank, would one’s own desire to be a bank robber inhibit one from taking revenge, if, say, the successful bank robber killed his one’s father- his own brother, and married his mother?
What if Hamlet ought not have killed Claudius at all? Freud and Goethe simply assume he should. Neither account for Hamlet being a student from Wittenberg, nor the possibility that the tragic flaw of Hamlet is that odd other-worldly revenge.
We considered these things in an 2007 essay in Interpretation, and would like to critique Freud’s reading of Oedipus. Freud apparently did not read Book IX of Plato’s Republic, where, as in Plutarch, the dream is associated with usurpation and tyranny. But that may be just as well. Jung considers the material of Oedipus in a better way, in Symbols of Transformation. There is a diversion and a mystery in the return toward- or as Augustine says, through- ones own origin, as is also evident in the question of Nicodemus to Jesus (John 3). Freud uncovered the animal ground of the bodily nature of man. The family is older than man. But the birth of intellect and the royal nature have to do with recollection. Freud is pre-Socratic. The distinction between tyranny and kingship is post-Socratic.
By uncovering what he does about the cause of “neurosis, Freud does not then go on to consider what neurosis is, and so his science does not lead us to understand the proper significance of these things, or how they are to be regarded. Similarly, by uncovering the “Oedipus complex” does not fully tell us what this is or how it is to be regarded. How do we know, for example, that it is not a wish for self knowledge that leads the soul to show the matter of penance to itself? How do we know that what is uncovered is not a fundamental desire for usurpation in our animal nature, something like a sin of Cain, innate, as though with us from Adam, or the fact that we are man? But this gets at the root of why we say that, although, quite famously, Freud turned from the neurological approach to words and psychoanalysis, he is yet pre-Socratic. What first appears upon the uncovering of nature is the body, and the pre-Socratics saw the animal body. It is following Socrates that political philosophy distinguishes between king and tyrant. Darwinian or Empedoclean natural philosophy leaves thinkers assuming that survival and reproduction- the animal ends- are the serious goals of man according to science.
Jung addressed the crux of the Oedipus complex in his Symbols of transformation, about the time of his break with Freud. The attachment to the mother is the attachment to the earth, with the original hierarchy of ends, to be sacrificed in the birth of what may be the royal nature or intellect, the eye of the soul. Freud, in his note to the chapter on the Dream Work (Brill, p. 393) in The Interpretation of Dreams, begins his free association from the topic of the eyes. Oedipus is blinded, but it is not fated, but rather his own action, due to shame. The point of Oedipus is to show the fall from the summit of apparent happiness to the worst shame, without fully intending the evil done, as is the point of Greek tragedy. The dream of Caesar- an undisguised as opposed to a disguised Oedipal dream- occurs as he crosses the Rubicon, that is, as he usurps the rule of Rome, or seizes tyrannic power, establishing the empire and ending the Republic. Freud also notes the example in Herodotus of Hippias (Vi, 107) in a similar connection to usurpation. The dream refers to the limits of our humanity, the root of the difference between men and animals evidenced regarding incest- deeply destructive of our human nature, but the logical conclusion if the animal ends are to govern to soul. The human soul is delicate, and sexual traumas do indeed cause grave confusion, which is the reason surrounding so much of marriage custom- the protection of the unfolding of the specifically human soul. Hence, molestations are to be considered at the root of many of the obsessions, anxieties, hysteria and depression rather than repressed fantasies or animal wishes as the causes of the kinds of “neuroses.” Socrates and Jesus rather teach the birth of the soul out of the cave, and this is the unveiling of the human things or the opening of the eye of the mind, the birth of Nous- a capacity for sight, as distinct from certain knowledge or true opinions. But this capacity allows too for the disturbances of thought called psychoses” as distinct from “neuroses.” The knowledge in the soul is apparent in a disintegrated way in the “symptoms” of madness. Political and psychological knowledge is embodied in analogies, as in parables, indicating the invisible truths regarding the soul that would have to be known fully if one were to govern with wisdom. The symbols are numinous because they come from knowledge and point toward knowledge, even that in the soul from prior to our mortal origins. Hence we say that the knowledge of the soul required at the base of a scientific psychology is kept within the soul. In the myth of recollection, in the context of reincarnation, Socrates describes the mystery, just as he tells Meno he will do, and these may even have been related to the Athenian Elysian mysteries. We say that the teaching of rebirth is not unique to Jesus, but comes through Noah. Nicodemus asks him how one can return to his mother’s womb (John 3) and then there is a diversion, and the teaching that one must be reborn in order to see. Kings and heroes are reborn, having paid the penalty of ancient doom, and this is the cause of the royal speech, rare but attributed to prudent men such as Lincoln and a few others.
Claudius usurps his brother Hamlets Senior’s Queen and kingdom, and it is the task of Hamlet to correct or address this usurpation. Freud does not address usurpation as the fundamental theme of the Oedipus complex, but spins his account of what inhibits the action of Hamlet, and it may well be that if Hamlet were free of the attachment to the earth, his strange revenge would not have prevented his securing the penance and abdication of Claudius.
We are attempting to get our psychology to follow Socrates in making the Socratic turn. In this enterprise, we have set out to examine the origins of the medical model of modern psychiatry, which begins just at the turn of the 20th century with Freud. Our first point is always that our psychiatry simply assumes the categories and the meaning of its Greek words without being able to examine the standard by which diagnoses” are made. And here we see that while I usually underestimate Freud, there is no necessity to his or any other of the first principles of modern psychiatry.
mmcdonald77 