Is a craftsman an artisan?

 September 27, 2022

Is a craftsman an artisan?

New York Review of Books made an interesting point on what to my mind, was a distinction between the craftsman and the artisan. (Gorra, 9/22/22.) The craftsman, has, it was asserted, a mastery of the tools and skills of his trade. The ultimate goal was or is, the essay asserts, to do the work so as to develop his self and to improve at what he does. The artisan, so it is imagined in this distinction (-is it true? I am not convinced.-) also masters materials and the use of materials underlying his work. How could this be a proper distinction between the real as personhood, and the real as product of work of persons? I think it's a mind-body distinction that neither the possibly-fallaciously-distinct categories of artisan and craftsman, but especially the artisan, would in truth rather avoid. But if we set aside the fact that the current speculatively-tinged moment would prove, that the mind belongs to the craftsman, the very simple and much more basic and fundamental fact, that use of craft requires tools that are in their very essence also material, as the body, the voice, and the brain are all material tends to erase the distinction between craftsman and artisan if taken properly to a conclusion. And a conclusion can never be put off.-

But deeper than this is the extensively material aspect of all of our actual experience. The world, material as it is, can't be put off, in it's materiality. To see the potential in a material object to transform into another thing, is not to not see, or not deal with, it as it is. The absolute wood-ness of some thing, the quintessence of wood, is another material transformation, of wood, that cannot be fully reached its fullness and completeness. There is no purity, and in fact the quintessence of wood could actually be, and is probably, not wood in itself.

This is an example. The quintessence of stone, too, may not be stone in the material transformation that we are used to seeing it in. But it is assuredly not, stone in its raw form that allows the mind to understand that material. And so with metal, or clay, the same way. 

Does the craftsman want to, in the end, turn himself into the material he works on? I think this is the canard, or confusion to be charitable, endemic in the article. This is not, to my mind, what it is all about. Rather, it is to turn himself, in a manner of speaking, into the tools by which he works on the materials he works on. But this is the simply worded, but complex thought that is the distinction: the craftsman strives to become what he works with, and not what he works on. Not the distinction between the craftsman and the artisan at all, but between what a craftsman works with and what he works on. And this does mean he becomes his material tools, but also, he uses the tools of his mind and his body, his hands and his brain, as tools, as well. Being an artisan is an incidental but unavoidable fact of being a craftsman. But it is not at all dispositive of it. In fact, the two are imbricated in the work of it all. Materiality does not mean without mind, it means with brain.

…Water

September 27, 2022

...Water

Ecosocialism or barbarism: that's the stark choice that is faced to us by the hard lessons of the mid-Sixties. The choice of a better life, or not, is laid out in delineations like that. But, now that Ecosocialism itself is co-opted, properly I might add, by the Powers That Be, the problematic, continuing on to this issue, most broadly described is "how do you explain a simile?"

"This is water", said David Foster Wallace as he read a lecture to Kenyon College for their commencement a long time ago now. What's the point of it, I wonder? Is it a blank? Or, I do wonder, is it, after all, a sort of admonition to excellence by dealing with the now, the stuff that touches your skin it's so close.

You have to admit, all round, that what matters is always, has always been, what gets us to where we want to go, even if there is resistance from it.

DFW's analogy is to fish in water; so what to the fish is water, is not what to us is water. The impetus to think comes not from the concern, what is water, but what, to us, is like what water is to the fish.

The explanation of the explanation disposed of, the real work is to interrogate, if you will, the existence of the almost daily resistance that allows you to push against it, to swim. As it were…but not through water, but through life.

The concern leveled at the graduates of Kenyon College that year by David Foster Wallace was actually: do you have a personal code, that you follow even if it limits you? He, as a novelist, probably stuck to the admonition "don't act, just think" while in public, no matter how hard it was. But, that day he was not a graduate, he was the fish of his own simile, and he was really asking: what do you do?

A friend and I read parts of that speech at a high school baccalaureate, long long ago. For those who might still be wondering what I read to you – what we read to you that day: so it was, so that was.

Taiwan politics proper

September 27, 2022

Taiwan politics proper

No, given that people may want to engage productively with Taiwanese politics on a productive, state-to-state basis, it is completely true that the political system there does not make as much sense to Western eyes, and sense. But it's actually fair to understand, although it exists on the spectrum of what we, here in America, might call political economy rather than politics "proper".

The two main parties there basically represent two ends of a spectrum about political economy. On one end, the KMT, Kuomintang, or the Nationalist Party in English translation, is on the more mercantilist end of the spectrum. The DPP, or Democratic People's Progressive Party, Minjingdang, is far more toward the physiocratic end of the political spectrum.

Taiwan airspace

September 27, 2022

Taiwan airspace

The latest Taiwan news, coming in the week of the momentous Nancy Pelosi visit, is that Taiwan is still weathering the aftershocks of mainland China’s reaction to the visit, that marked the partnership with Taiwan over the CHIPS ACT.  Taiwan’s “raw” semiconductor chips are going to be essential to the implementation of that bill.

But when this bill is begun to be put into action, the global effect on high-tech industry economics is going to be that the American chips industry takes business away from other countries in the developing world: namely, Southeast Asia and China, also smaller players such as India. And the Taiwanese government is maneuvering hard to reach that outcome.

The growing pains from that are involving an increased “threat level” from China, but mainly, of the nature of China showing off the new technology that it has , As if to say, it is also a high tech power.

The latest is a Rainbow CH-4 drone spotted off the coast of the Taiwan outer islands. “Developed by China Aerospace and Technology, the CH-4 has a cruising speed of up to 180 kph and a flight range of 3500 km; the other was a Y8 anti-submarine war plane” per Taipei Times and the Taiwan Ministry of Defense. The two aircraft were among the 20 Chinese aircraft and five naval ships, and combat air and naval patrols and defense missile systems were deployed in response, although the location of the other 18 aircraft or the location of the naval vessels were not disclosed by the Taiwan government.

This all raises at least a concern about drones in the rules of war about invading sovereign airspace by unmanned vehicles.

Contra Nietzsche

 September 26, 2022

"Contra Nietzsche"

Nietzsche was wrong. Nietzsche does not have some thing that the people need overall, because he never admitted he was wrong, talked, or kept a record of his life, nor did he theorize about that need to have that in the human condition. It is not there, in anything. You go right ahead and doubt. But Foucault had to fix it for him, otherwise he was incomplete and didn't have all four forms of the "paper". So draw your conclusions from that. And don't ignore that that is not how you get to the Foucault, the "ink" and The Way and the subject of the form of the talk/product.

There is a significant correlation between these "nihilist" philosophers and the old Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism (the legalism of Han Fei) too. I'm tired of crying out about this, as if people can't use common-sense to make this conclusion. 

(Nietzsche is an insufficient foundation... is all I'm saying. You can't get started, from it.)

Me and the Left right now.

 September 26, 2022

Me and the Left right now

Me and the Left right now.

We all want freedom of movement across borders. And it is absolutely, an hypocrisy for international corporations to move product freely but restrict the movement of people, across these same borders.

What is a country? Or a nation-state, which the topic will dance around forever. It's many things; at the very least: security, territory, population. What does that mean, at least in the most surface level and readily apparent way? On a basic level, there is a social contract. But, at minimum what is the social contract that makes up the state? That's kind of the problematic that Foucault takes up sometimes, and I merely want to interpret here some thing that he wrote about but very obliquely. "Territory" as in borders. Free movement of people across borders is some thing I support, but to have "open" borders in the sense that the movement is unrestricted and without consequence, is not the actual desired goal. Free movement of people is. What is "territory?" Foucault says that properly speaking it is the pastoral power of WHEN. Telling people when they can and when they can through the standard processes of the modern state, you might say post-Hegel, in the sense of borders; in a more general sense it is always a when in this pastoral power, when governing territory.

Deproblematizing(?) - the Politics of Desire

September 25, 2022

Deproblematizing(?) - the Politics of Desire

What you should have to do to relegate the politics of desire strictly to the purpose which it is socially salutary to perhaps widen it to most encompassing everything possible that can beneficially be desired. Because tho we are all monkeys, monkeys like to have all the things we by analogy to the monkey might also desire. The monkey that said maybe no more fighting and fucking for a little while because I want to go over there to get that tasty fruit and, y'all coming with me to get it? And, no, but that monkey went there anyway because he remembered that that fruit was super tasty; that is still a monkey too! - There is no need to say we are so high mighty supermen; they always make mistakes or at least one of those mistakes, and they always stay around too long and don't get the fruit or they don't do some other thing but just stay there, not doing it… And so on. But embrace what you want in the face of the reality that we are monkeys and monkeys are violent and do politics like chimpanzees and horny like bonobos sometimes too. So, keeping all in mind that social consequences always result from whatever you desire to do and do, but the only difference between monkeys and the monkeys that we are is, us monkeys care about the truth. And that monkey that wants to go get that tasty food store far away will also have to do his thing and… share the fruit or at least where the tree is where he got that fruit. Desire should be thought of as the totality as a crutch or framework too, so called, boil it down to what it is that you really brought back to add to that bubbling cauldron of true culture, that we all keep around as human type monkeys.

Even if that thing is just a rock, it goes in the pot! That is the consequence.

Current

 September 25, 2022

The “Current”

What is current? What is the current? I mentioned the current that moves you…

The faster you move, the faster moves the current that moves you… What is the current if it is not the contemporary? Because the contemporary is a who, who that you are contemporary with. But the current that sweeps you along, like the movements of people making history that Tolstoy wrote about at the end of War and Peace, on free will, it's like a current in a river too isn't it? The point I'm making is that you can not choose the what of what War and Peace is. The free will that exists is the sum of infinitesimals and not the choice of a totality, fully your creation. Nothing happens through being fully in control of your circumstances. The, and perhaps the only, free will is to not fight the current, but to swim. The material or other influential circumstances that exist to formulate your life are about the materials and manner in which, on which and through which you have to work. If you existed in a void, or an environment of which you were totally in control, there would be no resistance to you, to constitute traction for your motion towards completion or progress towards your task. There are all kinds of foolish things you can do. Avoiding that means doing something, in the presence of those options, present to be foolish, gives you the chance to resist and therefore propel yourself backward with more force. Is it motivated by desire? Perhaps only in a manner of speaking, but the object of the desire is always elsewhere from the distractions, again in a manner of speaking. The problematic that you walk through on the way there, are your materials tho' they may appear obstacles.

Jean Rhys and the Ethics of Elsewhere, and that book?

 September 25, 2022

Jean Rhys, and The Ethics of Elswhere, and that book?

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is a book that I haven't read but, is one of those touchstones that all who want to reference a particular character/personality matrix of assumed roles and so on: Not a person, that a person is. But, and this will be brief, the question strongly implicates the Ethics of Elsewhere. Which is the role of this person. But if we want to decide what is done in the room where we are, this depends almost entirely on doing and premising our doing on what is not here, but is elsewhere. And this does not implicate or consider in any way what is here, only what is not here, and what is Elsewhere. But, if we want to premise, for instance, the pen on parliamentarianism, and not disciplinarianism, we have to, – do we not?- Take into account what is not here? - If we are missing something - this is a predicate knowledge but, a predicate person-and-personhood for that endeavor of forward motion. The faster you move, the faster moves the current that moves you, until you spin out into the wide ecstasy like a thousand points of stars… But move on, you must.

The Politics of Desire, from Ms. Amia Srinivasan

September 25, 2022

The Politics of Desire

Amia Srinivasan gets real about porn, in a book, reviewed in the New York Review of Books.

One of the titles of the essays contained in the collection? "The Politics of Desire."

"Could it be that pornography doesn't merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real? I asked. Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it."
(In "Talking to My Students About Porn". By Amia Srinivasan, from The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century)

I suspect, as I think Mrs. Srinivasan does as well, that porn can't be avoided in this age of "porn ubiquity", and yet, everyone has studiously denied porn use for ages, and then pathologized the self when the truth came out. I suspect that she would prefer not to pathologize porn use, but she is concerned, too, about how men think about it. I think that this male catechism of self-flagellation saying that porn use, is absolutely problematic kinda amuses her because it is so at odds with their observed, and admitted, behavior. The hypothetical that it is all bad would mean that people are not capable of making these easy decisions and that porn may be the most evil conspiracy ever conceived, but also the most capable and intelligent? This doesn't pass the Occam's razor test. Simpler is to assume that the conspiracy is silence over a taboo – but that just talking about it to break the silence, will still not be enough, because the taboos cover up an inherent or hard-to-move inequality among persons which is where good feminist thought and theory and maybe a dash of philosophy such as Amia Srinivasan could perhaps introduce the mix of, comes in. I think this is about Foucault and it can't not be that he's not involved. "Tomorrow sex will be good again," he wrote. And that's the feeling about this whole enterprise that we are experiencing. Absolutely, we can't decide if "We don't like it, but we do?" OR, "We do like it, but we don't?" But, even more to the point, there is a long-standing trope/truth of ancient matrilineal/matriarchal sexual fantasies in conventional ones, and this truth of the human condition is central, Although not dispositive, of feminism. How can that not be important? It does not stand to reason that it would not be. Porn is canned fantasies, after all… as in, not fresh.

"The idea that pornographic fantasy should be egalitarian is preposterous and muddies questions of ethical responsibility." (Blair, New York Review of Books, 9/22/22.) And I agree. I think that the person of Foucault was the problematic that sex-skeptical feminism of the late sixties couldn't overcome dispositively, and therefore Blair, (NYRB 9/22/22) describes Ms. Srinivasan's retelling:

"there emerged… A pro-sex detente in which everyone agreed not to apply political standards to other people's sexual desires."

Could you be, however, "overfond of your desires", and isn't there a "radical demand" for sexual liberation as well as the "liberal demand" for it? - isn't sexual liberation not only laissez-faire when women are taken into account? And hence Ms. Srinivasan's argument that there is a "Politics of Desire."

"There's a kind of discipline here, in that it requires us to quiet the voices that have spoken to us since birth, the voices that tell us which bodies and ways of being in the world are worthy and which are unworthy. What is disciplined here isn't desire itself, but the political forces that presume to instruct it." 

(From "The Politics of Desire.")

I agree that it's a hard sell. But maybe it's worth putting into the debate, the fact, as bare and theoretical as that fact may be, that of course feminism is conditioned on male desire, but it might be worth thinking about what, in the realm of man, is conditioned on female desire as well?

They ARE Principled but lacking, in raging against the machine...

They ARE Principled but lacking, in raging against the machine...

September 23, 2022

A 17-year-old kid took a good crack at crashing the video game economy lately.  This is a complicated social phenomenon, isn't it?  I remember when the convenient raison d'être for hackers was that security was weak on the adult shit.  That kid who pulled up the Wi-Fi password listings of everyone on the dorm hall, because that was how the equipment he had worked.  That kind of stuff, totally justified by being a wastoid exploring his stuff and being really bored.  But this has changed in a really fundamental discursive way, hasn't it?  It's related to the way people relate, especially to myth, and especially the myth of groups like Anonymous.  Hacking as righteous retribution: OK now.  They were legit part of the Ukraine war effort weren't they?  And they are always on the right side of history, over and over.  And now they're on the right side of popular opinion with the Ukraine fad.  Absolutely.  But it's hard to rationalize.  And where goes the legion known as Anonymous so goes the whole hacking population, doesn't it?  When they go to war, every other goes to a state of war.  This is the state of computers now, and what's the use of talking about the past of it?  How does that song go?

"I don't want to talk about the way that it was."

I guess it's worth considering the question to be asked about stuff like this 17-year-old's motivations: what exactly is your beef?  It would be worth it to know.  And generally, as hacking goes from casual and lighthearted mischief to principled opposition to something, with perhaps justified and justifiable malice.  So, does this kid hate video games?  See, I don't think so.  I think that the real social phenomenon that this represents, is the increasing compartmentalization of society and the Internet.  People who have these hacking skills but are both isolated and swept up into the political zeitgeist of trying to be a principled attacker of "the system" that everyone is raging against.  And yet, those isolated and not at all willing to change to properly apply their powers, and unwilling to do anything outside of the interests of their friend group.  In a sense, we might call this, principles without purpose.  It's performative, absolutely, but it's sort of desirous of having it known that they too rage against the system.  But it's self-sabotaging too.  To do what you are doing without the courage to properly do it, but wanting just your friends to know that you could do it if you tried - but above all not willing to lose friends to do the right thing.  And this is what explains the phenomenon to my mind.  Most of all the blind they can't see beyond us, is that, their friends, no matter who they are or how connected, and not the whole state, and often not the state at all.  And they are raging against whatever their friends are into as a stand-in for raging against the machine.

On The Critic

On the critic

September 20, 2022

Everyone's a critic. It's a sign of the times. In a land, a country, even a world of increasingly abundant artifacts of culture - words, stories, images, spectacles, songs, - it's the human urge to reduce the entropy of all this product that comes to the foreground even as the main objects that this urge works upon recede somewhat into the setting in which we work. The natural human urge to systematize leads to the popularization of critique as a position from which to perceive the myriad mutually agreed-upon and pleasant delusions by which the average person now does more than slightly more than entertain themselves. This fact is perhaps variable by the material conditions of economic paradigms, but perhaps part of the inevitability of civilization's development: nevertheless, there is a sort of imperative to just make sense of the flavor of a human life met on the street or in public. It's an imperative toward criticism too. "We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal," Nietzsche commented (Human, All Too Human, 248). It's a necessity just to understand the passive fantasies consumed, by whoever you may be talking to.

Even a casual familiarity with pop culture and so on, whatever may have piqued someone's curiosity, reveals uncomfortable limitations on certain linkages between works; songs carrying repeated emotional appeals in different instances; tones, imagery, structural cliches; and then this alongside a really uncomfortable variety of artistic culture to be consumed. But even more familiarity or range doesn't really institute critique or "The Critic". But this point in the progression does elucidate a very distinct need peculiar to this time of fragmented and also identity-constitutive media landscapes, for a more complex and nuanced, fuller-fleshed concept of The Critic as a person who exists in society.

What, even, is critique is not so clear. It is precisely this media landscape that makes suspicion believe that any pen can be held captive to a higher will, and yet this is completely opposite of the sense in which this media landscape would have come about. In a similar way the conflicted notions about what makes honest criticism hides what criticism is, - and certainly, Foucault underscores that critique is not a notion from cliche.

A critique does not consist in saying that things are not good as they are. It consists in seeing what kinds of self-evidences and liberties the practices we accept rest on.

("So Is It Important to Think?")

As a basic reward from basic industriousness, a functionally illimited array of pleasant delusions can suck you in and walk you back out of something agreed-upon to be all-around agreeable. It's important to note that things are in so many ways better than they have ever been. I promise the contra-point to this is not the problem of too many options. In fact I'm not sure that this concerns some comment on the current moment at all; I'm disposed to say this concerns a feature of society that the current moment has only made relevant, and that the very current has finally given a problem so very deep-seated that the feature has to be defined out of obscurity.

Not everyone is a Critic actually. I wish for there to be one and hope it appears, and that passes for criticism for most. It is a sign of the times, though, that we yearn for this more than most times in the past.

On The Critic, it is such a thing that hasn't existed when things are too big or too fractured a spectacle. But even though both those are emblematic of our current times writ large and in broad strokes, I think it is the relevance of the limited linkages of sound and music, cliches of imagery too, and their inoperability and misuse as actual cultural touchstones, that provide the traction and the resistance that he needs to operate.

Things are better than they have ever been, but by being better than they ever are, these things that are concerns of the Critic, have almost exceeded the bounds of an audience's taste, without exceeding their understanding. Somehow, this almost makes things the worst they have ever been; and we yearn, that the Critic inhabit this space, sociologically, even perhaps philosophically, in society.

Let's talk about music in the audiovisual paradigm as a sort of drug to dope a construct from too much fractal variety into familiarity. It's the fractal variety that they want, but it disappears even for them into indistinguishability without some frustrating irreducibility to lash out against that carries the energy into the body of the work where the work is essentially the same: to reduce obscurity, or complexity, to the familiar or the irreducible-further. But it's a strange thing to understand because the familiar is hard to reduce further but it's glossed out of impossibility and with great rage; the possible-to-operate-upon is easier than these markers of impossibility, but its not only there that the work can be done.

These markers creating this traction have to be recognizable, but old favorites of everybody, so have they survived because they could have no meaning made of them by the Critics? Same with artistic cliches. And yet they trigger that mood to critique in the Critic...so do they say, to them, to look elsewhere, to critique them? And what does this say for the real production of music to take or not take into account in the age when the Critic is active?

Isn't this a thing? A sort of Ethics of Elsewhere.

The third rail

 September 19, 2022

The (new?) third rail of American politics...

For some reason, propaganda has become the third rail of American politics. The reason that it is learned to be so is that no one wants the truth about what people are thinking, but only the truth about what they are doing when they are making the decisions. And no one will tell them. Is it true? Is some of it true?

The whole problem is that the secrets that we know are right there are also right there in plain sight.

Doesn't make sense? Here's an example.

Tolstoy had a wife, you know, and she edited his random stack of papers for War and Peace. And this might lead you to imagine that she listened to him. She did not. His voice is on Wikipedia. Her name was Sophia. Still this might make you think that she listened to him. She did not.

More simple example.

Voltaire visited Prince Frederick but left his court after a while, but she might think this means they weren't friends still. Maybe that they didn't like each other anymore. This is not true. They liked each other the same. Because he left, even so.

Example.

Columns have different names based on how they are decorated at the top. But that is not what makes them distinct. It is how tall they are; what stone they are, that makes them columns.

Synthesis of examples because that's how people make sense of it all in propaganda. Propaganda is all this detail, it's a fancy, that just says that we like it when people do work, and we talk about the detail ancillary to the real work. People look at everything as a work and it is not that, not all the time. And this is why propaganda frustrates people because it is totally besides the work; it may fit together with the real work like a puzzle piece but the truth of what it's about is outside of it and not within it. People are going deeper and deeper into it to find "it"; some golden nug of truth, but this is the past that doesn't work, a relic. And that is why propaganda is so infuriating. Propaganda is so interesting though because the truth is so mundane but at least it is not banal.

Here's a thought - the newspaper only has a lot of good stuff in it when nobody or not enough people are reading it, if they are all reading it, nothing is new to people… So what's the point? It's a corrective…

People concerned about propaganda… It's like caution tape in a sense. Nothing new here… Just working…

But the reason it has become the third rail is that we're concerned that we don't know who it is that is doing the work. That is why powerful people are concerned and telling you to be concerned, not because the work the propaganda is referring to is no good, but because it is good, and yet we don't know who is doing it… we should be far less concerned that there is propaganda, far less concerned about the reason that there is propaganda, and focus less on the echo, that echo, of what is important, and far more on what is important that is creating an echo… That propaganda, this thing that is scary and makes no sense, exists, is an echo, and logically therefore, of some thing that makes sense, and that is nice.

Common sense works to tell you what it is, probably, that propaganda is probably about: only so much things are going on at once, in the state, and so on. You might not know what each example of propaganda is referring to, but that is not the point, the propaganda is not even the clue… Common sense and not following the crowd will show you what is being talked about, and common sense will tell you that. And that is as good as that kind of thing gets…

These propagandistic fuels…

These propagandistic fuels...

September 14 2022

You know we've gotten deep into the muck of propaganda when some miscreants would dare to sully the legacy of Henry George by dredging up how they used to sully us all before he told them to stop.

A news blip, barely a headline, today, about asserting "electricity will never overcome ethanol for cars." Let's draw a line in the ---- sand here and say this is more malfeasance than custom can allow, discursively.

This should be common wisdom, before George Bush Junior came through and screwed the pooch on this.

Our agricultural system is not an agribusiness system. The more these mercantilists with their medieval mentality try to exploit value out of the farm system, they degrade the worth of someone in the system: for the last 40 years, since at least Reagan, it's been the small freeholder of farmland that has been cut out.

Mercantilism, you'll remember if you've discovered it, is like the feudalism of food. Supply people from adjacent farms. It does not work because low prices mean farmers have no incentive to grow enough food. So because this does not work, they instituted something that works better: let food prices be high as possible, circulate food freely, and allow export but not import of excess. This is physiocracy, and it works. 

Play some basic reason here. If you allow ethanol to be such an attractive option, for excess corn, people are going to want to grow more corn. As in, instead of other crops. And sooner or later, it's the beginning of the movie Interstellar, which is the scariest shit, I have ever seen. George Bush Junior is a farmer more or less, but it's exactly these types running so far afield from their fundamental constituency in a human sense that is barely political in the formal sense, they are the most danger to the interests society has, in the background they come from. Everyone wants to get off the farm when the farm sucks and is in trouble, of course. And when they do, they make it worse by trying to fully escape. The bottom line is that ethanol is going to suck away preference for other crops in biodiversity. Corn is great; corn is magical. But excluding corn by preferring it with subsidies and etc. etc. is going to take away from the beans, and the squash and… the others. 

These propagandistic fuels.

They think that they need to talk down to the public about what they should know already but don't - absolutely don't. But the only thing deeper than the cornerstone of agriculture is the dirt and the salts.

Mercantilism is a trap for these folks. It's a revolving door between mercantilism and physiography. The commonsense notion, that isn't commonsense in reality, for people from this background is that "you" don't "have to" advertise food, or even talk it up. You would be surprised. Hence, Henry George in all his perfect glory. 

Why does this all matter enough to take it to the next level? Because despite all, John Adams' last words were "Jefferson lives." New world. New mentality.

Disappointment ethics

 "Disappointment" in ethics

September 14, 2022

We have a problem with disappointment.  I think it's endemic of our times. And to be clear, I don't think anyone is actually disappointed in us.  But there is a pathological self-infliction upon the subject of ourselves, and our times, as if we all collectively think that, or wonder why it's not that, everyone should be disappointed in us.  Secretly, with perhaps too much venom, I think often that I don't want to indulge this need for disappointment, if only to say that I have much bigger things to signal my disappointment about.  Honestly there is some contempt to that: to not even pay lip service to the outdated concept that anyone is the embodiment in person of virtue ethics; Honestly that is a disappointment in itself, to not complain about a dead ideology is still inexplicably alive, to everyone except for those who are, in the mind of people, where that dead ideology (still?) resides;  Honestly, that is kind, empathetic, because the ideology of virtue ethics, as opposed to morality, could never survive the light of day even when it was dominant…  But as a bit of advice to those who may still be riding the train of being disappointed in our elders for not having "it" – even if they seem to be baiting you to make that claim… It's so clear that the natural outcome of that narrative is that someone has to tell you that if you are disappointed, you had no reason to expect that what you seek in advanced ways would be found anywhere but as a product of your own striving.

"The liberal concept..." in this new historical paradigmatic

 September 13, 2022

"The liberal concept that men will do"

Is - for this is a contentious proposition - is off-grid solar energy an abegnation of the social contract? It even exists in a contentious social position: a public and private melded space.

What is the consideration in return for this transgressive but not exclusionary perhaps act? If you make your own energy, etc., what promise do you take and what do you give, what is the entire plane of social contractivity that exists at least to some degree for you in that?

A burden and an honor, and therefore the correct way.

So many unanswered questions. Don't we owe the sum total of our understanding, of the answers possible or not, to all these unanswered questions: normative, declarative and never descending to the interrogative with truth. Progress in this form toward some ultimate perceived ideal, beckoning some problematic leap of faith, requires sacrifice that in a sense precludes its ultimate attainment for a predatory attainment.

-- To in a sense foreclose on the wasteland of the current moment of which this "ultimate" ideal is but a part. To sacrifice, in this case the very concept of not having problems with the attainment of a power-potentiality. The wonder being of an empty vessel, and not the assurance of abundance to come, but rather the assurance that when the particular abundance is found it will be added to the vessel; from an old disregarded entity of virtue ethics – derivated  - to an integral construction of new parameters for living. The centrality in this new system of morality to underpin and base this new technological paradigm on is the problematic of excess, not disbursive virtue. A new problemization of residuals.

The song that says:

"… I can't forget
Now I can lend him my ear or two, how to stack these residuals
The liberal concept that men'll do." 

-Those lyrics matter again, it is not foolishness.

Agricultural solar controversies

Agricultural solar controversy

September 12, 2022

So this is the issue that has reoccurred: the solar panel controversy from rural Ohio.

The eternal recurrence of the…

Basically the controversy is the recalcitrance of rural America to adopting solar colocation on the farmland. Frankly solar colocation is not a good idea-the best argument for it is that it only marginally reduces crop yields. But the reason rural landowners are being propositioned with the business of rural solar is the confluence of two factors: the first is the commonsense reality that we should first figure out how to architect a good solar farm, and that has to happen with some good open space; the second, however, is that rooftop solar, which is the urban version, is almost too easy to do; labor prices fall and unions cannot maintain leverage for the good wages and benefits that we need. 

Of course, why not put it on rural buildings? - there aren't many. But of course, of course the efficiency of solar PV panels commercially available, are about half that of the experimental panel efficiency of about six years ago.

None of this explains the controversy, which is aesthetic, and the victimhood of being sold the lie that solar is a fad and a trend that will put you over the top. Again, this is a conflation, charlatanry in science communication with an argument based on aesthetics. When someone puts it that way, you can see that this "problem" is motivated by bad faith, but the farmers are not to blame.

The meta-conversation of that sell must go like: Farmer: "I have doubts about the long-term viability of this technology". Salesman: "Absolutely. And we've got lots of options…"

Well, here's the exact thing, about that, which is that, we actually don't… You can have your working PV, some sketchy solar thermal, or some organic variety that's just a stack-of-junk toy.

It's not reasonable to blame the farmers et al. of a rural community being sold solar for rejecting that sales pitch. And there is massive incalcitrance on someone's part, but it's incalcitrance that you shouldn't expect a farmer to sacrifice the product of his land for. Sales and such: you buy the idea, after all. If we don't like that, and here it's not working… why are you even doing it as a matter of sales?

The supporters of rural solar are going to try to convince their fellows by copying the stomach of the salesman who brought it to them; again, and abegnation of the responsibility of the salesman for not accurately portraying what it is they are selling. "What is the idea?" No idea.

We live in a nation of ideas. It's a fault to treat of the backbone of our nation, without ideas.

This confusion we cause ourselves

 September 10, 2022

This confusion we cause ourselves

This confused world... confused about the object of its own necessity. Confused about survival imperatives.

There is a confusion walking in the areas of future solar energy options. The cause is that every scientific discipline wants a piece of the pie of climate change mitigation. Nevertheless, they are balking at recognizing the real problem and they are chasing the money and the "cool" as their goal. The proximate situation is that each standard scientific discipline that wants to break into the mix is promising its own brand of utopia as an all-encompassing solution to climate change.

Foucault notes for us: "Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverse of analogy with the real space of society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal places."

The full schema of this solar energy confusion is a problem of decreasing margins.

There is, if you can imagine it, a pie chart of the total practicable methods of gathering solar energy. Number one, in terms of the most useful, practicable and scalable, is solar photovoltaic. Your standard solar panel, that is. Number two is some variation of solar thermal, which includes solar chemical applications: there are some use cases for this, but it is limited in comparison. Solar energy can almost entirely only be chemically accumulated as heat; solar chemical is essentially a subset of solar thermal, an inherent limit on its use cases. Number three is the practically negligible solar organic biological niche: organic solar cells, which are existing and makes sense at first, but degrade over time as you try to make them efficient and workable and last long enough. They are basically a toy.

To follow up Foucault in this alternate vein, Billy Bragg's song has these lines that come to mind, when these kinds of disciplinary rivalries infiltrate the narrative people perceive about the market. From "Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted":

"Be nice if we could have a cake and eat it
Though that's impossible to do, but
Too many have been invested in this outcome
They simply can't afford to for it not to come true."

The recurrence, the "there it is, again" is that speech by China Mieville from 2014 previously mentioned, here. Climate change causes an existential panic. And for that we need some measure of inspiration. But the commonplace from that speech is:

"But to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can't afford."

Every scientific discipline is proposing to solve climate change for us now. But the clamor of their utopias is betraying the fact that the deployment of the solution is not in their hands - advice, proposal, but not the disposition of the forces marshalled to the solution. The power to decide what we need lies elsewhere. The notion of scientific hegemony is the inconvenient belief of familiarity postponing the necessary attitude we need to take these utopic designs being proposed under the rubric of scientific leadership, an evaporated notion stemming from the aberration of the mid-19th century.

This artificial photosynthesis kick that organic solar is leading up to, is the new canard of our scientific moment. The new hubris without end…

Artificial photosynthesis is the structure behind the brutal mistake of burning hydrogen, for example. Fuel cells from the green electrolysis of hydrogen are a fine idea but fuel cells do not involve combusting hydrogen, and the power in-to-power out ratio is below the level of feasibility. But it's the endless drive toward this foolish ideal unreachable by technical work, namely artificial photosynthesis, that's creating this systemic excess of hydrogen that's feeding back into this antiquated system. On the radio today: an ad from Enbridge, the evil qua evil of mid-Michigan environmental history, about them burning hydrogen and even tonally foolish glory.

Billy Bragg's lyric again coming to mind:

"All opinions are equal in the free market of ideas,
Truth is nothing more than opinion,
That garners the most likes, provokes the loudest cheers."

Perhaps Mr. Mieville's words mean, at this moment, that all this desire for utopia is what creates the feeling of dystopia. Utopianism, after all, is opposed to the idea of progress: it is a stasis, presumed to be perfect. Perhaps that is now, or soon to be, what deserves to be mocked.

Anyway - the commonsense assumption that burning hydrogen en masse produces the exact problem we are trying to fix, somehow hasn't sunk in to the skulls of people. In this case, nitrogen oxides, the acid rain pollution, and stuff we haven't studied. It's alternative energy, but it's not green energy. It's no solution.

"Not everything that counts can be counted
Who holds the markets to account?
Not everything that counts can be counted,
Not everything that can be counted counts."

Chile's vote to reject a new constitution is a real boost to EV metals mining, according to business press

 September 9, 2022

Chile's vote to reject a new constitution is a real boost to EV metals mining, according to business press…

Chile voted to reject a proposal for a new constitution with progressive values today, in what is largely seen by the business press as an opportunity for "EV metals mining," namely lithium mining, in the interest of large western corporations. The causality?  Unclear.  That is to say, there is no telling whether the "need" on the part of rich countries for "EV metal material," is what caused, or what benefited, from the rejection of the new constitution.  

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Chile’s EV Metals Mining Gets Boost After Voters Reject Constitution

By 

Craig Mellow 

Sept. 9, 2022 2:30 am ET

Chilean voters celebrate following the rejection of the national constitutional referendum in Santiago, Chile, on Sept. 4, 2022. The ‘no’ vote could give a boost to the country’s mining companies.

Cristobal Olivares/Bloomberg

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What does a constitutional referendum in far-off Chile have to do with California’s ambitious new targets for electric vehicles? A lot, actually. 

The South American nation of 19 million is the world’s dominant copper producer, boasting a third of global output, and No. 2 in lithium. The planet needs much more of both of these metals if EVs and renewable energy are going to save it. Demand for copper will double by 2035, S&P Global research predicts. Chileans’ landslide rejection of their new proposed constitution on Sep. 4 could make the race for supply easier. 

The 178-page document offered lots of reasons for 62% of the electorate to vote No, from a universal right to “nutritious food” to a “plurinational” state structure. “Chile is a pretty pragmatic society,” says Shannon O’Neil, senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “A comprehensive leftist transformation was just too much.” 

The draft constitution also threatened mining investment, notably through a ban on extraction near “glaciers and other protected areas.” That could have excluded rich copper seams in the high Andes, depending on how the terms were defined.

The resounding defeat could also curtail President Gabriel Boric’s push to extract more revenue from miners. Boric’s campaign sprang from the same street protests that catalyzed the constitutional convention in 2019, and he supported its passage.

A fiscal blueprint he sent to Congress this summer would hike effective tax rates for mining from 37% to 59%, estimates Francisco Acuna, a Santiago-based consultant with commodities specialist CRU. “This would put Chile out of consideration for tier-one mining companies,” he says.

The legislature will likely rein this in now to about 45%, closer to global norms, Acuna predicts. Boric fired his mining and interior ministers two days after the vote, a signal he is tacking toward the center. 

That is bullish news for global mining giant BHP (ticker: BHP), which operates the world’s largest copper mine at Escondida, Chile. It has targeted $10 billion more for the country under conditions of “legal certainty.” Other miners waiting-and-seeing on big new Chile strikes include Antofagasta (ANTO.UK) and Teck Resources (TECK). 

The certainty these companies crave is still a ways off. Boric, who just took office in March, remains committed to taxing miners more to pay for social programs like pensions and education, and to tighter environmental regulation. He retains backing for these goals, O’Neil says. “The broader social demands that led to Boric’s election are not over,” she says. 

Chilean lithium mining was a mess before Boric arrived. Ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet declared it a “strategic resource” under state control because lithium is used in nuclear fission. Successive governments failed to develop a public-private investment framework even as the EV age dawned. Australia roared past Chile as the top world producer, although Chile has 50% more reserves.

Boric has floated creation of a state lithium company, akin to copper miner Codelco, possibly in partnership with lithium-rich neighbor Argentina. Consultant Acuna isn’t impressed. “There’s been no real discussion about making the resources easier to exploit,” he says. 

The same might be said about the quest for “green metals” globally. The world seems to have belatedly united around a technological transformation to abate climate change. 

Extracting the necessary raw materials is, if anything, getting more difficult. The failure of Chile’s woke constitution provides some breathing room, though.

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Note, with due diligence, the inclusion of the factoid about lithium's determined role as a strategic resource, due to its role in "nuclear fission" under a fascist government instituted by a US-backed coup (Pinochet), that for Chileans almost certainly refers back to historical trauma that most reasonable folks would like to put behind them for the time being. 

The role that lithium plays, allegedly, in nuclear fission, is as certainly tangential as its reference is in that context to the current situation. 

The reason it was included in the article very clearly has to do with casually conflating the idea of nuclear power with issues about green energy.

The extremely forced historical amnesia that was attempted with this reference is also very painful. 

The Pinochet regime was brought to power under the auspices of a several-thousand-page economic manifesto drafted by University of Chicago neo-conservative economists, listing every possible way a dictatorial regime could control the entire economy for the purpose of export to US multinational elites, and the exploitation of the domestic population. 

It would be more surprising for some thing not to have been listed in the central economic manifesto that powered this neo-fascist regime.

Therefore, referencing any determination of the strategic value of any Chilean national resources under the Pinochet regime is absurd. 

The only purpose would be to confuse our current situation about green energy by conflating it with an unrelated vested interest.