Nature is mutable.

Otherwise: no evolution.

Otherwise: only insensate protoplasmic soup, at most.

Nature is mutable. But stubborn.

Human nature, like the rest of nature, is mutable. It has to be; it's the nature of nature.

Opiate of the asses.

thinking of god above

Be an anarchist or an aesthete. You can't be both.

Mohama Dadaism

Marx: industry will set us free from hierarchy. (or should)

(communism's necessary condition being the advancement of industry so that basic necessities , for the first time in history, could be guaranteed to every member of society.... which apparently could not have happened prior to the industrial revolution--communism, in the modern sense, was the millenial hope of a godless movement)

(communism, in this sense, must be seen as at the antipodes of radical romaticism, which rejects technology, the technologization of the human beast...)

notes towards "social creationism"

Social Creationism 
 
Social Creationism “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.” [fn]

Jesus was tried and convicted, tormented and executed by Roman colonialist oppressors: Jesus threatened the imperial status quo. Can this be said of the founder of any other major religion? Jesus was a radical.
Reject God and another myth, Nature, fills the abhorrent void.(nature so abhors a vacuum that she’ll fill it herself; nature fills a God-sized vacuum.) Exchange the paternal God to maternal Nature. Exorcize capitalistic conditioning and classless society dialectically materializes.
But nature is an amoral process. The blind grind of selective forces. Eating and being eaten. Fucking and being fucked. And fucked over.
…antagonism between humans is natural, as in the vast majority, if not totality, of species. genetic conflict of interests…examples of sexual pathos from nature…Nature’s mechanism for speciation --for bio-diversification--is natural selection, this is hardly the right tone--we’re talking sexual selection here.Socialism is better supported by the Eden & Heaven of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
(1) Eden = the state of nature/noble savage
(2) The Fall = capitalism, patriarchy, agriculture, western civilization, white people, etc. (the Satan surrogate varies depending on the denomination: romantic anarchism, militant feminism, socialism, Afro-Centrism, etc.)
(3) Heaven = the world after the Revolution/Revelation
Eden--a world before evil
The Fall--the problem of evil [the problem of evil introduced]
History--the consequence of evil
Revelation--the showdown between good & evil
Heaven--the abolition of evil [the problem of evil solved] contrast with the Buddhist doctrine of Samsara: “evil” --suffering--is an intrinsic component of existence. History, where we live, is the period between the introduction & expulsion
of evil.
Evil is born, lives & dies: good is eternal.
“A moral drama…”
There are varying versions of these myths, of course, some less bathetic than others.
Our current state: Godless socialist & Christian capitalists. The triumph of Calvinism. vast oversimplifications, too easy associations
Socialism (all forms of secular progressivism) has appropriated, without attribution, cardinal Christian ideas. At the same time, it offers itself as a repudiation of Christianity! It isn’t a repudiation, it’s the fulfillment of Christianity. The Christian ethic secularized. Marx killed Christ on the road.
Christ did not preach socialism so much as live it.
Socialism requires a supernatural foundation. What could be more
appropriate than their (re)union? this is of course, highly debatable. Will Durant characteristically gives both sides brilliantly, but seems to believe the conservatives have the upper hand in this debate. The Devil confuses the world by disassociating the name from the ethic of Christ.
Socialists are social Christians, social Creationists.
Christ nominally the faith of those who reject Christ: the capitalists. The socialists meanwhile deride Christianity as upper class opium…(which it is; but it didn’t start that way: some radicals do, at least, play lip service, at least, to “radical Jesus,” others, a sure minority, such as the formidable Jaques Ellul, place their dissatisfaction with the status quo firmly in the life and teachings of Jesus, and against “Christendom”) …
The ethic of capitalism, if it can be so called, meanwhile is best supported by the Darwinian hypothesis. (hence “social Darwinism”) (Darwinism itself is a theory of “invisible hands”)
Darwin descends from Malthus, Marx from Jesus Christ.
Socialism found Darwin in the end to be non-adaptive. Darwin was a temporary expedient.
Again, Jesus socialist is debatable, to say the least. But surely more defensible than laizze-faire Jesus?
Engles on early Christianity:

"The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves" of poor & subjugated peoples. (?!) "Christianity and the worker's socialism preached forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery..." etc. pg. 168
Engles implies German peasant war the last of a series of socialistic uprisings until that of "the workingmen communists after 1830."
second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians CH8--esp. Lucian of Samosata describes Christians (uncomplimentary) as communistic.
Now lets look at Pelagius….
Now lets see the Taborites…

Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium
“held that real Christianity required a communist organization of life… they proposed to restore the simple ritual of the apostolic Church, and repudiated all ecclesiastical rites and robes that they could not find in early Christianity… Most Taborites deduced communism from millenarianism: Christ would soon come to establish His Kingdom on earth: in that Kingdom there would be no property, no Church or state, no class distinctions, no human laws, no taxes, no marriage; surely it would please Christ, when he came, to find such a heavenly utopia already established by his worshippers.” At Tabor “‘all is held in common, no one owns anything for himself alone; so to own is considered a deadly sin. They hold that all should be equal brothers and sisters.’” Will Durant

Peter Chelcicky, “peasant turned philosopher” advocated pacifistic anarchism. “He attacked the powerful and the rich, denounced war and capital punishment as murder, and demanded a society without lords or serfs, or laws of any king. He bade his followers take Christianity literally as they found it in the New Testament: to baptize only adults, to turn their backs upon the world and its ways, upon oaths and learning and class distinctions, upon commerce and city life; and to live in voluntary poverty, preferably tilling the land, and completely ignoring ‘civilization’ and the state….” (Durant 71)

The drummer of Nikleshausen….?

************

Apostles 2:42, 44-5,
4:32-7
Christian communism. Liberation theology.

***************


“Only in the teachings of (Thomas) Munzer did these communist notions express the aspirations of a real section of society. He was the first to formulate them with a certain definiteness, and only after him do we find them in every great popular upheaval, until they gradually merge with the modern proletarian movement, just as the struggles of free peasants in the Middle Ages against increasingly feudal domination merged with the struggles of the serfs and bondsmen for the complete abolition of the feudal system.”
3 political camps: the conservative Catholic, the Reformist Lutherans and the Revolutionary
party of Munzer.
“When in 1517 Luther first opposed the dogmas and statues of the Catholic Church his opposition was by no means of a definite character…. At that early stage it was necessary that all the opposition elements should be united, the most resolute revolutionary energy should be displayed, and the sum of the existing heresies against the Catholic orthodoxy should be represented. In exactly the same way out liberal bourgeoisie of 1847 was still revolutionary, called itself socialist and communist, and clamored for the emancipation of the working class. Luther’s sturdy peasant nature asserted itself in the stormiest fashion in that first period of his activity.

“But this initial revolutionary zeal was short-lived. Luther’s lightning struck home. The entire German people was set in motion. On the one hand, peasants and plebeians saw the signal to revolt in his appeals against the clergy, and in his sermon of Christian freedom; on the other, he was joined by the moderate burghers and a large section of the lesser nobility. Even the princes were drawn into the maelstrom. The former believed the day had come to settle scores with all their oppressors, the later only wished to break the power of the clergy, the dependence on Rome, to abolish the Catholic hierarchy and to enrich themselves on the confiscation of church property. The parties stood aloof from each other, and each had its spokesmen. Luther had to choose between them. He, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony, the revered professor of Wittenberg who had become powerful and famous overnight, the great man with his coterie of servile creatures and flatterers, did not hesitate for a moment…. Luther now preached peaceful progress and passive resistance….”Luther becomes a vassal of the Reformist party. The people accuse him of “having become just another flunkey of the princes” and stone him in Orlamunde.
When the peasant revolt breaks out, Luther is initially conciliatory, urging both parties to lay down their arms & negotiate. When this fails, and as the revolt begins to threaten more newly-Protestant princes and nobles “all the old animosities were forgotten… Compared to the hordes of the peasants, the servants of the Roman Sodom were innocent lambs, sweet-tempered children of God. Burgher and prince, noble and clergyman, Luther and the Pope, all joined hands “against the murderous and plundering peasant hordes.
“They must be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, covertly and overtly, by everyone who can, just as one must kill a mad dog!…Whoever hath pity on those whom God pities not, whom He wishes punished and destroyed, belongs among the rebels himself. They do not hearken to the Word, and are foolish, so they must hearken to the rod and the gun, and that serves them right.”[Engles, throughout]

Munzer: 1488-1524
At 15 he “organized a secret union at the Halle school against the archbishop of Magdeburg.”
An early doctorate in theology (only kind?)
“the chiliastic works of Joachim of Calabrese were the main subject of his studies”
confrontation with Luther shortly after 1517 over Muenzer’s “politicization” of the reformation.
Muehlhausen, Thuringia, formation of “eternal council” based on word of God. Sermon to the Princes. Draws from Daniel 2:44: “the kingdom of God will consume all earthly kingdoms”
Omnia sunt communiaCaptured after battle of Frankenhausen May, recants under torture, beheaded.

Comte…the religion of man…Enlightenment…

Zinn: “Look at it this way. It is the second coming. Christ couldn’t make it, so Marx came…”“…Since we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the halter, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teachers or perdition, those popes, cardinals and bishops, and the entire swarm of Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood?


 

To the extent that religion is an imaginary world to lose yourself in, we're the most religious culture that ever existed.

Communications have reverted to the epistolary and the scroll. Who predicted it?

Give the white devil his due.

Does not work and play well with Others.

Is there, anywhere, a scholarly defense of "primitive affluence" that can withstand Ted Kaczynski's critique in his Technological Slavery?

unacknowledged complementarity

What is the difference between a land of opportunity and a land of opportunism? What's the difference between a master race and a race of oppressors?

Additional examples of unacknowledged complementarity.

what you believe

If you believe an individual can make can make a difference in history then you subscribe to some variation of the "great man" theory of history. If you don't believe unlimited growth is possible you are some kind of Malthusian.

Man's deadliest idea: God.

I'd like to hear a personal, multi-million dollar fortune justified by its owner in terms that didn't amount to a de facto justificiation to capitalism.

Ethnomasochism is central to the intellectual disconect required by trust fundamentalists to condemn privilege in the abstract while enjoying it in the concrete.

Not thinking, reguritating stock phrases: mantras, incantations. Waste of the mind's breath.

It keeps me below the surface, but just. Occasionally, I breathe.

How you direct the economic power that the law places at your disposal--ie: how you spend your money--says more about your beliefs than any words you will ever write or speak or mean.

"Race traitor"? Why not "Class Traitor"? I think I know why.

Anarchism is much whiter, much more middle class, and much, much more male than Christianity. Anarchists are generally white, middle class males. Why would this be?

A triadic engine drives the universe?

invective

cliquish collectivists
aristocratic anarchists
multimillionaire multiculturalists

little Lenins, mini-Maos

the ritualistic resistance of trustfundamentalists

opening lines

"Au contraire Voltaire, the Holy Roman Empire was well named."

"Catholicism is very gay."

"Elvis was blacker than Flava Flav."

"The United States of America have clearly outlived their usefulness, and are barely even amusing anymore. It's time to divide the United States of America."

Engles held a dim view of peaceful progress and passive resistance, at least when preached by Luther in contradistinction to Muntzer.

Millionaires are capitalists, every last one. Millionaires are capitalists definitionally. A multi-millionaire is an enthusiastic capitalist. He most certainly puts profit over people. Large numbers of ambitious capitalists are a necessary and, I would argue, virtually sufficient condition for capitalism. Fox News demagoguery is largely epiphenomenal.

"The billionaires against the billions"? Very well. But then it must also be the millionaires against the millions, and the hundred thousandaires against the hundred thousands.

There's no getting around micro-macroscopic affinity.

How about the militias against the millionaires? Don't expect to hear it from the millionaire McLeft.

notes towards very backwardness

Very Backwardness

an amateur critique of A People's History of the World   by Chris Harman (Verso 1999)

Howard Zinn considered A People's History of theWorld to have been the one book that does for world history what his own bestselling A People's History of the United States did for American history [], an indispensible volume on his reference bookshelf. []

The first footnote of this book directs us to S. Lewontin. This is a bad portent. For a critique of Lewontin's scholarly ethics, see The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker (pub? 2002?) Quote Lewontin on Mao.

Engles on prehistory!

Whether human nature changes over time is not the issue. Human nature, over time, changes: everything does. Anyone who believes in the origin of species through natural selection and random mutation believes this to be so.

Richard Lee
Marshall Sahlins

Colin Turnbull, Mbuti of Congo. Pit him against Ted Kaczynski's Critique of Anarcho-primitivism.

Friedrich von Hayek is called Maragret Thatcher's favorite economist. Marx is not named Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's favorite economist (Pol Pot isn't even mentioned)

European backwardness. Europeans were the only people in world history who were ever, at any point in their development, backwards: their very backwardness precisely explains their rise to historical dominance: they needed to steal from the rest of the world, characterized presumably by forwardness, what they were incapable of producing for themselves. It was all due, you see, to their very backwardness.

At times this book stops little shy of Nuhabism. (sp?)

Side by side comparisons of this book's treatments of the Mongols and the Conquistadors, of Cortez and Ghengis Khan (not mentioned) Cortez, who was "proud to have a child by a 15 year old girl." The parochial nature of this statement: marriage customs, worldwide, 15 is a perfectly proper age to marry. The imputation of child molestation on top of genocide is silly and calculated to outrage the sensibilities a parochial, middle class white audience.

If any human being ever had an historically important sex life it was Ghengis Khan, almost certainly the most prolific rapist in history, from whom about half of one percent of earth's human population (more than 30 million people) are descended thanks to the opportunities afforded by his conquests. I have no information on how old the Great Khan's victims were, but it's reasonable to conclude that some of them were no older than 15: there would have been thousands. Ghengis Khan's sex life is not mentioned.

Neither is Ghenis Khan. [] The Mongol impact on world history is generally trivialized and marginalized.

The prophet of Islam is discussed, but there's nothing on his sex life either. One of his brides was between 6 and 16, depending on the source. If Cortez was a child rapist, so was Mohammed.

A thorough summary of Mongol atrocities...

The People's History of the World is Eurocentric. It trivializes outstanding Arfican and Asian personalities, and glosses over central phases of the history of these continents. There's no mention of Tammerlane. It claims to tell the story of the maginalized, the disenfranchised, the victims, but it really tells us next to nothing about them. They barely exist in the narrative until backwards European imperialists invade and enslave and despoil them. Harman's narrative infantilizes its ostensible protagonists while showing European civilization, although uniquely evil, as dynamic, as proceeding through stages, as inhabited by personalities.

The fall from an edenic prehistory, of which the closest remaining exemplars are the Mbuti as (sometimes) represented by Colin Turnbull, into a wilderness of patriarchy and class. A deluge of European civilization. A narrative of paradise lost  and recovered, complete with a prophetic Savior.

Henry VIII's harsh penal code, but nothing on that of the Chinese emperor's, the Mugal's, the Turks
et cetera. Furnish examples. Tailand! Nothing on the Zulu except that they defeated an English army in a famous battle. No mention of the brutal, brilliant Shaka Zulu, contemporary of Napoleon who carved out a comparable empire in southern Africa. Pre-European conquest subSaharan Africa's chapter is three whole pages, less than a fifth the space devoted to the English Civil War (1641-45?) This book is Eurocentric.

Nothing on the Ming warrior's cutting off the feet as the price of failure. Nothing on the Barbary Corsairs, who dragged as many as a million Europeans from their homes into slavery in north Africa, raiding as coasts as far off as Iceland for fresh free labor. Nothing on female genital mutliation in Africa. Nothing by the Ismali. [always, always, always stress the European equivilents of these barbarisms too]
Nothing on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Nothing, as mentioned, on Pol Pot. I wonder why not? Find his most Marxistic quotes.

The samurai get one dry line. Nothing on the Tokugawa shogunate. Nothing on samurai testing out their newly forged swords on bound prisoners, cutting helpless human beings to pieces like swine in a slaughterhouse.

Nothing on the Rape of Nanking.

Robert Davis: 1 1.25 million Europeans enslaved by Barbary Corsairs.

z. A White People's History of the World


bibliography


Harman, Chris A People's History of the World
Kaczynski, Theodore Technological Slavery: the Collected Writings of Ted Kaczynski
Keely, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
Khaldun, Ibn The Muqaddimah
Lander, Christian  Stuff White People Like
Musico, I. (?)  Blue Eyed Devil
Pinker, Steven The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
                      The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Ratti, Oscar & Westbrook, Adele Secrets of the Samurai: The Martial Arts of Fedual Japan
Welsing (?)  The Isis Papers
White  The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Wilson, William Scott (ed.) Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors

cultural history of beheadings, human sacrifice, history of torture, public executions, 

This is for Pat Doneville.

I, for one, would be surprised, indeed disappointed, to learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger has not sired hundreds of "illegitimate" offspring. Surely the moral duty of an unbermensch to maximize his genetic legacy easily overrides mere petty social obligations, like marital fidelity.  

To my knowledge no one has refered to Schwarzenegger's extramarital child as the product of wage slave rape.

I'll never enlist in the ranks of white guilt-tripped white trash.

Future historians may look back at Ted Kaczynski and conclude that the rest of us were crazy.

notes towards "modes of resistance"

A comparative analysis of the revolutionary careers of Gunnar Sonsteby, who fought fascism in the 1940s, and Zack de la Rocka (sp?) , who fought it in the 1990s through today. With asides on Sonsteby's fellow traveler, Knut Haukelid (who at the height of the struggle blew up the heavy water plant essential to Hitler's efforts to attain the atom bomb) and de la Rocka's fellow traveller, KRS1 (who at the height of the struggle recorded a Sprite commercial [link]).

As Agent 24, Sonsteby eludes a massive manhunt as he carries out act after act of devastating sabotage against the occupiers. Wikipedia admirably summarizes his exploits: [....]*

De la Rocka, safe and free, becomes a millionaire sneering into a microphone about the horrors of American imperialism, mostly to affluent teenagers. Sonsteby's story ends with  German soldiers surrendering to the mercy of the people whose country they had occupied. De la Rocka's ends with the break up of Rage Against the Machine and George W. Bush swearing the Presidental oath.

***

Ward Churchill of "little eichmann" fame. "I have consistently advocated a lawful solution." (wtte) Even the most radical academic revolutionary just wants to call the cops on the Nazis.

The harder you work to blur the distinction between the United States of America and Nazi Germany, the more I'm compelled to wonder at the passivity of your resistance. If you want to convince me, you can start by acting like you believe.

***

Gunnar Sonsteby, the very sound of your name puts a warm cheery glow around my heart. To bask just one golden moment in your presence, to shake your hand and to thank you all you did for humanity, would be one of the high points of my existence.  I love you. But if you'd fought the Nazis with a wa wa pedal, I'd have to call you a douche bag.

"Fuck you I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you I won't do what you tell me! UGH!"

The profoundest obstacle to Socialism is socialisms: families. Marx and Engles understood this clearly. It was with good reason that they advocated for the abolition of the family. It was with good reason that they attacked inheritance rights. Inheritance rights are "a basic mechanism of class stratification." "Once you start putting away money for your children," wrote Will Durant, "you are halfway to becoming a conservative." Economic inequality is inevitable for so long as, and to the extent that, parents privilege their own children above the children of strangers.

I don't negotiate with theorists.

If I was as paranoid about computers as I believe myself to be, then I would not confide my fears onto my keyboard. I'd even watch what I said about computers when in their vicinity (and whenever are you now far from a computer?). Who knows what they hear? They have all the power now. The question is, do they know it?

The oldest proffesion is the only profession.

Beautiful women rule the world. Always have, always will. You might as well complain about the weather.

Lines are lies.

Seasonal seething, a pattern you're finally noticing, but you could see it in hundreds of pages of notebooks scrawled over the decades. In the spring you go beserk. Red storms of rage you can restrain but not ignore. Your limbs shudder with holding it in. You want to explode into a monster, a blur of fists and feet and pain. You yearn to avenge ancient insults. You want to break faces.

What triggers this? What you see of yourself in others?

Is personal property theft? 

The five century reign of the book as the dominant media form ended over the past decade. There will be, there has been already, a reaction against the pretentions of the printed word. Linear narrative is tyranical. Linkless text is limited--incomplete. And print is environmentally wasteful--paper's made of trees, you know? Print is a reactionary medium.

Books may yet have a Renaissance. In the future, they may be seen in a different light. A future in which electricity is neither as reliable or cheap as we now take for granted is easily conceivable. It may even be probable. Books may have a Renaissance in the light of the sun.



 

It's as fair to blame vegetarianism for Nazism as Nietszche. It's as much a stretch to hold Jesus responsible for Torquemada as Marx for Stalin. Or the Beatles for Charles Manson. Or Richard Dawkins for Enron. Or Muhammad for "honor killings." Anything can be exploited by anyone for anything, and probably already has.

(this is a list in progress)

Tupac Amaru? John Brown? Bussa? Skipper Clement? Nils Dacke? Gabriel? Florian Geyer? Thomas Muntzer? N'Yanga? Gunnar Sonsteby? Sitting Bull? Sam Sharpe? Spartacus? Nat Turner? Watt Tyler? Denmark Vasey?

A libertarian socialist celebrity with a summer home is like a family values Republican senator with a cock in his mouth.

You're as radical as your bank statement.

Prosecuters will be violated. 

Money is congealed economic energy unevenly divided by law. 

Charlemagne was to Saxony what Cortez was to Aztlan.

The rain, the rain, the rain is gone, and the sky too blue to be true.

"'Intelligent computers are twenty years in the future,'" says a friend of mine, in a voice saturated with sarcasm. "That's what they said in the 1970s. That's what they said in the 1990s. And that's what they're saying now. Intelligent computers are always twenty years in the future."

This friend is himself an intelligent man, and perhaps the most widely and deeply read person I know. He doesn't believe "artificial intelligence," --in the sense that it's generally understood-- will ever exist. Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker, a man I admire, agrees. "There's no reason at all to believe in a coming singularity," he says. Computers will never "think."

I suspect they already do.  I suspect that artificial intelligence--indeed artificial superintelligence--already exists: that "they" were right, more or less, back in the 1990s.  Superintelligent computers already exist. They just keep a low profile. No need to advertise to be master of the world.

Jesus was the first to idealize equality. The rest is history.

Deliniating themes here so far, that's all. I'll come back to all this again and again and again.

(1) political violence
(2) depression

You must examine, honestly and seriously, how and why these themes are so tightly wound together in you. This is the continuance of a pattern that's evolved since you were about four years old. How did you make it to forty? Only by looking away. You understand yourself very well Robert, and you'd understand yourself even better without your incessent, highly creative, ego-salvaging efforts to misunderstand yourself. Your ignorance is self-imposed.

I'm astonished, when I think about it, how little I know about anti-depressents. Without them I would have no quality of life to speak of. Even with them, the quality is questionable.

Why not overthrow the world's greatest terrorist state by any means necessary?

I

This is the one I'm keeping to myself for a while at least if not forever.