Resistance Is Not Futile

 A short post, probably muddled by having read James A. Diamond's The Devastation of Philosophy: Nazi Jurisprudence, the Shoah, and Fackenheim's Transcendental Wonder of Resistance, a review of James A. Diamond on Kenneth Hart Green's The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust, after having awakened from 6 hours asleep thanks to my muscle relaxers.

I admit the review goes into deep water and should be read in full. One stray thought came to mind, a reminder of an old Usenet discussion about why Stalin's murderous regime did not get as much attention as Hitler's, when the review mentioned the philosophers arrayed against Fackenheim. They were all German. There is the difference between Stalin and Hitler: Hitler attacked German philosophy and its humanistic metaphysics. 

Resistance is, however, the subject here. I have also been reading about Albert Camus, so the following struck home:

Green refers to concrete paradigms cited by Fackenheim of resistance mounted during the Shoah, which he considered so powerful as to provide an antidote to the ‘diabolical’ evil they confronted. A heroic act of resistance is “a novum of inexhaustible wonder, just as the Holocaust itself is a novum of inexhaustible horror.” Resistance reaches its crescendo on a national scale in the establishment of the State of Israel as the supreme fulfillment of that 614th commandment, redemptive not only for all Jews, both orthodox and secular, but universally so. As Green concludes, the resistance embodied in the heroic successes of the Zionist project flow directly from resistance effected during the Holocaust, “offering hope of survival not only to the Jews but to all mankind and hope also for restoring (belief in) God.” This idea closes the circle in the span of Fackenheim’s struggle with the fraught nihilistic implications of the Holocaust since its impetus was the Six Day War of 1967 and its looming possibility of another Holocaust that roused his theology “from its dogmatic slumber and quickly turned him toward an unyielding focus on the Holocaust.” But this transcendent notion of resistance leads to what I believe is Fackenheim’s most important legacy, not only for Jews but for a world that seeks to make sense of evil all around us, of human rights violations around the globe. Such a philosophy goes beyond mere survival of circumstance because it asserts the human right to dignity and freedom from oppression, it provides a reason; resistance is the assertion of tzelem Elohim, it is brandishing a living flame in the face of every force that seeks to obliterate the divine spark.

What else can we do except resist our worst impulses? That is part of free will - to do good or do evil.

 There is also an interesting view of Israel as an act of resistance. This gives another perspective on anti-Zionism.

Fackenheim’s philosophical theology identifying tikkun, or mending of the world, veritably with “Israel itself” is now, in the face of the growing herd of voices seeking to dismantle it, more urgent than ever. I do not refer to legitimate criticism of state policies—to which Israel is not immune—but rather anti-Zionism. What this amounts to is no less than the sole call in the world to relinquish political sovereignty of a nation that is the sole historical victim to near total extinction made possible by its very statelessness, and of the sole ancient people to reclaim its indigenous roots. Only ‘diabolical’ antisemitism can account for such animus.

Which raises the question if one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic? 

I still hold that one can be anti-Netanyahu without being either anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic.

sch 10-13

Starting The Week

 Off work early, I spent an hour deleting email before getting on the bus to the west side. I was to see my counselor at 4 pm, I decided to treat myself to some frozen yogurt. I should be embarrassed by what I spent at BerryWinkle, but it did taste good.

The session went well. I made it back to the apartment around 5:30.

I ate dinner, read some of my email, did some legal research, and spoke with MW. The reading glasses are good enough but not good for everything.

I also listened to the following because I saw "Straw Dogs" once, a very long time ago, and it has stuck with me through the years.

This I finished it this morning while writing this post.

The goals for the week: legal research and my driver's license.

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Being a Politician

 I am trudging through today's reading instead of blitzing. The reading glasses do give me a bit of a headache. 

That said, I will try to do justice to James Vitali's Why do we get the wrong leaders? from Engelsberg Ideas. It might be better to just skip what I am about to write and follow the link to the original essay.

It seems to me, over here in the U.S., that Mr. Vitali only comes close to the real problem of judgment in public affairs in his last pragraph:

Providing the space for our political leaders to begin to address the great tasks before us requires that we put aside our cynicism about their profession. That we recognise that politics is purposeful and distinctive as a sphere of human activity in and of itself. That we appreciate again that being the man or women in the political arena can be a noble enterprise. Improving the quality of our political leadership will not come from disparaging their endeavour. Nor will the situation be remedied simply by importing more experts or people from different occupations. We need more politicians, not fewer.

We have the politicians who represent our judgment. 

 Vitali describes judgment this way:

No — the quality that our politicians are deficient in is something simultaneously more specific and more difficult to put your finger on. ‘We speak’, as Isaiah Berlin put it in his essay On Political Judgement, of,

an exceptional sensitiveness to certain kinds of fact; we resort to metaphors. We speak of some people as possessing antennae, as it were, that communicate to them the specific contours and texture of a particular political or social situation. We speak of the possession of a good political eye, or nose, or ear, of a political sense which love or ambition or hate may bring into play…

This political quality is not to be found in the substance of any particular value or conviction or body of knowledge, but rather in an attitude towards how all of these things should be weighed up in the process of decision-making. We call this quality judgement. And once you know that this is what makes for a good politician, you see it, or more precisely you see its absence, everywhere.

If the people do not have judgment, how can they select politicians with judgment? 

Vitali relies on Max Weber, the founder of sociology, where I would mention William James and pragmatism:

The problem, though, is that judgement is a rather difficult quality to get a grip on. It isn’t a prescription for specific decisions to be made in particular circumstances. In fact, it is almost the opposite of that. Judgement is a dispositional attribute; it refers to an attitude towards the taking of decisions in a context of imperfect information and uncertainty, when the best course of action cannot be known in advance.

For the sociologist Max Weber, judgement denoted the ability to weigh up and strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives: one, to follow one’s convictions; and the other, to take responsibility for the consequences of pursuing one’s convictions. Such an activity is moral, rather than scientific; there is no formula for how to get a ‘correct’ mix of conviction and responsibility in any particular decision. It is this uncertainty that distinguishes judgement from something like intelligence or ‘knowledge’. To make a judgement is to come to a decision without knowing whether it is the correct one, but to do so effectively, and responsibly.

This uncertainty was critical for Weber. And it was partly what characterised politics for him. In science or law or medicine, dilemmas might be soluble through the application of reason. We can have a degree of certainty about what is true and what is false in such fields. Yet what distinguished politics from other professions for Weber was the fact that he considered it a domain of human endeavour that cannot be straightforwardly understood in terms of truth and falsity. Politics in Weber’s mind is defined by the clashing of and compromising between various irreconcilable moral imperatives. It is a profession entirely unsuitable for those who cannot cope with such a lack of certitude.

Americans want that certitude that does not exist in this world. It seems to me that when jazz was king, we had a better handle on the need for improvisation. Yes, it is a silly idea to explain how we became a nation of thumb-sucking whining muddle-headed imbecilic spongers. 

The following led me to a conclusion:

The West faces great problems, and many of them are not straightforwardly about policy, but politics – about compromises between different and potentially irreducibly conflicting interests and values. Some of those problems – ageing societies, global immigration trends, the development of artificial intelligence –  are driven by factors that seem entirely out of the control of individual political leaders. But it is the condition of being a politician to take responsibility, rather than to leave things up to fate.

My conclusion: the condition of being a citizen in a democratic republic puts a responsibility to judge and compromise for the good of all.

sch 10/12

Blatant Self-Promotion!

 I am happy to say that Dream of Rust and Glass is out with my story "Exemplary Employee". Please get a copy!

This is an anthology of speculative fiction by Midwestern writers from Of Rust and Glass magazine. Please check it out, also.

sch 10/14

Laundry, Proust, Prisons, Irish Writers - Closing Out 10/13

 I did my laundry this afternoon. The email was caught up to a point where my tired brain would go no further.

I give you a reading list (and two videos) to close out today.

Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (podcast). I did not have patience enough for listen to it; this novel was far as I got with Proust.

The Porous Prison (an interview)

What makes the picture striking is its revelation of a time when the prison’s walls were more porous, both for imprisoned people and those in the free world. The present-day norm is hyper-security, surveillance, and restriction, which forcefully separates prisoners from the free world, severely limits their connection to their families, and disappears the violence of their incarceration. Yet such a contemporary nightmare, as this picture shows, is not an historical constant. Rather, as Reiko Hillyer argues in her generative new book A Wall Is Just a Wall, “the impermeability of the prison is neither natural nor inevitable but rather a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon.”

Spanning across a diversity of states and criminal legal systems, Hillyer examines three sites of struggle over the prison’s permeability: clemency, conjugal visits, and furloughs, or temporary releases that allowed prisoners to leave prisons for hours or days at a time. In doing so, she disrupts the standard historiography of late 20th-century law and order by unearthing a more “contradictory juncture” when crises of prisoner unrest and prison overcrowding prompted experiments, to varying degrees, of prisoner release. Attending to the shifting boundaries of the prison need not suggest there was ever a “golden age” of incarceration, and Hillyer goes to great lengths to contextualize even the more “porous” eras of imprisonment, where prisoner release or visits with the outside world were more common, within reactionary regimes of racial social control.

Brendan Behan doc - a writer I know of without having read him: 

Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre

Finishing the night with Genius.

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Sunday Notes and Reading List and Round Barns

I do not know if it is the reading glasses that are giving me headaches or if the muscle relaxers are to blame for my being tired and lethargic.

I went to sleep last night at 4:30, woke around eleven, did a little reading and a couple of posts, then I was back down until around 7:30 and then back down from 9 to 11.

Well, I did not go anywhere. That should make the government feel better. But I did not get to the laundry, either. 

I feel like taking another dive right now.

So, I give you a reading list for today:

Malcolm Forbes, The life and deaths of Joseph Conrad (Engelsberg Ideas)

From Daily Sabah: Tariffs, tax cuts: Could Trump's policies 'shake up' global trade?

Others, like Bernard Yaros of Oxford Economics, estimates a Trump presidency could raise inflation by 0.6 percentage points at its peak.

Previously, businesses bore the brunt as imported components got more expensive, said Kyle Handley, professor at UC San Diego.

But he noted: "If they do an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20%, there's no way we're not going to see that on store shelves."

And it is unlikely that manufacturing can return to the United States in short order.

"We haven't made TVs in the U.S. in decades," Handley said, adding that U.S. factories are not producing at the scale needed to satisfy consumption either.

Trump claims earlier tariff hikes on China and others brought no inflation.

But Handley estimates the supply chain frictions exporters faced were equivalent to a 2% to 4% tariff hit – and companies tell Agence France-Presse (AFP) they have had to pass on some costs.

A 2019 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that by end-2018, import tariffs were costing U.S. consumers and importers an additional $3.2 billion per month in added tax costs.

America Is Faustian: Gregory Laski interviews Ed Simon about “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.”

That contract which is America promises so much—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—but that of course obscures the atrocities on which the nation was founded. American politics has always had religion at its core, even if—especially if—the nation’s ostensibly secular. We’re always the city on a hill, the last best hope, and so on, in our imaginations. I think that anything which conjures the angels brings up the Devil as well, and that a working knowledge of Faust behooves us if we’re to understand that.

The Definitive History of Neo-Nazi Edgelords: Jordan Carroll reviews Spencer Sunshine’s “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s ‘Siege.’” 

Indeed, subsequent history has shown that, frequently, it’s the fence-sitters, provocateurs, and other bad faith actors who extend the fascist network to individuals or communities that wouldn’t otherwise encounter right-wing extremism. Ambivalence can even be a virtue in the role of fascist proselytizer. Many who wouldn’t bother listening to a convinced neo-Nazi will entertain someone who’s just making jokes or asking questions even if it leads them down the path toward white nationalism. Thanks to the internet, fascists no longer need to worry as much about recruits finding their contact information, but they do have to make themselves legible to algorithms and salient to popular conversations. People peripheral to the fascist network prove to be central to its expansion in these moments. Vampires always need someone at the threshold to invite them into places where they haven’t been.

The Siege case also shows us how flexible fascism can be. Neo-Nazism begins to look less like a personal creed with specific tenets and more like a reactionary structure of thought that changes based on context. Wherever someone imagines that life is a biological struggle for survival, hierarchy is rooted in nature, and the world is divided between creative elites and disposable subhumans, something like neo-Nazism is almost certainly quick to follow. One of Mason’s innovations was to rebrand neo-Nazism as the Universal Order, an abstract concept that allowed him to tolerate a great deal of ideological and even ethnic diversity in people willing to further his genocidal cause. Sunshine reveals how neo-Nazism adorned itself with the generalized misanthropy characteristic of the extreme subcultures of the 1990s, an important lesson to remember in the modern moment as fascism reclothes itself as transphobia and religious chauvinism.

Mexican War history for you:

 

Democrats’ problem with working class voters in Wisconsin 

After supporting Obama, Adams won’t be voting in 2024, he said. “I’m done with all that,” he told Kaufman. He has no faith that Harris will do anything to help people like him. All politicians are crooks, in Adams’ view. But if he did vote, he’d probably cast his ballot for former President Donald Trump, he said. Trump’s a crook, too, but “he’s a gangster,” Adams said, laughing.

I’ve heard similar reactions from Wisconsin dairy farmers who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. They liked it when Trump pledged to remember “the forgotten men and women of America.” They laughed off some of his outrageous statements. As a political outsider, they felt he would throw a rock at the two-party system that, in their view, abandoned ordinary people and really only served the interests of big corporations, especially when it came to trade deals like NAFTA.

***

Contrary to his rhetoric about representing the working class, Trump created a huge trade deficit and his 2017 tax cut gave corporations a new incentive to offshore jobs by cutting taxes on foreign profits.

Still, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have capitalized on Democrats’ decision in the 1990s to shift away from working class concerns and embrace NAFTA. They are speaking directly to the voters who were left behind. 

***

But one of the most important questions candidates must answer is who is looking out for working class Midwesterners. Many Democrats have taken a pass on that issue in recent years. Unless they make it very clear that has changed, it will come back to bite them.

Sounds like Indiana, only our state party does seem to be even trying. 

 I once had a border collie; great dog.

Did you hear about the farmer who went crazy trying to find the corner in his round barn?

A Rural Revolution: Indiana's Round Barns (2020)

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Pearl Harbor On My Mind, So Is The Ukraine

 No idea why Pearl Harbor came to mind this morning. The fellow who gives me rides to church thinks there was a conspiracy behind December 7.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Keeping secrets is very, very hard; someone likes to talk too much; evidence can always be found by a prosecutor.

I do think FDR wanted Hitler disposed of. However, we did not declare war on Germany; Germany declared war on us. I also seriously doubt that a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy wanted to harm the Navy, or that FDR wanted to move the Navy from battleships to aircraft carriers. That transition was the result of Pearl Harbor. There was no reason to think Hitler would declare war on America - he did have his hands full with the USSR, and Japan was not helping him with the USSR. 

The Japanese were arrogant in estimating America's response to Pearl Harbor.

The Americans were arrogant in estimating Japan's abilities.

There is your conspiracy - racist arrogance.

All this came to mind while reading Sergey Radchenko' s Notebooks The wages of Putin’s war from Engelberg's Ideas

One of the reasons for calling the war in Ukraine ‘existential’ is that it helps governments rally public support for increased military spending. In all cases, this entails making some difficult decisions about spending on guns or butter. Whatever we make of the threat posed by Putin, such redistribution of funding in our troubled world may well serve the purpose of deterring aggression, not necessarily by Russia, and so ultimately avert a truly existential war.

On the eve of World War Two, America wanted its comforts, so the Germans and the Japanese thought we would do nothing. Isolationism cost us our war dead.

Trump is an idiot, thinking that Putin will just pack up and leave Ukraine alone on his say-so. He likes chaos, and is incapable of bearing the cost of a more aggressive world. 

The pro-Palestinian Democrats who do not vote for Harris over Gaza will have to bear the costs of Trump giving Netanyahu a completely free hand. No, Trump has no solution to the Middle East's problems, and he has not the backbone to keep Netanyahu from starting a wider war. 

Trump will become our Neville Chamberlain, only in a louder, more obnoxious way.

What came from Pearl Harbor was a rough peace. Trump will destroy that peace.

sch 10/12