Letters to the Editor
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
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I'm a bit worried L.W.M. brings a transcendent criticism of his own
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]'Transcendent' here in the logical sense, of 'transcendent' as opposed to 'immanent' critique, i.e., critique not based upon contradictory implications within the argument critiqued, but on considerations completely external to it, which supposedly 'transcend' it. The criticism L.W.M. brings is based on what is currently referred to as 'sociobiology,' but this neologism itself attempts to legitimise the conflation of two completely distinct disciplines, so it is a tendentious and illegitimate term. It's common, though, to see atheist pundits being lionised by the mass media - primarily the right-wing ones - for attacking religion on 'sociobiologistic' grounds. This is great stuff for all the mass media, right-wing and left, because the arguments presented by both sides are completely transcendent to one another and therefore cannot be critiqued meaningfully by one another at all - they have no logical points of comparison.
Glenn Greenwald, as someone primarily interested in the law as such, will I hope agree that such disputes are deliberately staged by the mass media and their owners in order to distract the public, while law as such, as the framework of reference for its own activity, is starved of meaningful, 'immanent' critique and impoverished, possibly with a view to eventually drowning it, too, in the bathtub.
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@ arthurdecco (yum, yum, a tasty morsel)
[Read the article: "Actual journalists" as government spokespeople]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Zionism is by definition, racist."
-- whose definition, arthurdecco? Bring your "definition," please.
"Then there’s the fact that at the epicenter of Zionism’s obsessions is Israel"
-- that's a "fact"? don't you need to establish that "obsessions" is a factual descriptive term here, or else drop it, and leave the rather unremarkable statement that "at the epicenter of zionism is Israel," which would indeed be true "by definition"?
"a ‘warmongering’ culture if there EVER was one"
-- compared to what, Arthur?
"a culture built from the bricks and blocks of Zionism’s fractured principles"
-- would you tell us what zionism's principles are fractured forms of, please?
"and a delusional sense of deserved entitlement."
-- compared to what sense of deserved entitlement that you would accept is not delusionsal? Who has this sense and, why is it not delusional in their cases?
Always a bad mix.
-- you have other instances of this combination of nonsense that allow you to speak as connoisseur of it?
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How sexual judgments are made
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was glad to see some people mentioned Lacan on a previous thread (talking about Tom Friedman's "phallic gaze"). I have my own understanding of Lacan, which builds on the well-known observation of Barthes regarding the photograph of the Black North African soldier saluting the French flag, and how images in general 'speak louder than words.'
It seems to me that, although a lot of both bourgeois-Freudian and Marxo-Freudian ideas filtered into US popular culture during the 1960s and 70s, the way that the visual mass media actually construct their mass-psychological agenda is more Pavlovian than Freudian. It relies on the creation of conditioned reflexes of shock associated with visual exposés involving sex and violence. These effects proceed directly from the visual register to the tactile register, by-passing the verbal register : one sees the image and feels the shock (in one's 'gut,' rather than one's 'heart,' interestingly enough).
As a result of the continuous repetition of this type of shock effect, a generalised apprehension is built up in the viewing audience. I believe that the visual-erotic imagination is non-dual : that is to say, we identify visually with all parties in a scene depicted (let us say, for example, the seducer and the seducee simultaneously, to use fairly mild terms). However, the mental 'voice-over' which constructs the verbal register (our 'thoughts') is dualistic, and therefore moralistic : it comments on the scene viewed, in such a way as to position the ego as morally unbesmirched, uncompromised by the ambiguities of desire. By 'the ego' here, I mean the self-concept made explicable in verbal terms, in the first instance to the self, but also to any hypothetical police interviewer, psychiatrist, or other authority.
With all this going on continuously, it is a simple matter for television to manufacture and deploy titillating material which at least compromises us on a subconscious level, while obliging us to work out verbal accounts of ourselves that hopefully will leave us clear of any imputed stigma.
And all this, in the background of any discussion of law and sexual ethics...
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The powers that the state inherited from the church
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]let's start from the oldest : the recognition of children as members of the tribe. It may be unfortunate that Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) was so much influenced by Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) and Bachofen’s Mother Right (1861), because his theory of primal matriarchy became part of the mythology of left feminism, and eventually of leftism as a whole. Freud went in the other direction, with his fantasy of the primal horde and the murder of the fathers by the sons. All this is merely representation of aspects of universal and common childhood fantasy, I suppose, but it led to a system of religions, one of whose primary functions was to police reproduction, and eventually to declare children of unknown paternity "illegitimate." The modern state inherited this function, quite naively, during the period of enlightenment secularisation, which has led to the modern state being judged by the rigor with which it polices reproduction and sexual behavior in general. The problem lies in the naive, i.e. unexamined, manner in which the modern state assumed these functions, which constantly traps it in anachronism and inferiority vis-a-vis an imagined ancient purity of race which I imagine never actually existed anyway. And all this underlies 'the Law.'
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Cheap, cannibalistic hype
[Read the article: In the land of believers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If the interviewer isn't even allowed to distinguish between Eric Hufschmid and Steven Jones, for fear of a few readers sayin, oh, that's where Taibbi draws the line, now I needn't buy the book, then he is assistant chef to a cannibal fats where the commercial left eats itself.