Ourselves and our environs

[waldopaper]

What’s left of us… where we’re coming from… and where do we go? Post it under here. Did you just think of underwear?

[pan]

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends....

If it weren't a show put on by the victors there would have been big trial about Wounded Knee and the capital punishment enforced for dancing.

Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy....We need protection and we need it now.

[waldopaper]

BO's prize-winning reply:

In response to this article by Matt Taibbi also reproduced at Queenie's site which should not be mentioned,,, there was this observation from an obviously-educated reader and astute writer dipping into a good knowledge of obtuse shit nobody cares about any more... like Literature... and Roman history... and Latin:

caveat emptor — gag me with a pitchfork!

Those who study the classics cannot pinpoint exactly where this so-called Roman aphorism actually appears or exists. This little fairytale is a wholesale neologism born in the cauldron of the Millsean/Burkean maelstrom of early 19th century paeans to the Roman republic as interpreted. It is what is termed a gloss: based in no actual evidence, filtered wholesale through the mindset of an interpreter.

It is, and arose, as a convenient slogan of those who yearn for their own rise to, eventual rise to, or sustainment of present, aristocracy. There is a vast difference between aristocracy and nobility: aristocracy is crass.

There are, however, far more scholars (conveniently, to the ruling class, of little or zero attention or "repute") who made field day of not only debunking but refuting, quite rigorously and accurately, this midrash of the idle rich.

Caveat emptor is quintessential Italic sarcasm; understated irony at its very best Roman tradition. No Roman would have uttered such an obvious thing in earnest.

The Romans, blood-thirsty though they may have been, were far more preoccupied with justice than anything else; justice was the glue that held the res publica together, to the extent that even slaves had recourse to justice, a case and situation that the corrupt Western Civilization modelled on the resurrection of the Imperium Romanum, assiduously expells, and expelled, from its rhetoric.

The USA, a Deist conglomerate of self-interested if marginally "freedom loving" aristocrats, enshrined via its drumbeat of dubious "democracy" since the 1820s and the Louisiana Purchase, has exploited the ignorance of the un-read religious simpletons of its populace. One of these exploitations has been the utter corruption of the very views that Darwin himself attempted to expose: that Nature has its tendencies to favor the "strong" over the weak physically. Darwin was quite religious; he also tempered that maxim in thoroughly Christian values of charity, which succinctly are that merely because one is "stronger" than a weaker creature, God's Will is that there is no triumph or hence retribution against the weak in Nature, for the weak survive (and prosper) just as often as not in God's Nature.

Rand's demented cult is an evil and crass corruption of Darwin's acknowledgement. There is no intellectual rigor in it; it is wholesale cultic propaganda; it is wholly a human intellectualized apology for not only greed but vengeance. It takes this to heights of evil and screed, of sociopathy. In short, there is no virtue in it, and the Romans above all prized virtue, so no such pithy rejoinder as 'caveat emptor' could even apply to such a febrile derangement as Randianism.

In the harsh light of History, Stalinist Communism and even Nazi social-nationalism, pale in comparison to this abominable corruption of virtue, Randianism. Indeed, it is even more Stalinist than Stalin could have wished for! Stalinists and Nazis are bald on their face about their political aims; they make no claims to philosophy.

Randian "philosophy" is not bald; it is crafty and sly. It is the same rhetorical space as the post-Roman Catholic State: deceit and Realpolitik, the aim: Empire.

In the ages prior to the science of sociology and anthropology, no system other than religion existed with which to apologize for sociopathology. Since Veblen and Weber, meticulous deconstruction of the psychopathology of capitalist mercantilism has long since been stripped, and proven to be a moral and spiritual sickness of the first magnitude.

One need only follow this up with the iconic scientific studies of terrorism under the Pavlovian-Skinnerian line and their exposure by the Milgram studies. It is a product NOT of the post-Russian revolution but of the 1930s and 40s, a heightened and febrile super-nationalistic period of paranoia and hubris on both sides of the Atlantic.

Randianism is the Ur-descriptor of the depravity of tyranny, the tyranny of the seven deadly sins, which will corrupt any soul to believe in and celebrate Evil precisely because without a moral compass, Reason corrupts to rationalization in a nanosecond.

The Romans not only developed a working, workable system and ideal of justice (not Law; that is a postcursor, not a precursor), they willing absorbed the nuances of Greek philosophy and parsed them. It is this that the maxim 'caveat emptor' refers to! — i.e., beware of the seller. It is not a burden on the buyer; the cheated buyer is a fool, yes, but the seller of corruption is Evil. This is the Moral Code of 'caveat emptor.'

Nobody gets that.

Mills and Burke were products of their Age; they have zero resemblance, and can pass on NO legacy to, the utterly alien corruptions of the later 19th and the 20th centuries. They were results of the Romantic period, the so-termed "Gothic Revival." They have similar weight and relevance to us today as medieval feudalism (which, I caution, has been on the ascendance since the 1970s.) Neoliberalism is a corrupted gassification of bastardized Millseanism, devoid of the counter-valences provided by both Schopenhauer and Goethe, as well as Nietzsche. (Nietzsche's Übermensch is, by the way, a transcendent state of affairs. It NEVER pointed to, nor alluded to, an actual OVER-race. It is a state of condition, not essence.) Most all other philosophy (of "note," that is) after Nietzsche, are scientifically-bound intellectual hacks precisely for their institutionalized eschewance of morality supplanted by ethics and neoScholasticism. There is not very much there to be proud of; as much destruction has been wrought by this as not.

'Caveat emptor' is the motto of tyranny and despotism, the seduction by greed FOR greed. It is, in short, a-human. The USA as a culture yearns for its own aristocracy. It's a sickening existence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

/my apologies to the board for this long-winded comment — MR
_______

Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit. A verbis ad verbera
Égalité, liberté, solidarité.
M Richards's
Submitted by M Richards on April 26, 2010 - 9:31pm.

yeah... I was blown away. MR is exactly correct about Roman sarcasm... and their distaste and distrust of the "Merchant Class" who have successfully established themselves as the new "Divine Right" neo-feudalist "meritocracy." I was in awe. But then came BO's response that wins the all-time (so far) Make-Waldo-Cackle-Out-Loud-All-Day Pullet-Sir Prize: :

Pretty impressive work, MR

If you tell me that that came off the top your head, I think I'll have to go kill myself.
bobo4u
Submitted by bobo4u on April 27, 2010 - 4:05am.

HAW!!! NO SHIT!! Such a fitting tribute to the brilliance and precision of others should not go unrewarded! BO... yer rubber chikken is in the mail!!

ps. and wothefuck were you doing up at 4:05 am dribblin shit on-line ye misogynistic misanthropic mumble-pants old fuck? GET A FUCKING LIFE (after you have some fun with yer well-deserved rubber chikken, of course)
-wp

[pan]

Thanks for sharing that

[BO]

Was pretty sure I was paying the person a compliment. But if my brief, humorous reply to what I also considered to be a brilliant piece of work, is being misinterpreted, that saddens me. Guess I'll have to be clearer in my attempts at humor. Save the rubber chicken for another time. But, take my wife, please!

[pan]

I took it as a compliment - but then I know you....

[waldopaper]

BO- you still get the waldo rubber chikken award... which is awarded for text that actually makes me laugh out loud. The cyber-textule Lollers lolling the "lol" only makes me snarl... and then only mentally. It is rare that a group of words on the screen prompts me to make a sound... and then it's usually a string of filthy epithets. Laughter is rare for me these days.

But I read with jaw-dropping awe M Richard's take on "caveat emptor" with his obvious knowledge of the Roman Republic (different from the Empire) and the fact that this legal lexicon is a neologism (compared to 50 BCE) via 19th Century mercantilism. Anyway,,, scroll down... and there's BO's comment... my sentiments exactly... except I usually would not be able to express them in such a brief and funny way. No shit. If MR rolled that out spontaneously as a comment, I would suspect he is a Philologist and teaches at a university. A very rare skill indeed.

Even with my own reasonable knowledge of all of MR's parts, I still did not make the connection(s) in the Taibi article that MR did... and one of the core principles in my blather method is "making connections." To see somebody smack down a nail when I had a hammer myself underneath all the pizza boxes made me feel the same way. Since you (BO) aint "banned," you oughta send this guy a chimpmail and invite him over here. He is one brilliant motherfucker...and we need some more perspectives since Mark and Curt seem determined to sulk in their fucking tents FOREVER. I no longer have the currency to allow time to "heal all wounds."

BTW... the guy's Latin sig means, (first) Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit - He has left, absconded, escaped and disappeared... and the second I believe is his own Latin translation of the French "Liberty Fraternity Equality" with the emphasis on "Equality." And that's right... Booshoid is "gone like a turkey through the corn." To serve Justice in the world, somebody should track down that mofo and punch his ticket. And it's true... "Justice" is not the same as "Law." That's why it's so fucking ironic that the US has a "Criminal Justice" system. It certainly is. The adjective frames its following noun.

One of the things we (us boomers) should be talking about is technology and our conscious choice between prolonging/ ending our own life and the cost of our "decision" to "posterity" and not just the posterity on which we sit... our own delusional asses. Look at the San Fransisco footage from 100 years ago... everybody in that movie is DEAD. They sure as hell don't look that way in the flick In any case, wouldn't it be nice to pass on whatever philosophical kernel (we have) to help them get through the ecological disaster (that is largely of our own making) so they don't have to re-experience the same-old-shit?

Do WE even have such a thing?

[BO]

So, you were just telling me how much you loved me in your previous post. That's a relief.

Personally, I'm not for Mark coming back. I've been reading his posts on the chimp and they're just as disingenuous as before. I remember going round and round with him regarding his intellectual dishonesty and I really don't want to go through that again. It's easy to ignore him over there--it's not so easy here.

I do miss Curt. But I think he's become a free agent and probably doesn't want to be identified with any particular place. He's always fun to read.

I'll have to monitor MR and wait for the right moment to invite him here. I've been posting a lot of stuff in favor of immigration laws there lately. As expected, it goes over like a lead baloon-o. My reputation is probably just right of a typical tea-bagger's--not that I fucking care. But I doubt too many want to befriend me right now. I'm kinda enjoying my new agitator status anyway. The group think on the chimp has gotten pretty thick. IMO, their reverse fascism is as fascist as the fascists they like to rally against--hypocrites all. Curt could have said that better.

Been feeling like a man without a country lately as I agitate both left and right. But I'm digging that there's an uprising of sorts in the making and I'd like to see it gain steam. Hoping it might actually coalesce into a unified movement against the PTB. I know you think that's a pipe dream, but a man's gotta dream lest his pipe go soft or something along those lines...

[BO]

Speaking of agitation...

check this out....sometimes reality is a 'puta'.

[pan]

I don't know BO.....knowing that you weren't banned over there kind of lowers you in my esteem......

(Insert smiley faced emoticon here to indicate that I'm just funnin' with ya)

[BO]

I've been trying pretty hard.

I did get banned from the Un-Democratic Underground, so I think I'm getting close.

I'll probably never be banned as the Chimp is pretty hard-up for posters. Tiedrich could never admit to himself that he lost a huge portion of his audience when he updated his site's format--many moons ago. Now, the only people that post there--with rare exception--are rubes like me.

But what I've really found interesting is how entrenched the dogma on the Chimp has become. Seems the left has become as narrow as the right in their ideology. I think the intellectual community has left town. Or at least, seem to be hiding out somewhere. The only answers you'll find on the web these days--with rare exception-- are those that the peeps on both sides have been programmed to give. Seems to be a meme field day.

And hey... don't worry about teasing me. I got the joke.

[pan]

The only answers you'll find on the web these days--with rare exception-- are those that the peeps on both sides have been programmed to give.

As free internet access disappears we will see the media go the same way as community access tv did - we can't let the heathens have an uncontrolled voice otherwise they might actually challenge the paradigm.

It goes further than controlling the answers - it goes to what questions are allowed.

[waldopaper]