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Opinion

Amateur Academics

I’ve bounced off of Ellul again. This time I was trying to go through Propaganda and I just kept hitting moments that made me go “hang on”. And it made me do something that I’m sure other people do but I never hear anybody talk about: the “_____ sucks” search. It is pretty much what it sounds like. I type “Ellul’s Propaganda sucks” and see what it comes up with. I tried this a couple different ways and came up with nothing but praise. It wasn’t until searched for reviews of his work on JSTOR that I found any skeptical opinions.

If you are the kind of academic that gets off on “academic pettiness” or things of that kind, it will be hard to beat the review of Propaganda made by Daniel Lerner in the American Sociological Review. He starts out with heat: “What this book tells us about propaganda is less interesting than what it tells us about Jacques Ellul, about the present state of mind of French social scientists, and about the ‘Cartesian method’ today.” But this isn’t what really grabbed me.

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Opinion

Defining General Fascism

It’s late, I just wrote a bunch about general fascism, it’s over at Journal of Cogency, go read it.

Defining General Fascism at Journal of Cogency

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Opinion

The Temple-City of Kazaf

After a long, long while, I’ve finally written some new fiction! Well. This isn’t a full new story, and I still do have the ending of another fantasy tale just about finished, but this is what I spent time doing today.

“The Temple-City of Kazaf” is a guidebook-style piece, an introduction to a new setting I am working on called the Land of Nodd. In it, a runaway priest tells his audience what the city of Kazaf is like.

Check out The Temple-City of Kazaf at Nearzone.com

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Opinion

Why Propaganda Works

So yet again, I decided to post this blog up on Journal of Cogency. I think that as I’m getting comfortable posting here, I’ve figured out that I can sort of farm out these pieces to other blogs I have and just park a link here; that way I’m keeping this blog updated while still silo’ing some of the material. It seems simple but I’ve kinda struggled with sites having different identities and all that.

Anyway, if you’re needing more philosophy in your life, check out the new one: Why Propaganda Works on Journal of Cogency

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Opinion

Thoughts on Christian Zionism

I got the urge to write this particular blog after taking a gander at an Al-Jazeera documentary about Christian Zionism. It’s made me think harder about the link between religion and politics, and my own perception of the situation. It’s challenged how I see the Christian influence on the decisions being made by these Zionists, but not totally overturned it. It made me realize that my critique was shallow and that it needed to become more sophisticated. Now, I’m not going to achieve that right here, but this will be a baby step.

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Opinion

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause

I’ve written a blog giving my thoughts on the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I posted it over at Journal of Cogency rather than here because it’s a longer piece, and it being on politics meant I could justify adding it there. Check it out; the prose is a bit messy but I hope the points are constructive.

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause on Journal of Cogency

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Opinion

Value and Control of the Military

I’m about 3 & ¾ chapters into Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money and I started having outside thoughts about it, so I took some time to glance at some other material and now I’m going to ramble about my thoughts for a bit. The issue I’m trying to get at right now is the implications of the monopoly of violence on the institution of money. To try and make sense of this, I looked at some writing about civilian control of the military; I don’t think I will take any direct insights, nor am I really ready to critique any of that literature, but it did get me thinking in a useful way.

If we take the phenomenon being studied here as being “value and its relation to the civilian control of the military”, then there are two questions we need to answer. First, what is the connection between value (as in money) and control of the military? Second, is there any value (as in moral weight) in civilian control of the military? Please don’t misunderstand; here I am specifically not equating money and moral weight, but I didn’t want to sit down and dig out better words for the two “values” here. What I will say is that I think understanding these two distinct concepts will provide some insight into how money operates as a social agent.

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Opinion

Fief, Province, and Monopoly

Studying money is very hard. I’ve looked at a few different attempts to define it and I have skimmed through Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money. His answer to the question implied in the book’s title is complex and I don’t grasp it well enough yet to explain it. One thing I do understand, however, is that he believes that the value of money is primarily determined by society. I agree with this wholeheartedly. But as far as the social mechanics of this interaction, I don’t know that I will find the answer laid out in Ingham’s work. I might find it elsewhere, or I might have skipped over it and I’ll find it when I make another pass through the work.

I say that by way of introducing this blog’s topic, which is finding (or creating) a distinction between monopoly, province, and fief as subdivisions of a state. What I’m interested in is how money works as part of the state-society’s machinery of coercion. To understand that better, I wanted to understand how the economy is broken up from the sense of power relations. The decision to subdivide territory and establish regional administrations, and the type of regional administrations established, are all questions that are deeply tied in with the economy, even though they are not classically economic concerns.

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Opinion

Top Ten Mid-Level Big Hitters: Stoner Rock

Finally, here’s a lighter topic: music. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while but just took the time to start now. I want to talk about songs by lesser-known bands that still really hit for me. That’s the idea behind “mid-level big hitters”: a mid-level band (both in popularity and appeal of their music) who produces a song that’s way better than it has any right to be.

I get that this framing is kind of condescending, but I’m using it because this is how I think about a lot of these. It’s not that it’s a backhanded compliment (remember, the only thing you can really do with the back of your hand is slap someone with it), it’s that I think the fact that these songs are examples of a band kind of pushing past their normal limits. It’s not just that these are the bands’ best song; as I say in the write-ups (which I did before writing this intro portion), these songs are better than the best songs of a lot of more talented bands.

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Opinion

A Bias on Money and Coercion

I know I said that I was going to blog on a lighter topic today but I got a bug up my ass and I want to talk about money. More to the point, I want to get down some ideas about what I want to investigate in regards to money. My main interest is how money works as a method of persuasion-cogency-coercion. The reason I’m writing this is actually because I’m not finding a lot of literature on this already. I’m hoping that by laying out what I’m looking for, it’ll help me investigate further. And if it gives you any ideas on where I might look, let me know!

One process or phenomenon that I’m especially interested in looking into is what I call “financialization.” This probably already does have a name but I haven’t discovered it yet. What I will say is that this financialization is not financialization as typically thought of. I’m not talking about the creation of credit instruments right now. When I say financialization, what I mean is the process by which more things become accessible by (and in some ways interchangeable with) money.

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