Tag: philosophy

Categories
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.

Continue reading “Amateur Academics”
Categories
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

Categories
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

Categories
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.

Continue reading “Thoughts on Christian Zionism”
Categories
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.

Continue reading “Value and Control of the Military”
Categories
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.

Continue reading “Fief, Province, and Monopoly”
Categories
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.

Continue reading “A Bias on Money and Coercion”
Categories
Opinion

Deep Waters

The thing about blogging, if that’s what I’m doing, is that I have to do it in the middle of the day. I can’t save it for later. And that’s a lot of why I haven’t done it that much, I don’t always hang onto things that I want to talk about in this medium. But I’ve got a bit of time and something on my mind so let’s talk.

If you’ve followed me on social media for a while, and if your timeline isn’t too cluttered, you’ve probably seen me doing a thread on an argument before. Not an argument thread, but a thread about an argument which is taking place somewhere else. It’s typically me breaking down how I think things went, devices I think worked, when people overextended, etc. A kind of post-game report.

If you don’t really know me, you might assume that what I’m doing is gloating, and there’s a little bit of that. But these aren’t like popular threads and I don’t do them with the expectation that other people are going to be interested. That’s why you will very rarely see me do that other popular move: arguing by quote tweeting. If I quote tweet it’s generally because someone has said something particularly absurd to where I’m not even taking it seriously. Much more often, you’ll see the other person quote tweet and then I’ll follow them with a regular reply. I don’t need an audience, though I don’t reject one; my arguing style is not sneaky, so there’s nothing to hide.

Continue reading “Deep Waters”
Categories
Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: The Agency System, Part 1 (feat. AEW)

Cody Rhodes after winning the NWA World's Heavyweight Championship at the original All In
Cody Rhodes as NWA World Heavyweight Champion

Let’s try and rethink wrestling. It’s an ambitious proposition, I get it, but I’ll have fun with it and maybe you will, too. What I’m going to do is propose a new style of wrestling booking: the Agency System. If I had to boil down the goal of the Agency System to one word, it would be realism. If I had a few more, I’d say this: we’re going to rely on naturalistic stories for wrestling rather than on artificial stories.

American pro wrestling is for children. When I say this, I don’t say it disparagingly as-such. That is, I’m not saying “American pro wrestling is for children and therefore bad, because children only like bad things”. What I’m saying is compare the beats of The Sopranos to the beats of Power Rangers (look, I’m not watching TV these days, work with me) and see what pro wrestling hews closer to1. Not just WWE. All of American TV pro wrestling is like this. It is loud, it is in your face, it is frantic. It’s almost desperate not to lose your attention.

Continue reading “Pro-Wres Lab: The Agency System, Part 1 (feat. AEW)”
Categories
Opinion

Philosophy: What Is Attention?

Attention has always interested me as a subject of thinking, but as a non-psychologist, it’s been difficult for me to get stuck into the study of it. I can search, of course, but it’s not a huge topic when I do so. Instead, what I’m going to do here is a bias, which is a form I use to put forward my personal theory about an idea. From there, when I decide to pick up this line of thought again, I’ll have specific avenues existing already that I want to move forward with. I expect that a lot of my presumptions will be ripped apart when I look into them further; that’s the nature of honest research. I’ve had my own thoughts and done some preliminary reading on the subject. That said, I will be leaving this largely unsourced so that I don’t give off the idea that these are final conclusions.

Continue reading “Philosophy: What Is Attention?”