Heidegger

— Dr Malcolm Riddoch wrote:
> Ok, so as a Canadian resident of America you approve of Americans

I’m not Canadian, but enuf with playing 20 Questions.

> “burning the US flag” (metaphorically or otherwise) in response to
> their executive elite burning other countries to the ground but you
> proscribe non-Americans as anti-Americans for “burning the US flag”
> while the US is bombing their country to the ground,

There you go again. You describe liberation from tyranny as bombing
to the ground, so I question what grounds your truth.

> What about your Canadian compatriot and 40 year resident of the US
> Neil Young and his new album? It’s vintage Young and the single
> “Impeach the President” is killer. I guess from your perspective he
> is a foreign anti-American and should therefore be proscribed?

Neil’s been a US citizen for some decades. I’m very fond of some of
his stuff, I liked the use of irony on his latest album (something
noticeably lacking in most of the antiwar crowd), but, like, Neil’s
still a hippie, man.

> Does this American’s view mean
> for you as a non-American that their views should also be proscribed
> and should not appear in pro-American (or rather anti anti-American)
> and therefore “neutral” discussions, at least according to Anthony’s
> definition of neutrality?

No. But just because (1) they’re american, and (2) they’re anti-american,
they can provide foreign haters with an excuse for their anti-americanism.
You only have to read anything recent by say Chomsky or Vidal, to realise
they’re clowns. Yet they’re regularly voted as top intellectuals in
places with intellectual pretensions like Europe. It just goes to show
the lie dream of the anti-american scene. Wake up! All Europe’s useful
intellectuals have moved stateside. That’s why its called a brain drain.

> For instance, take the “paranoid idiot” Paul Craig Roberts, a paragon
> of the Republican old guard, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
> Economic Policy under Reagan in the early 80’s and one of the
> founding fathers of Reaganomics, a French Legion of Honor, syndicated
> columnist, academic fellow at Stanford U and so on … is this
> distinguished American an anti-American when he states that the US
> executive is “evil”?

No comment. I’ve never heard of him. Perhaps he should move abroad
where he might stand out and attract attention as an intellectual.

> Then of course there’s the US psychiatrists debate about diagnosing
> GW Bush. The main proponent here claims that such expert psychiatric
> profiling is used by the US State Department amongst others so he
> sees no reason why the US public shouldn’t have the benefit of
> profiling their own leaders. So is Dr. Frank an anti-American
> American when he states that in his clinical opinion Bush “fits the
> profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but
> not treated” and that he also fits the clinical description of a
> “paranoid megalomaniac” as well as “a sadist”?

You’re appealing to the authority of psychiatrists on a Heidegger list?

> 2. The US executive appears to have gone precisely in the opposite
> direction away from global leadership and has instead embraced the
> concept of full spectrum dominance in executing a mass murder of its
> own citizens in order to embark on a global terror war for Lebensraum
> starting in the Middle East that threatens every nation on earth.

Right after they dynamited the WTC…yawn.

> After all, it’s what a hell of a lot of Americans are more or less
> saying on the net, and going by Bush and Cheney’s poll ratings
> there’s a ground swell of “anti-Americanism” in America that
> threatens to overwhelm not only the presidency but also the
> Republican majority in congress.

Maybe. We’ll see after the next election. Right now the Republicans
control every insititution of goverment minus some state governor
ships and houses, so it can only go down. But then they’re up against
the Democrats, who have yet to elaborate a credible alternative. So
we’ll see what the people who bother to vote say at the end of the
year.

> My proposition, following
> Heidegger, is that all leaders are bound by the historical, pragmatic
> relations of power that constrain their choices and potential for
> action in this world, and irrespective of the rationalizations or
> self-justifications they or we might make after the fact. Power is
> merely an amoral, practical fact of life and the world we live in,
> its relations set up the historical situation we inhabit and our
> future remains unclear so long as we remain oblivious, where the
> willful oblivion of technologically constrained modernity seems to be
> our present and future reality.

How is this different from common Hegelianism or Foucaultism? Why
include Heidegger and the remark about oblivion of tech?

> So if you want a world picture for today you might try painting the
> technological relations of power that constrain us in an-archos,
> where all is polemos essentially without leadership, either of our
> selves or our national relations or our relation to nature. Polemos
> an-archos is my theme and if this is to be proscibed by North
> Americans on this list then so be it. I invite and encourage all
> international list members on this globally distributed list to write
> as they see fit even though all non-Americans apparently remain
> outside the protections of the US constitution’s first amendment.

I don’t think the North Americans proscribe anything. They’re merely
pointing out the cracks in various dialectics. That’s where the
light gets in.

> For those who might care I should however point out that the website
> archive of this email list resides on a server in the heart of
> Kentucky on the US backbone network and is of course subject to the
> massive data mining sweep of their domestic internet being conducted
> by the US Homeland Security and its intelligence forces.

That’s why half of us are agent provocateurs, ain’t it?

And I’d add, as someone with some involvement in tech, the abilities
of software, and government agencies, to make sense of massive amounts
of data is highly exaggerated.

Posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
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