The Traditionalist School

So I've probably already put this stuff on here, but with stuff like this, more is always better and is never enough. alex was actually telling me about this stuff because he was reading about this monk named, well, i'll just copy his email, insert the necessary links, and let him tell the story himself

Alex wrote:

Interesting that you bring up "perennial philosophy". I am somewhat familiar with Ananda Coomarswamy's son who was actually a convert to Catholicism (Dr. Rama Poonambalam Coomaraswamy) and who still held on to the "Traditionalist school". Also I have come across some material from Rene Guenon (he was a Sufi Muslim, no?) interestingly enough from a biography I read on an Orthodox monk/priest Seraphim Rose who was greatly influenced by Rene Guenon

A Politician's Hypocrisy

Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'? -- $30,000 utility bill

(2/27/07 - NASHVILLE, TN) - Back home in Tennessee, safely ensconced in his suburban Nashville home, Vice President Al Gore is no doubt basking in the Oscar awarded to "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary he inspired and in which he starred. But a local free-market think tank is trying to make that very home emblematic of what it deems Gore's environmental hypocrisy.

Armed with Gore's utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president's 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours.

"If this were any other person with $30,000-a-year in utility bills, I wouldn't care," says the Center's 27-year-old president, Drew Johnson. "But he tells other people how to live and he's not following his own rules."

Scoffed a former Gore adviser in response: "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent."

Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for the Gores, did not dispute the Center's figures, taken as they were from public records. But she pointed out that both Al and Tipper Gore work out of their home and she argued that "the bottom line is that every family has a different carbon footprint. And what Vice President Gore has asked is for families to calculate that footprint and take steps to reduce and offset it."

A carbon footprint is a calculation of the CO2 fossil fuel emissions each person is responsible for, either directly because of his or her transportation and energy consumption or indirectly because of the manufacture and eventual breakdown of products he or she uses. (You can calculate your own carbon footprint on the website http://www.carbonfootprint.com/)

The vice president has done that, Kreider argues, and the family tries to offset that carbon footprint by purchasing their power through the local Green Power Switch program — electricity generated through renewable resources such as solar, wind, and methane gas, which create less waste and pollution. "In addition, they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power," Kreider added. "They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero."

These efforts did little to impress Johnson. "I appreciate the solar panels," he said, "but he also has natural gas lanterns in his yard, a heated pool, and an electric gate. While I appreciate that he's switching out some light bulbs, he is not living the lifestyle that he advocates."

The Center claims that Nashville Electric Services records show the Gores in 2006 averaged a monthly electricity bill of $1,359 for using 18,414 kilowatt-hours, and $1,461 per month for using 16,200 kilowatt-hours in 2005. During that time, Nashville Gas Company billed the family an average of $536 a month for the main house and $544 for the pool house in 2006, and $640 for the main house and $525 for the pool house in 2005. That averages out to be $29,268 in gas and electric bills for the Gores in 2006, $31,512 in 2005.

The press release from Johnson's group, an obscure conservative think tank founded by Johnson in 2004 when he was 24, was given splashy attention on the highly-trafficked Drudge Report Monday evening, and former Gore aides saw it as part of a piece, along with an Fox News Channel investigation from earlier this month of Gore's use of private planes in 2000. Last year, a seemingly amateurish Youtube video mocking the "An Inconvenient Truth" turned out to have been produced by slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

"Considering that he spends an overwhelming majority of his time advocating on behalf of and trying to affect change on this issue, it's not surprising that people who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo would go after him," said the former Gore aide.

Kreider says she's confident that the Gores' utility bills will decrease. "They bought an older home and they're in the process of upgrading the home," she said. "Unfortunately that means an increase in energy use in order to have an overall decrease in energy use down the road."

Gore is not the only environmentalist associated with "An Inconvenient Truth" who has come under fire for personal habits -- and not all the criticism has come from the Right.

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, liberal writer Eric Alterman criticized producer Laurie David for her use of private Gulfstream jets. David, he wrote "reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable." New Republic writer Gregg Easterbrook followed up, computing that "one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year."

In an interview in 2006, David told ABC News that she was limiting her use of private planes and was flying commercial far more frequently.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Class Warfare debate

Paul sent this article out to a few of us the other day stating that 'This was a handout in my Political science class yesterday.' Below the article are the responses to it.

In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning
By BEN STEIN
Published: November 26, 2006

NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.


Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don't pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay,
or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. "How can this be fair?" he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. "How can this be right?"

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

"There's class warfare, all right," Mr. Buffett said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

This conversation keeps coming back to mind because, in the last couple of weeks, I have been on one television panel after another, talking about how questionable it is that the country is enjoying what economists call full employment while we are still running a federal budget deficit of roughly $434 billion for fiscal 2006 (not counting off-budget items like Social Security) and economists forecast that it will grow to $567 billion in fiscal 2010.

When I mentioned on these panels that we should consider all options for closing this gap — including raising taxes, particularly for the wealthiest people — I was met with several arguments by people who call themselves conservatives and free marketers.

One argument was that the mere suggestion constituted class warfare. I think Mr. Buffett answered that one.

Another argument was that raising taxes actually lowers total revenue, and that only cutting taxes stimulates federal revenue. This is supposedly proved by the history of tax receipts since my friend George W. Bush became president.

In fact, the federal government collected roughly $1.004 trillion in income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2000, the last full year of President Bill Clinton's merry rule. It fell to a low of $794 billion in 2003 after Mr. Bush's tax cuts (but not, you understand, because of them, his supporters like to say). Only by the end of fiscal 2006 did income tax revenue surpass the $1 trillion level again.

By this time, we Republicans had added a mere $2.7 trillion to the national debt. So much for tax cuts adding to revenue. To be fair, corporate profits taxes have increased greatly, as corporate profits have increased stupendously. This may be because of the cut in corporate tax rates. Anything is possible.

The third argument that kind, well-meaning people made in response to the idea of rolling back the tax cuts was this: "Don't raise taxes. Cut spending."

The sad fact is that spending rises every year, no matter what people want or say they want. Every president and every member of Congress promises to cut "needless" spending. But spending has risen every year since 1940 except for a few years after World War II and a brief period after the Korean War.

The imperatives for spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they will ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.

The fourth argument in response to my suggestion was that "deficits don't matter."

There is something to this. One would think that big deficits would be highly inflationary, according to Keynesian economics. But we have modest inflation (except in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22). On the other hand, we have all that interest to pay, soon roughly $7 billion a week, a lot of it to overseas owners of our debt. This, to me, seems to matter.

Besides, if it doesn't matter, why bother to even discuss balancing the budget? Why have taxes at all? Why not just print money the way Weimar Germany did? Why not abolish taxes and add trillions to the deficit each year? Why don't we all just drop acid, turn on, tune in and drop out of responsibility in the fiscal area? If deficits don't matter, why not spend as much as we want, on anything we want?

The final argument is the one I really love. People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?

Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn't that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven't the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?

THIS brings me back to Mr. Buffett. If, in fact, it's all just a giveaway to the rich masquerading as a new way of stimulating the economy and balancing the budget, please, Mr. Bush, let's rethink it. I don't like paying $7 billion a week in interest on the debt. I don't like the idea that Mr. Buffett pays a lot less in tax as a percentage of his income than my housekeeper does or than I do.

Can we really say that we're showing fiscal prudence? Are we doing our best? If not, why not? I don't want class warfare from any direction, through the tax system or any other way.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

Paul's friend Chris said:

While I agree with some of his points, I have a hard time buying
into the fact that someone making $20 million a year and pays $5-6
million in federal income taxes (my estimate) is not paying their
fair share. Based on what a person needs to survive, its quite
obvious that a person making this type of money could probably
afford to pay more.  But at the end of the day, one person paying
60%, 70% or 80% of their earnings to the government seems much more
unfair.

Dave said:

FLAT TAX WOULD GET RID OF THE UNFAIRNESS ASPECT.  I DON'T SEE THE
ARGUMENT AGAINST IT. IT WOULD RAISE REVENUES TO AN UNPRECEDENTED FIGURE.
IRONICALLY ENOUGH, THE ONLY PEOPLE THAT ADVOCATE IT PUBLICLY ARE
REPUBLICANS.

Sara said:

but thats not what is happening.  Their dollar amount is higher than
ours, but our percent is higher than theirs.  the way to make it fair
is to make it the same percent across the board.

I said:

i know i'm late to this conversation, but I think that people making
$100 million or more should have to pay minimum 40%-50% of their income
to the government and that this percentage should decrease the lower
down the yearly income scale you go.  i guess the common objection to
this would be that it is unfair to tax people more percentage of their
income just because they earn more.  I think that this argument is
fallacious because the acquirment of attaining great wealth through the
means of society also gives that person a greater responsibility to
give back what he has earned to society.

Hate to sound like Peter's Uncle Ben  here, but with great wealth,
comes great power, comes great reponsibility to give back to the
society that helped you attain that wealth and power. The people who
are saying it is unfair are either rich or using lower and middle
income standards or reponsibility and applying them to the upper class.
Your position in society and how much income you make is directly
proportionate to how much responsibility you assume for the
maintenance, preservation, and continued growth of society. At a
minimum, this responsibility entails taking on a greater financial
burden of giving back to the society than it does for middle or lower
income class people.

People who have been blessed with great ability to take care of
themselves have an obligation to take care of people who have not been
blessed with great ability to take care of themselves. So rich people
should pay for medicaire and medicaid programs and social security
because these are the people in society who cannot take care of
themselves.

as far as the freeloader objection goes, like what about welfare
and programs like that, if we really cared about these people instead
of just giving them money and not having any consequences attached to
the money we should have some sort of checks and balances were if these
people don't make an effort to improve themselves and get off the
government nipple, then the government will eventually take that nipple
away.  If we had effective and trenchant welfare reform and recidivism
reduction reform, this objection wouldn't even have any strength.  We
could use the extra money we get from the rich people to improve these
programs for the poorest of us so that they actually produce some
positive societal benefits, instead of just being a leach on the whole
system.

that is my argument, i look forward to your responses

Chief Illiniwek Controversy

Here is the Wikipedia page on the Chief Illiniwek, here is the website of the anti-Chief people, here is the website of the pro-Chief, more information can be found doing a yahoo or google search. here was my initial view on this situation, before i read any of the above information.

My take on the controversy:

does anybody want to debate this with me (maybe a lawyer or two in the thread), cause i've been thinking about this for a while and I agree with the indians side. let me quickly explain my reasoning. what i don't think illini people realize is what exactly this means to the indian population. let me put it into kappa sig terms and you can tell me if my analogy is wrong or shouldn't or doesn't apply.

something like this would be analogous to another group of people coming into our fraternity house, killing the majority of our brothers, stealing the house from us and putting the survivors in a shitty ass house with no reedeming value far away. then, these people start blaspheming and desecrating our ritual and ceremonies by totally doing it wrong and totally not understanding the meaning of it, etc., etc., and thus, in our eyes, mocking it and mocking us every time they do this pseudo-ceremony.

as if this wasn't enough, they add insult to injury about this by claiming that their own meaning and value for their interpretation of our ritual and ceremonies supersedes or takes precedence over the original and intended meaning that us, the originators of the ceremonies, gave to it. they say it makes it all right for them to do our ritual and ceremony whatever way they want because they've been doing it this way for many years (like 80 or something i think, you illini could correct me on this) and for them it stands for noble things like honor, integrity, tradition, etc., etc.

that's what i think illini people don't understand, that for these indian people, this cheif illiniwik ceremony is tantamount to shitting and pissing on the cross and the altar in a church for a christian and then being told by the very people who are doing the shitting and pissing that this is all right and shouldn't be stopped because for the shitters and pissers, their ceremony stands for good and noble things. am i missing anything here in my reasoning about this?

even after all this, i guess the burden depends on whose interpretation of this ceremony takes precedence or should trump the other interpretation. does the originator's interpretation take priority and thus, the ceremony should be stopped because it's highly offensive to them, or does the borrower's interpretation take priority and trump the originator's interpretation, because of the length of time it's been going on and the good things it signifies for the borrower's? does anybody want to advance any arguments about which interpretation should take precedence here? maybe some legal precedent speaks to this subject? anybody, anybody..

my fraternity brother jason replied:

The only differnce is, if I understand it correctly,
is that the tribes that made up the Illini Indians
made a traditional headress for the univeristy of IL
back in 1927, the second year of the illini tradition.
Since then the Illini Indians have become extinct,
and the people who say they have a problem with the
Chief have nothing to do with the Illini Indians.  If
the real Indians that made the headress and encourged
the univeristy than what is the problem with
continueing the tradition.

my fraternity brother nick said:

which illini indian people are offended? none, they don't exist anymore. they are a tribe gone for many years now. wiped off the face of they earth by people we never even met. maybe those who oppose the mascot need to change their negative thinking and think of it as a tribute to those who have come before us. since indian culture is dead, besides the casinos in the wasteland of america, the half time rituals give young people a look and better understanding of a culture that has long been gone. i don't see any native americans promoting their culture to anyone, if anything they sell it like whores. why not instead of bitching about mascots they lobby to get more native american culture in the education system?

who can really comment on the rituals of a culture that has not existed for 100 years or more? how can they, the accuser, possibly know if what they want to be more accurate, isn't already incredicley accurate? they can't because they weren't there when it was actually happening.

rituals differ from individual to individual. reinemann performed differently than urban and nate different from henderson. same content, different spin.

according to keith oberman(spelling) on the dan patrick show today, a recent poll showed that most(over 75%) of native americans do not care about this issue.

i highly doubt that the people who pick the mascot to begin with thought it would be awesome to rub it into the indians faces. instead they honored their people. picking a mascot that shows honor, toughness, and respect.

I replied:

after thinking about your responses for a night, i guess that my next question would be that if the people who are opposing the cheif are not the descendents of the illini indians and if they don't have any information about what this dance originally consisted of, then what basis do they have to both 1) make their argument against it and 2) to be offended by it's portrayal? i guess nick's statement about the misguidedness of this attack on the cheif, which I think I now agree with if all of what you guys said is true, that 'since indian culture is dead, besides the casinos in the wasteland of america, the half time rituals give young people a look and better understanding of a culture that has long been gone. i don't see any native americans promoting their culture to anyone, if anything they sell it like whores. why not instead of bitching about mascots they lobby to get more native american culture in the education system?' is an extremely good and valid point. if these people were really concerned about perceptions of indian culture or it's accurate portrayal (or inaccurate misportrayal) to the general populace, they could affect more change by affecting the educational system in early schools instead of protesting a college mascot.

also, i think that the vast majority of native americans who are living today don't care about this issue says a lot. I guess since nobody knew the original meaning of this ceremony and none of the descendents of those who would have known even exist anymore, i see know reason for disallowing the ceremony, given that the original meaning of the ceremony is the meaning it has today and nobody is alive who can genuinely be offended by it. Where the fuck do these people come from who are always offended by everything? Maybe they shouldn't be so sensitive. I'm offended by people who get offended at stupid shit, like these people now seem to be, but you don't hear me complaining. Thanks for the information about this guys, I appreciate it.

Nick replied:

i knew you would see it my way.

I replied:

i don't know anymore man, after reading the wikipedia page, i don't know what i think. it looks like originally the descendents were all for the chief, and then somebody else gained power and met with some students, and now they are against the chief. i still lean towards your view because of 1) the descendents waffling on the controversy, 2) the fact that some women's kids, who are not even descendents of the illiniwek indians, are the initially offended people, and 3) what it means to the university. i thought you had a really good argument though, way better than any of the other guys at least

Nick replied:

i feel education is the best way to reach people and have them understand. i was never offered a class on american indians in any system and that is the real crime.

My fraternity brother Jared said:

It is clear that everyone needs to review their Native American history
and culture.  A good book collection to start with is narrated by Mary
Brave Bird.  In these texts she discusses her people's plight through a
collection of facts and personal suffrage.  Mary Brave Bird discusses
the issue of other people using her ancient and deeply spiritual
cultural in other non-cultural affairs as is disgusted by such actions.
Anglo-Saxons stripped Native Americans of their culture, and continue to
mock them to this day.  Why did 75% of Native Americans not care about
the issue? Probably because they are worried about how they are going to
eat or sleep...or maybe they are worried about the millions of tons of
waste deposited (both toxic and nontoxic) on the pitiful wastelands, we
comfortably call "reservations."  Perhaps we should look at the 360+
treaties the American government has broken, or the 40 billion we stole
from their reservations in the form of oil. The last thing we need to
discuss is some fucking douche bag mocking an ancient culture and
people, we should be discussing how we are going to pay them back for
the acts of genocide committed by our ancestors, our government, and our
inability to act morally or ethically.  Not only have we destroyed an
ancient people we have turned their mother earth into a state of utter
peril.  If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the
problem, find a charity today. 

I Can t Believe this F#+king Guy!!

Pastor with 666 tattoo claims to be divine
POSTED: 2:08 p.m. EST, February 19, 2007
By John Zarrella and Patrick Oppmann
CNN
Story Highlights
• Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, a minister, says he is God
• De Jesus preaches that there is no devil and no sin
• His church claims thousands of members in more than 30 countries

Adjust font size:
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- The minister has the number
666 tattooed on his arm.

But Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is not your typical
minister. De Jesus, or "Daddy" as his thousands of
followers call him, does not merely pray to God: He
says he is God.

"The spirit that is in me is the same spirit that was
in Jesus of Nazareth," de Jesus says.

De Jesus' claims of divinity have angered Christian
leaders, who say he is a fake. Religious experts say
he may be something much more dangerous, a cult leader
who really believes he is God. (Watch followers get
666 tattoos for their leader )

"He's in their heads, he's inside the heads of those
people," says Prof. Daniel Alvarez, a religion expert
at Florida International University who has debated
some of de Jesus' followers.

"De Jesus speaks with a kind of conviction that makes
me consider him more like David Koresh or Jim Jones."

Is de Jesus really a cult leader like David Koresh,
who died with more than 70 of his Branch Davidian
followers in a fiery end to a standoff with federal
authorities, or Jim Jones, the founder of the Peoples
Temple who committed mass suicide with 900 followers
in 1978?

Prophets 'spoke to me'
De Jesus and his believers say their church --
"Creciendo en Gracia," Spanish for "Growing in grace"
-- is misunderstood. Followers of the movement say
they have proof that their minister is divine and that
their church will one day soon be a major faith in the
world.

But even de Jesus concedes that he is an unlikely
leader of a church that claims thousands of members in
more than 30 countries.

De Jesus, 61, grew up poor in Puerto Rico. He says he
served stints in prison there for petty theft and says
he was a heroin addict.

De Jesus says he learned he was Jesus reincarnate when
he was visited in a dream by angels.

"The prophets, they spoke about me. It took me time to
learn that, but I am what they were expecting, what
they have been expecting for 2,000 years," de Jesus
says.

The church that he began building 20 years ago in
Miami resembles no other:


Followers have protested Christian churches in Miami
and Latin America, disrupting services and smashing
crosses and statues of Jesus.


De Jesus preaches there is no devil and no sin. His
followers, he says, literally can do no wrong in God's
eyes.


The church calls itself the "Government of God on
Earth" and uses a seal similar to the United States.

Doing God's work with a Lexus and Rolex
If Creciendo en Gracia is an atypical religious group,
de Jesus also does not fit the mold of the average
church leader. De Jesus flouts traditional vows of
poverty.

He says he has a church-paid salary of $136,000 but
lives more lavishly than that. During an interview, he
showed off a diamond-encrusted Rolex to a CNN crew and
said he has three just like them. He travels in
armored Lexuses and BMWs, he says, for his safety. All
are gifts from his devoted followers.

And what about the tattoo of 666 on his arm?

Although it's a number usually associated with Satan,
not the son of God, de Jesus says that 666 and the
Antichrist are, like him, misunderstood.

The Antichrist is not the devil, de Jesus tells his
congregation; he's the being who replaces Jesus on
Earth.

"Antichrist is the best person in the world," he says.
"Antichrist means don't put your eyes on Jesus because
Jesus of Nazareth wasn't a Christian. Antichrist means
do not put your eyes on Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Put
it on Jesus after the cross."

And de Jesus says that means him.

So far, de Jesus says that his flock hasn't been
scared off by his claims of being the Antichrist. In a
show of the sway he holds over the group, 30 members
of his congregation Tuesday went to a tattoo parlor to
have 666 also permanently etched onto their skin.

He may wield influence over them, but his followers
say don't expect them to go the way of people who
believed in David Koresh and Jim Jones. Just by
finding de Jesus, they say, they have achieved their
purpose.

"If somebody tells us drink some Kool-Aid and we'll go
to heaven, that's not true. We are already in heavenly
places," follower Martita Roca told CNN after having
666 tattooed onto her ankle.

I said:

yeah, i heard about this guy 10 days ago, and i think that the best thing for all concerned is that this guy catches multiple bullets being fired from automatic weapons at close range with his face. all self-delusional assholes that somehow acquire this much power should be eliminated immediately and wiped off the face of the earth, no questions asked. especially with his ineffalibility doctrine and political agenda, one of the worst of all human combinations. if we pray to jesus hard enough, hopefully, we'll be reading about his demise before anybody involved really gets hurt.

Sara replied:

most people are self delusional to a point, and more people think of themselves as infallible than we really want to admit. the thing is that we are usually seeing them in political circles. now you see a self delusional person in a religious context and your thought is kill him? just because you don;t agree with what he preaches or says? one of the main things we DON'T like is the intollerance between religions, and now, because you come across one who is not mainstream you say kill him. and while i don;t agree with him, and i think his followers are nucking futz, he has the right to preach what he wants(just like ANY OTHER church or religious leader out there) and his followers have the right to follow him. If i was into killing people who i thought were self delusional and had a god complex there would be no jerry falwells or other "christians" who preach hate left and the 700 club would be banned from air time on my tv. but jerry falwell has the right to be a self delusi onal asshole and the 700 club has just as much right to be on tv as any other infomercial. and these people have the right to have 666 tattooed anywhere they want and follow someone who is crazy. your response to this really disapointed me

I replied:

your argument fails because your analogy doesn't apply to this case. you state that 'most people are self delusional to a point,' and although that may be correct, that is different enough from this case as not to apply. this guy is much more than self-delusional to a point, he may be the most extreme form of self-delusion and that is dangerous, both to himself and others. also, you state that 'more people think of themselves as infallible than we really want to admit' and although this may be true, again, it doesn't apply to this case because there's a difference between privately thinking your infallible and maybe being arrogant to friends and family and preaching your the infallible God of Christianity to thousands of your followers.

and it's not just my disagreement with his doctrine or his politics or the fact that he's not mainstream, that is totally to miss the crux of my argument, which I should have explained better to clear up any confusion and didn't really touch on my previous response. (i actually wrote 6 pages about this last night with what i really thought, but didn't want to send it for obvious reasons) i have no problem with muslims, hindus, mormons, catholics, atheists, etc., etc., that's fine with me.

my point is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and this guy is preaching a doctrine that will lead to him having absolute power over his followers and that is what i don't like. it is extremely dangerous for one man, especially a man like this, to have that much power. how many examples of men throughout history do we need to prove this. George Bush, Osama bin Laden, Stalin, Hitler, and the religious right people in our own country. how many people have died, murdered by followers of these people because it was their master's will? and although the followers of falwell and robertson are more level headed than these other follower's they have still killed people because they disagreed with their master, like abortion doctors and gay people. if these religious right people start preaching this guy's doctrine the carnage will be even greater.

you also right about his and their's freedom of speech and religion and tatooing, i totally agree with that. but this is going to lead to a situation like i stated above, i see only bad consequences following this guy and his followers, so like i said before, why not just end things now before anybody gets hurt. also, if christianity is correct and this guy really is the christ or the anti-christ, then killing him would be a good thing. the reason that is is because if he's the anti-christ, then after he's dead, satan will resurrect him and armageddon will start which will eventually lead to heaven on earth. if he is really christ, then he'll obviously be able to prevent himself from being killed and the attack will start the war of armageddon and eventaully lead to heaven on earth. either one's a winning combination. so if this guy really is one of these two people, why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is and start the war of armagedon. a bullet coming his way would just fulfill chrisitan and his own personal destiny. if not, one more looney is off the face of the earth. like i said before, either way, it's a winning combination

It's the God-Soul! Totally Awesome!

So I'm reading about objections to Cantor's theory, which can be found here, because I wasn't buying what Quentin was selling about their being larger and smaller infinities and completed infinite sets and according to Cantor, an infinite number of infinities, etc., etc. So i'm reading this article about people who object to Cantor and i run across this idea of an absolute infinity, which Cantor equates with God, so being the religiously curious person that i am, i decide to go there and explore a little bit and i scroll down a little bit and start reading all these names of God and run across one called Paramatma - "The Supersoul" and I'm like the supersoul, this sounds exactly like what i believe, the remembrance, repurification, and reunification of the Universal God-Soul, so I went to that page and checked it out and it was pretty cool. That's the end of the story. Pretty exciting huh (at least for me)!

Also found this oversoul stuff a little later as well, as well as the wikipedia page on the perennial philosophy. Like I said at the begining, Totally Awesome!!!

A New Policy

So whenever I come across weird or crazy shit, I'm just going to post it on my blog and let ya'all decide for yourselves. My first example of this is here. Enjoy!

For all you philosophers of language, mind, and identity, check this out!

These links are about a form of autistic communication here and here (the first one is the blog, the second one is the google version of the video on the blog) and I thought that this article was pretty cool as well (don't you just love indexicals). If nothing else, I think that stuff like this forces us to expand our definitions of everyday concepts like communication, language, interaction, thought, self, etc., to include those forms that, at first thought, may not seem like the proper forms to us, but must be included because these are obviously examples of these forms, just not examples that we encounter as regularly as the other ones. Enjoy!

After reflecting on this video for a little while, these are my philosophical conclusions:

Sorry it’s taken so long for me to reply to your question Sara, but I wanted to think some more about what the video meant to me and why I thought it deserved to go on our blog before I replied to your question.

I guess that for me, the video raises a few issues that I believe have some philosophical import. The first issue has to do with the word normal. Obviously, this is a word that we all use in our daily lives but I think it takes video’s like this to make us question what exactly we are saying when we use that word. I believe that inherent in the use of that word is a prescriptive judgment about the value of things that are normal vs. things that are not-normal. I thought that one of the main points of the video was that non-autistic people would label her forms of communication, her ways of interacting with the world, and her very identity as not-normal because these things are different from what the majority of other people do. I thought that the video was trying to teach people that this is an invalid labeling of autistic people for several reasons.

The first reason seemed to me to be that normal itself is such a loaded, vague, and ambiguous word that the application of it to anything is itself problematic and fallacious. I don’t know if it would be a form of equivocation or something like that, but this word has no sort of ontological or semantic definiteness to it for us to use it as commonly and as non-chalantly as we do. I thought that she touched upon this lack of any meaningful foundation to the word normal in the video and that the video should serve as a lesson to those who would use the term in order to label her or anything about her as not-normal.

The second reason why this labeling of autistic people as not-normal is problematic is because the words, despite their ambiguity, carry with them a value judgment that implicitly says normal is to be preferred and is better than not-normal. By labeling something, anything, as not-normal, we are implicitly stating that it is somehow defective and there is less value in it than normal things. Using this implicit value judgment inherent in the word normal to refer to autistic people automatically devalues everything about them including their very existence and I thought that the video was a protest against that as well. I guess a lesson to be learned here is that certain words that we use carry with them implicit value judgments about the worth of existence itself (that we may not of even known they had) if they are extrapolated to a logical extreme and applied to the world. I’m sure that people who label other people as not-normal didn’t think that they were making a value judgment about the other’s very existence, but I think that the video teaches us that this may be implicit in the use of that particular word.

I guess that the last lesson I drew from the video has to do with assumptions that we make in regards to communication. When parents hire speech counselors to help communicate with their autistic children, they are already making a value judgment as to what are and what are not good and valid forms of communication. We automatically assume that just because there is a failure to communicate with others, especially with autistic people, that the failure resides on their side of the communication bridge and not on ours. I think that this is because there is an implicit value judgment that our form of communication (language) is better than other forms of communication and if others somehow fail to meet our requirements for communication, we label them as not-normal or communicatively defective. I think that the video was trying to raise the question as to why her form of communication is seen as not-normal or defective and ours is seen as normal or regular. I think she was trying to raise questions about how and where to place the burden of communication failure, on the people who use language to communicate or on the people who communicate without language. Why is language the standard bearer of what is and what isn’t good or bad communication and is it valid or correct to place a defective or not-normal tag on those who refuse to communicate linguistically, like autistic people? I think that her video was a protest against this communicative prescriptivism of language.

Those are the issues that the video raised for me. That is why I labeled it the way that I did. It definitely helped me to enlarge and redefine what my ideas of normal and not-normal are, especially when it comes to communication and autism. These reasons are also why I thought it had philosophical worth and thought I would share it with my fellow graduate students.

Sorry, maybe I should have included this in the initial blog post, but I wanted to see what others thought about it before I put in my two (looks more like three or four) cents in. What about you Sara? What did you get out of the video, if anything? Or maybe you disagree with some of my thoughts above about the video or about the implicit value judgments I think are in inherent in certain words? Or maybe you think that all of this has no philosophical import at all and should be wiped clean from our ‘official’ philosophy blog and I should be banned forever from posting anything on in the future? (hopefully this is just a possible truth and not a necessary one, :) , <--my sad attempt at a modal joke)

Acidic Toxic Waste Movie Dream

So these guys are in this military installation, which I guess later turns out to be a military coimplex, I don’t realyknow and fseth green is one of the two male characters in this facility, lot’s of white and lots of official looking white shit, they are repairing this acid leak or txic waste leak on the bottom of the floor, then we cut to this scene where somebody puts this shit in what turns outto be the water supply but at the same time, also right above seth green and his partner, , after they are done repoairing the hole in the floor caused by this acidic toxic waste wstuff, the other guys notices stuff is on his clothes, and they look up and see that the stuff from the leak they just repaired is now leaking through the floor above them, so because of this, they panic and start running and seth pulls the fire alarm and they run like what happening is going to be the end of the world, they finally escape the compund after yelling and screamoing their way out of it, I guess they tell bosses and peole around them what is going on while they are running away, telling everybody they need to evacuate, we cut to another scene and they are on their roof using a telescope to check out what is going on at the facility and I guess all the military people that start showing up there surprise them and they think, man, this must be getting serious, a helicopter is flying aaround and I guess it spots them for some reason, I guess they are either not supposed to be watching this facility the way they are but I think the real reason is these official people want to talk to them about what happened because they were the first to notice it, a helicopter lands and people get out to talk to them, but then we cut tot another scene and they are skeet shoting with shotguns somewhere, having a good ol time, discussing what ht efuck is going on, and then the weather starts acting up and they see this huge tornado begin to form right in front of them, like only a few hundred feet away, so of course they start freaking out and get in their car to drive away, barely avoiding this super tornado that forms very close to them, but then they are in this military complex parking lot, another military complex and they have to go up this ramp and out the door closing white door from both sides to get out and official peole are chasing them and right when they get to the top of the ramp and are about the make it out the door closes and they are trapped, then since they can’t leave they get out of the car and with these official people, go into this complex because now everybody realizes things are so fucked that this is like their only chance to survive, and the guy at the door, who later goes kinda crazy, is the warden from the shawshank redemption, I just went on imdb and found out his name is Bob Gunton, so then after we enter this facility, it is like we are in a regular house and I guess this gunton’s family is there, chilling out, waiting for the end of the world because of this acidic toxic leak which I think they are finally realizing is in the water supply because of something that happened when they used the water in that house, so they are finally realizing that this stuff is going to affect peole for miles and miles in every direction, so seth green starts to kinda freak out and then they hear something on the roof and then a big concrete balls, a wreacking ball, comes through the roof and basically lands on the leg of gunton’s son, everybody tries to rescue him but the balls are coming down periodically and another one falls on him which injures him severely, I go into the other room and start running around and looking at the ceiling to avoid these concrete wreaking balls that are falling from the sky because of the bad weather caused by this acidic toxic waste that has seeped into the water supply from some shady organization and I’m running around for like a minute and then I go to the other part of the house and then the dream is basically over and I wake up and I think to myself a few things, that was a really vivid dream, it totally had a movie feel to it, with seth green and bob gunton being in it, and for some reason I felt like I should write it down, probably inspired by both Cheryl writing her dreams down and the fact that I read a few of them a few days ago and I thought this movie actually made sense when I first woke up so I thought, hey, maybe one day this could actually come to fruition, but now after writing it down I don’t think that this is the case, I think I’m gonna put this on my blog and then go back to bed, but I also think that this is the first dream I’ve ever written down like this, right when I wake up, not even for the day, but right when I wake up after the dream is over and feel it’s important enough and I remember enough of it to write it down, also, thinking about it now, I think it may be an analogy for global warming, man pollutes earth, in this case the water supply, man get’s freaked out about it and then weather starts happening from the movie the day after tomorrow, anwyas, I’m getting tired againso I’m gonna go back to bed, goodnite

Trevor's Wisdom

Philo Sophia, the love of wisdom, not of knowledge, not of science, not of logic, of wisdom, wisdom, but what is wisdom one might ask, I think wisdom is how to live life, isn’t that what wisdom is, isn’t that why they call stuff like ecclesiastes and proverbs wisdom literature, when was the last time anybody called any philosophy of mind textbook wisdom literature, it’s not wisdom, but this is what philosophy is now, it’s not the love of wisdom anymore, it’s just another scientific endeavor, what is the value of living your entire life reading books and learning all about stuff and being professionally successful and being totally influential in a field, if you don’t know how to live life or don’t have any wisdom about life, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now and I think it is something that hasn’t sat right with me since I got to graduate school. I was writing an article for the blog called the value of analytic philosophy and my roomate tedla loves analytic philosophy and thinks that anything older than 5 years has no more philosophical value, maybe that’s a mischaracterization, but I see this same attitude in all of the philosophers here, the so called professional philosophers, tim ripping on derrida, Quentin calling all of modern philosophy pop philosophy because they were not smart enough to get into scholastic universities, I guess there are a couple of issues here, I’ll try to name them one by one, in a totally analytic way, hah!
1) what value is it to have a theory or a philosophy, like Quentin claims this scholastic stuff is that is totally technical and very very rigorous if nobody except a very small select group of people can understand it. That is why Quentin said that scholastic philosophy died out, because it got so rigorous and so technical and so sophisticated that nobody could understand that. Does that have any value, is that even philosophy, is wisdom supposed to be that sophisticated that nobody can understand it. No, I think I agree with marie here, wisdom is supposed to be simple, not simple in that everybody understands it, but simple in that although not a lot of people understand it, once they understand it, they think, wow, that’s kinda obvious, why didn’t I think of that before. So I guess what I’m tryin to say is that etiquette is philosophy, etiquette is how to live life and lessons on how to live life is wisdom and thus, etiquette is philosophical wisdom, let’s move on to the second question
2) because philosophy is the love of wisdom and is supposed to be the study of wisdom and not of science, is analytic philosophy even philosophy? It chops the world up into little pieces and trust me, I think that in a way it has value because in order to understand the world, at least on some level, we need to chop it up into little pieces, isn’t tha twhat thscietific method does and what analytic philosophy does. But then I guess the question is is that philosophy or is it just science, the science of mind, the science of meaning, the science of meta science,
3) geez, I had all these thoughts, but now they escapte me for some reason, I guess I think of Quentin, I was over at Quentin’s house today with tedla and his house is a fucking mess, he hasn’t eaten in like three days, he was telling us how doctors years ago diagnosed him with faminism or something, that he is constantly in a starved state and close to dying because he is famished, and I guess he would be one of the first to say that what he is doing isn’t philosophy but is physics, but all the stuff that I’ve read of him according to the above definition, really isn’t philosophy. What wisdom can one glean about life from the kalaam cosmological argument, from an infinite number of infinities, from quantum mechanics, from any of these so called philosophical disciplines? I guess then according to this definition, what would count as philosophy is ethics, definitely, because it is about what is right and wrong and that directly relates to life, etiquette, because that also relates to life, probably health class, that that also relates to life, but does metaphysics relate to life, or more specifically living the good, virtuous, wise life? I don’t think it does, but maybe I’m wrong. Doesn’t epistemology relate to life, I guess maybe a little bit, but do we really need to be clear on internalist externalist justification in order to live the good life? What about lingusitics and the philosophy of language, truth and meaning, do these directly relate on how to live the good life? What about philosophy of mind? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a metaphysics and philosophy of mind major and I love natural theology stuff and I’m sure I’mm gonna love modal logic and I already like logic, but I guess I’m having a hard time seeing how some of this stuff relates to living the good life. I wonder if Quentin is living the good and virtuous life? He so wrapped up inn his studies and doesn’t even have time to eat, I think that is being downright unphilosophical, living in a house that is a complete pig sty (thanks for the term mom) is not loving wisdom, I guess we need to make a distinction between truth and wisdom, tedla talked about philosophy being the search for truth, but technically, it’s not the search for truth, it’s the love of wisdom, I think I’m gonna be done writing here for a little while, my inspiration has run out and I think it’s time for me to go to bed. I’m totally getting tired. I also don’t think I’m gonna smoke what’s next to me either, I’m going to bed and if I smoke that I’ll be up for another few hours and I need to get to bed because I have modal logic to learn about tomorrow. I guess that’s it for tonight, but I think I’m gonna incorporate some of that stuff into my the value of analytic philosophy blog that I’m putting together for the wmu blog. But this is a good start and I’ll post this on my blog just because

Ibn Rushd's Monopsychism

So I'm looking for the truth conditions of the oridnary language indicative conditional 'If A, then C' according to the possible worlds account and I just happen to run across our old friend Ibn Rushd (commonly known in the West as Averroes). So I am looking at this philosophy and run across this idea that the soul is divided into two parts: one individual, and one divine; the individual soul is not eternal; and most importantly for me, that all humans at the basic level share one and the same divine soul, which I come to find out is an idea known as monopsychism. So I go to that page and learn that:


Monopsychism is the belief that all humans share one and the same eternal soul, mind or intellect and that it is a doctrine of Buddhism, Sibghatullah, and Averroism, and is also a part of Rastafarian beliefs.


I guess you could probably include the Christian gnostics in that category as well, at least on Freke and Gandy's interpretation of gnosticism. I am also of a monopsychistic persuasion. Either that, or the idea of the World-Soul or Super-Soul, what I call the God-Soul, but if either one of these specific ideas is true and the other is false, does it matter, isn't the point the oneness and connection of the soul, whether we all share the same one or whether all our souls are connected and combine to form the God-Soul? I'll leave that one for you to decide, I've got to get back to work!

Unitarian Universalist Wisdom

I found this quote on this Unitarian Universalist website, specifically right here
and thought it was good enough to post because it is totally what I believe and have
believed for a while now, or at least since the night happened.  I guess that I just
don't believe that the messenger was the message, suprisingly, especially in this case.
I believe that the message was seperate from the messenger and this is obviously why
I like the below quote. I guess for more traditional christians, the messenger was the
message and this is how I am different from them. Anyways, Enjoy! 

“This is a free-thinking church where you are free to search for your own truth
and try to get back to the teachings OF Jesus not teachings ABOUT Jesus.”