determinism as apologetics

If I'm talking to someone about ethics, it means that two or more systems are in contact, communicating, each to some extent open to the other's influence. Even lecturers frame their speeches for an audience, while hermits frame their speeches for a superego. Ethics is process long before it can get to anything we'd consider principles and when we do get there, those principles are never anything more than process. So as long as we're talking ethics, we're necessarily capable of change. In fact, we're necessarily changing.

When determinism shows up as an ethical argument, on the other hand, it uses an imagined past, which appears fixed and sterile to these visual brains of ours, to make the case, in a present in which we're as free as it's possible to be, in favor of (ironically, freely) chaining ourselves to a misguided understanding of temporality that has the effect of favoring repetition of the same. When a determinist, in such a case, says that the system is (relatively) closed, they're saying, in a free, evolving conversation, that they want it to be closed. But it isn't closed at all, clearly, because they're involved in an ethical argument when they say it.

An example. Obama couldn't help being what he is. He was raised this way and that with this DNA and he met these and those people and certain ideas mechanistically influenced his brain and so he couldn't possibly be anything other than he currently is, and therefore, while you can complain about the consequences of his actions, you can't complain about his intentions. A weaker, more common, version that comes up is that, as President, Obama is subject to systemic constraints that prevent from doing all the groovy things you silly dreamers want him to do. If he calls for cutting military spending in half, he'll get assassinated, impeached, or otherwise dethroned. It's a closed system. His hands are tied. Therefore, goes the argument, you should stop acting as if you, I, and Obama are each perfectly free systems open to other perfectly free systems right now. You should, says one free system to another about another, act on a theory of determinism that is falsified by this conversation. You should act as if the repetition of the same is a foregone conclusion. Determinism, in this context, is an argument that urges you to refrain from your dissent against the status quo because neither you nor I are free and implores you to freely accept this and change your course of action! This is not in fact a war between determinism and freedom but between attempted repetition and attempted change.

The status quo is a choice. Pretending that it's a closed system is a choice. Using determinism as an excuse to support a psychopath is a choice. Refusing to withdraw support is a choice. I'm talking to you right now, apologist, and there's a fair chance you're choosing to try to repair the damage I've done to your system, though I hope you're choosing differently. 

donkey pyramid scheme

There's a girl in a tower, against her will. Half the townspeople, the bad ones, are glad to have her there. The other half, the good people, want to rescue her.

When the girl cries, diamonds fall from her eyes. She's attached to a device that causes her severe pain, and in doing so, produces diamonds, which are funneled down from the tower regularly and enjoyed by the bad people only. 

There's a button halfway up the tower. It's the one and only pain button, and the more it is pushed, the more the diamonds flow. If it's not pushed, there's no pain.

Logistical considerations permit only one way to produce the diamonds -- to form a human pyramid and have one person at the top push the button repeatedly. 

The pyramid itself is closed off from view with a black tarp. Sometimes the pyramiders come out and give speeches but there's no way to verify what exactly is happening. What can be seen is that the diamonds keep coming. 

Half of the pyramiders work on behalf of the good guys. The other half work for the bad guys.

The current button pusher is a good guy. But the diamonds keep coming at the same rate as before, when a bad guy was pushing the button. 

"If the diamonds keep coming, that means he's pushing the button!," cries the town lunatic. "That means he's a bad guy!"

"You fucking lunatic," says a good guy. "Of course the button pusher isn't perfect..." 

"My criticism is not that he's imperfect, it's that he's a bad guy," replies the lunatic.

"Whatever. He doesn't want to push the button but if he doesn't, worse things will happen. They'll kick him off the top of the pyramid and then a bad guy will push the button more."

"Do you have any concrete evidence to support that?," asks the lunatic. 

"He says he doesn't want to push the button. Well, he implies it, at least, sometimes."

"But judging from the flow of diamonds, he's pushing it as vigorously as the previous guy. That makes him a bad guy."

"No. Good guys can only push the pain button against their own will. Which means that the bad guy influence is strong in there, which means that the pragmatic, logical, sane approach is to try to get more good guys in the pyramid so our good guy button pusher will be able to get away with incrementally reducing his button pushing. Eventually, we'll have no button pushing and no diamonds."

"But you'll still have the pyramid? And anyway, there are already lots of 'good guys' in there. And you keep sending them in there and they keep holding up the pyramid so that a button pusher can push the button, which you admit is a bad thing to do."

"I don't know where you're going with this. I mean, OK, it's bad to push the button. But what else are we going to do? If we don't do it they'll do it worse."

"No, they won't. I thought we established that."

 "OK, smart guy. Do you have any better ideas?" 

"Yes, stop supporting bad guys."

"But I don't support bad guys' button pushing, I support their non-button pushing. By definition, I support good things."

The lunatic shook his head in disbelief. "OK, just for the sake of argument, let's say the current button pusher, who chose to be the guy who pushes the torture button, is somehow anti-button pushing. He's not, but let's say he is. Even in that case, instead of talking about how 'he can't help it,' if you really cared about the girl, you'd describe exactly how evil it is that he's pushing the button in spite of himself instead of making excuses for him. You'd actually make it more likely for him to stop if you'd just say 'button-pushing is evil and he's pushing the button.' Which makes me wonder..."

"Talking about him negatively would mess up our plan of getting more good guys in the pyramid so that he can get away with incrementally reducing his button pushing. And at least I have a plan."

"Your plan is to torture a little girl."

"What!? I'm offended. I want her not to be tortured." 

"Yes, you say that but...hey, is that a diamond necklace you're wearing?" 

get out of my way, i've got a race to win

In a dualism born of the self-promoting insistence of locales -- that here, I, and this must persist because I'm attached to it -- the badness of the one implies the righteousness of the other, necessarily, as the localist, a pragmatic box-preserver, first closes the circle -- certainly in theory, to some extent in practice -- then harps incessantly about the evil of the circle's only other member (who is outside the small circle, inside the big circle). Your Democrats and Republicans fit the bill, to be sure, but the term foreigner will be applied everywhere to indicate those who are not us -- to the person indoctrinated on the archipelago called Japan, the American and the Iraqi (gaikokujin, foreigner) are more similar to each other (on this logic, the same, to be precise) than they are to the Japanese (nihonjin) -- so even the multi-party system is essentially dualistic.

So when I hear complaints about the (real, I think) pollution from China (called "PM," I assume for "particulate matter," pronounced "pee-emmu"), apart from the fact that the complainers wear Chinese-manufactured clothing and are themselves implicated, it's clearly driven by own-back-patting pro-Japanism, as opposed to a concern about human well-being. Because if it were the latter, the first response would be "what can we do to address this problem?" and the answer would involve consuming less, among possibly other things. Instead, the thinking jumps to China equals bad and the worse China is, the better Japan is, and the more the Chinese threat needs to be dealt with. The Japanese nationalist, who is pretty much everyone in Japan, opposes evils like Chinese pollution the way Republicans and Democrats oppose spying and torturing when the other is doing it.

For the localist, everything must be sacrificed to save the box. It's the only thing we've got.

thinking outside the box

Those who exhort you to think outside the box invariably want you to do the very opposite. They do not want you to escape its confines, limitations, demands. They want you to go outside only so that you can support it from out there. They want you to hold it up, increase the likelihood of its repetition with greater strength and size, send it into the future in better condition than it would otherwise be in. They want you to serve it.

And since the exhortation always emanates from those whose well-being is bound up with that of the box, "think outside the box" means nothing more or less than "serve me." So after you say "go to hell," or something perhaps more severe, I'd suggest rejecting the premises of the box and exposing it for the self-serving monstrosity it is, with the aim of making it disappear.

Instead of boxes, we should be blowing bubbles, appreciating their graceful, aimless dance, headed absolutely nowhere as they finally, predictably, happily fail to withstand the tension of their own absurdity.

the real social contract

A desert tribe finds an oasis. One tribesman says, "we need to manage the water supply properly," takes out a gun, and proceeds to confiscate it, promising that he'll distribute it wisely. He puts a fence around it and puts a tap on it. There's now a single point of access, which he controls. The water is distributed.*

A dissenter takes his share, but says "I object."

"You contradict yourself!," cries the bossman. "You complain, and yet you take the water."

The dissenter replies, "I did not agree to the original theft. It was you who created this choice between submission and death."

*unevenly, of course, but that's a secondary issue here

UPDATE:
It's true that the above example of dissent is that in a pretty mild form and that there are other, better options, like open rebellion or finding another way to get water. But as long as I'm wearing factory-made clothing, I'm taking the water and in many cases, I'd be stupid not to. And it would be irresponsible not to speak against the original theft in the meantime.

advanced obamapologetics

From "The Other 98%" via "Truths2SetUsFree-from the lies of mis-leaders":

Each panel taken alone is accurate. Murder? Yes, and how many people are honest enough to call it that? Same for crimes against humanity. And together, the panels make a good point, as well. The contrast between "Bush murdered and is now, relatedly, free" and "Manning exposed murder and is now, as a result, unfree" is 99% of an excellent point. And yet, given the context, it's still a heaping pile of humanshit.

Where a beginner Obamapologist thinks "if Obama does it, it is good" and, so, turns Obama's ongoing assault on Manning into some kind of positive in itself (national security! strong leadership!), an advanced Obamapologist asks how they can use the evilness of something Obama has done to promote Obamaism, how they can use Obama's actions, by virtue of how evil they are, as an argument for Obama. So they wonder, specifically in the Manning case, "how can we reap political profits from our imprisonment and torture of a whistleblower; how can we milk Bradley Manning even more, so that we not only abuse him physically but also use him as a tool by which we give ourselves more power so that we can do the same sorts of things to future Bradley Mannings?"

I don't imagine they think it through so explicitly, at the clearest levels of consciousness, but how else could someone get to a juxtaposition of Bush and Bradley Manning, sans Obama than to act on such motives?

UPDATE:
First, Clinton killed half a million civilians, mostly children, with sanctions and bombs. Then, the Iraq invasion of 2003. What a disaster, right? Right? Vote Republican!

murderers and their athletic supporters