More on backwards logic.

note taking

I'll post this here since it's as far as I can get, on this site, from the Social Darwinism of Tyler Cowen.

Still nearly every comment here is backwards: par for the course for the intellectual life on the WWW. "The Primacy of Politics" or of "ideas" is a peculiarly modern peculiarly American idée fixe-

“In America, a nation that hates politics (and seems to hate them more with each election) how do we convince its people that politics is their salvation?”

-that is to say it is no more or less than the mirror image of the anti-politics of our cultural life. If any of you were more interested in observation than in intellectual object creation you'd recognize that ideas are generated by or within systems of communication and culture, not the reverse. Social Democracy is not an invention it is a fact of social behavior that was first seen in it's latency, then described, and finally defended. Invention is the dream of Randians, Chicago School Liberals and vulgar Marxists. The Scandinavian "model" is no more of an invention than Swedish. And as I keep trying to remind people, Esperanto was a failure.

The questions -I hesitate to say 'choices'- for the future are whether we get social democracy or hyper-capitalism. You could call the web an example of the sort of communicative network that would foster the former, but ironically or not in the Anglo American world the people who are most involved in the web are more comfortable with the latter. But as technology becomes normalized the romance and futurist logic always fade.

The lack of imagination of those who prize imagination over observation never ceases to amaze me.