Tomorrow.
Then what?
Ok thats good news.
Pezer and I were going to pick him up and all that we thought but things went the other way. An other way.
Anyway I hope he shows up online. And he should write a book now, for real.
Like
Being In Prison Under Trump
Regardless of what it is about so it sells.
Free advice
invite me for champagne on the jet later
Sneak philosophy into the public discourse.
Anyway someone a few years back said that Zoots prison writings were book-worthy, and then Zoot figured it for a joke.
I don’t know why.
I don’t think I know of a single novel or book that is truly about prison. And yet imprisonment is a pretty default condition.
For the record: Lampert did agree. Also, I don’t think Socrates believed in the Platonic Ideas, and I’m pretty sure Lampert doesn’t, either.
plato was correct in his assertion that nobody intentionally does ‘wrong’, and that if they knew what was ‘right’ they would do it. what he wasn’t correct about was his assertion that there IS ‘what is good’, in his platonic ideal absolutist sense.
what people do is neither right nor wrong, but only effective or not. the efficacy of action is its motivation, something that is mostly unconscious, not some conscious intention to do what is ‘right’.
the spinozean capacity to act is the only feature of intentionality that is real. what is ‘moral’ is the increase and improvement of one’s effectiveness, one’s movement, one’s activity, and there exists a plane of immanence in which everyone (individual quanta of power) interacts as this happens.
how can ‘that blockhead john stuart mill’ (nietzsche) know what will result from an action when he cannot see three steps ahead? and the pragmatists? the ‘cash value’ of an act can never be determined; when do i cash in my act? what i call true has worked for me today… but what about tomorrow, or the next day, or the next? what if something bad happens to me next week as a result of what i did today?
plato was right and wrong as long as you understand that he didn’t believe there was a universally applicable moral criterion for all people. he BEGAN his moral theory with the premise that there is no equality. the aristocrat is not bound by the same conditions as the pleb.
and kant? pfft. one has duties only towards one’s equals (nietzsche).
MS
Why don’t you start a current Zoot thread for his most recent thoughts to strike up conversations in if that is the purpose of these quotes.
Zoot Allures wrote:
only two people wrote me the entire time i was in the joint. turd and phoneutria.
I wrote you a letter, Zoot, that was supposed to be forwarded through Phoneutria (she thanked me for the receipt of it), but either A) it wasn’t forwarded or B) it was that forgettable.
MS
Why don’t you start a current Zoot thread for his most recent thoughts to strike up conversations in if that is the purpose of these quotes.Zoot Allures wrote:
only two people wrote me the entire time i was in the joint. turd and phoneutria.I wrote you a letter, Zoot, that was supposed to be forwarded through Phoneutria (she thanked me for the receipt of it), but either A) it wasn’t forwarded or B) it was that forgettable.
Awww Wendy, B) sounds awful… let’s hope it’s not B).
Those who didn’t write, would continually send salutations and etc. which Phon passed on to Zoot… but I guess it’s not as memorable as letters.
MS
Why don’t you start a current Zoot thread for his most recent thoughts to strike up conversations in if that is the purpose of these quotes.
He asked me to post those messages in this thread. I’ll ask him what he thinks of creating a separate thread for them.
Zoot Allures wrote:
only two people wrote me the entire time i was in the joint. turd and phoneutria.I wrote you a letter, Zoot, that was supposed to be forwarded through Phoneutria (she thanked me for the receipt of it), but either A) it wasn’t forwarded or B) it was that forgettable. #-o
If I understood correctly, he only got to read those messages after he got out.
He asked me to post those messages in this thread. I’ll ask him what he thinks of creating a separate thread for them.
Just out of curiosity…
Why is he asking you to post them here instead of posting them himself?
“I don’t think Socrates believed in the Platonic Ideas”
in the meno dialogue, socrates claims that we can’t acquire knowledge through learning. he held the platonic thesis that one cannot learn a truth that one does not already know since they would not recognize it as a result of their not knowing it. and you are familiar with the theory of recollection; one cannot learn what one does know since they already know it. socrates concludes that we don’t learn anything- we remember what we already know. such knowledge must be of the platonic forms or universals, according to them both.
am i mistaken?
He’s not, except that’s only the exoteric message of the Meno. Finding its esoteric message would require close examination of the Greek text(s). Strauss held lecture courses on it and probably also wrote about it, but he himself spoke and wrote exoterically, so reading his writings and lecture transcripts would only make the task so much easier.
“plato was correct in his assertion that nobody intentionally does ‘wrong’, and that if they knew what was ‘right’ they would do it.”
you might get the wrong idea about this statement in its context so i wanna explain what’s going on here, i think.
‘wrong’ does not mean- or doesn’t have to mean, i should say- what is considered disobedience to laws or mores or codes of conduct, for these things cannot get past the is/ought problem… the naturalistic fallacy.
to act ‘right’ requires that one knows what is ‘right’ first, and, since one cannot know what is ‘right’, one can’t act competently. there’s a hidden premise here. only competent action can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ action. having knowledge of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in an imperative sense is not possible anyway, so there’s no platonic ‘idea’ of what is right and wrong. even if there was it would be inaccessable.
when someone justifies what they do, so that they can believe they are doing ‘good’, they cannot ever know they ought to do what they’re doing (as an imperative). it could be the case that what they’re doing is actually wrong and only seems right.
insofar that plato meant by ‘right action’ an ethically motivated action, he was confused. central to his idea of ethics was the notion that a person must understand what they are doing… or as they put it, ‘giving an account’ of the reasons why one acts as they do… else they are acting autonomously and arbitrarily… and such acts can’t be moral.
knowing what ‘ought’ to be done is required to qualify an act as moral and therefore capable of being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the first place, see.what plato meant, but didn’t know he could only mean, was that people do what they think they should do, and in this very act of intention and purpose do they justify the act itself. being ‘right’ is only to have comprehension and understanding of one’s reasons as far as one understands one’s reasons.
petitio principii, i know. there’s no other way to say it without writing a book on phenomenology, and i won’t do that.
think of voluntary behavior as hypothetically categorical in the way that it is end-oriented and motivistic, meaning that an action is qualified to be called ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ insofar as that means competently or incompetently… purposely or arbitarily.everyone acts ‘rightly’ because they act willfully. they might regret what they did later, but that won’t be because they discovered the act was morally ‘wrong’. one can’t possibly know that so it’s a moot point.
the murderer who murders either murders because they were acting consciously and purposely and of their own volition, or because they were sleepwalking. the former is ‘right’ action, the latter, no action at all, and ‘wrong’ action is impossible.
Again, I’m not so sure that Plato was “confused” or didn’t know what “he could only mean”. Anyway, I guess I agree with the gist of this (though as Nietzsche says in BGE 32 one may also judge actions, not by their consequences or the intentions behind them, but by what’s unintentional about them). However, I think it doesn’t get us anywhere, since there are then only right actions or no actions. Now in my “Nature and God are History” OP, I made the following suggestion:
“What morality, then, can be based on all this? To be as noble as nature, we have to be indifferent as to the direction of obedience; the old custom, religion, laws, state is nobler than the young, as long as it endures.”
This suggests that “wrong” does mean “what is considered disobedience to laws or mores or codes of conduct”… I’ve explored this idea further in my "Insightful analysis of Dawn 113 thread:
“With this, we arrive at the book’s fundamental idea, that moral goodness is only obedience to custom (aphorism 9). And we may consider obedience to custom natural, no matter how ‘unnatural’, how arbitrary a custom it is: after all, we can conceive of physical laws as laws that are always obeyed and hence completely natural (=physical). […] Nature is beautiful and good and just because it obeys[.]”
Compare my “Nietzschean Feminism” OP, though:
“The only true source of morality is human will. Acknowledge this, affirm this, will this, and you’re on my side. Deny this, and you deserve to succumb to Islam or the like. At least Islam is a more consistent form of that denial. (The most consistent form is tribalism, e.g. pre-Babylonian Captivity Judaism. A return to that would be my second choice, after the Nietzschean enlightenment.)”
Mitra-Sauwelios:He asked me to post those messages in this thread. I’ll ask him what he thinks of creating a separate thread for them.
Just out of curiosity…
Why is he asking you to post them here instead of posting them himself?
He says he doesn’t want to come to ILP…
iambiguous: Mitra-Sauwelios:He asked me to post those messages in this thread. I’ll ask him what he thinks of creating a separate thread for them.
Just out of curiosity…
Why is he asking you to post them here instead of posting them himself?
He says he doesn’t want to come to ILP…
Any particular reason why?
Mitra-Sauwelios: iambiguous:Just out of curiosity…
Why is he asking you to post them here instead of posting them himself?
He says he doesn’t want to come to ILP…
Any particular reason why?
I’ll ask him, or rather he’ll read your question himself (he is lurking!).
Zoot Allures wrote:
that being said, when the criminal justice system betrays you, your social contract with the state is voided (see locke and hobbes). part of the civil contract is the obligation of government to behave itself. if it breaks the rules, you can break the rules. if you do not receive the rights, privileges, and luxuries of other citizens, you are no longer subject to society’s laws, ipso facto exacto.
Can anyone pinpoint the books (chapters, sections) that deal with this subject?
Thanks
derleydoo:Zoot Allures wrote:
that being said, when the criminal justice system betrays you, your social contract with the state is voided (see locke and hobbes). part of the civil contract is the obligation of government to behave itself. if it breaks the rules, you can break the rules. if you do not receive the rights, privileges, and luxuries of other citizens, you are no longer subject to society’s laws, ipso facto exacto.
Can anyone pinpoint the books (chapters, sections) that deal with this subject?
Thanks
according to hobbes, society is a compromise people enter into in order to achieve a state of peace that is otherwise impossible for life in a state of nature. the compromise, or ‘covenant’, consists of an agreement among people to follow certain rules and conventions imposed by a government.
so far there are two disagreements between hobbes and locke here; locke denies that the natural state of man was necessarily ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and short’, and locke does not agree that the ruler has absolute authority, as hobbes claimed. but for both, government should not be tyrannical.
the one exception to the absolute rule of the monarch, according to hobbes, is that the citizen retains natural rights that aren’t transferred by the covenant. in other words, since the subject has entered into the contract to protect and preserve his life, he can refuse to obey a sovereign when to do so would put him in danger. i was put into a kind of danger when i was wrongfully convicted of crimes i did not commit (long story).
locke claims the same thing, only civil disobedience would be against the elected, democratic government instead of the self imposed autocratic ruler.
in both models of government it is apparent that authority exists only insofar as it can function properly… and part of functioning properly involves competence and honesty of that government.
if, and when, a branch of government violates these terms, it forfeits its authority in principle. in my case, because of being charged and convicted of crimes i did not commit, the judicial branch of government has violated its terms, and as such becomes exempt. in other words, i have been emancipated from that civil contract as a result of this violation, and i no longer recognize the laws i am supposed to be bound to.
because of these wrongful convictions i no longer have many rights and privileges i once had… and since these rights and privileges were stripped from me unjustifiably, i respond by disregarding any punishments, penalties and restrictions i was once subject to. of course, i will follow laws sometimes only because breaking them might subject me to unwanted consequences, but not because i honor or respect such laws. if i can get around such laws and consequences i will not hesitate to do so.
in short, my entire contract with society has been cancelled (since 2007).
the crimes i mentioned above (breaking and entering into vehicles) is a kind of collateral damage that’s a consequence of my having to survive without being able to do so legally (working)… as that would risk my being arrested again, as i explained. perhaps i should have been given a medal for what i did instead of punishment? i could have very easily commited armed robbery, but i chose a nonviolent means of making money because i felt bad for having to steal shit from people in the first place.
it is unfortunate that this had to be done, and if citizens of this society object to what i have done… and they certainly do… they can complain to their criminal justice branch of government, since it is to blame.
when government betrays a citizen, that citizen is in principle justified in being disobedient and no longer acknowledging the sovereignty of government. that there will be ‘victims’ of his crimes is incidental/circumstantial.
there are three options for the citizens, that would prevent my crimes against them:
- force its government to expunge from my record the convictions i was not guilty of.
- destroy me
- join me
only these three options will prevent the citizens from becoming victims of my crimes.
Thank you for your very candid and informative response.
“i was put into a kind of danger when i was wrongfully convicted of crimes i did not commit (long story).”
I enjoy your writing - any time you wish to share your ‘long story’, I would be more than happy to ‘listen’.
Thanks again for your help.