Dear & honourable GEA + 🐵🙉🙊🙈🐒 readers,

Now that the Microsoft electro-mechanical device is ‘kaput’ for the time being at least I’ve old essays i’ll ‘pump’ out unedited to your proverbial door thereafter in the ‘micro-farious’ permutations of household life insinuating their ‘selves’ into your very own spaces of micro– con-sheusness (which evidently means wild social darwinist heterosexual consciousness for lads & men – we’re all going to be so relived when we leave behind that grotty Hollywood Feminisation Phase of History aren’t we?) for perusal slash mental ingestion on a proverbial scale of one to ten – you’re lucky we don’t use Trackers it’s just that everybody else does because once were liberals, thence socialist dialectitians-with-issues we are all advertising salespersons now so gotcha anyway, this little ‘bottler’ in macro beyond meso-consciousness was generated on 26th April ’24 (I’m informed).

There’ll be 3 more old such documents released each day or so now till I’m up to scratch with long essay publication.

John

Great Sudden Land/ Long White Crowds &c 🦘🇦🇺🌏

In the last 150 years the world has warmed on average by 1°C and our atmosphere now contains concentrations of carbon dioxide that have not been equalled for millions of years. We are today perilously close to Tipping Points, that once passed will send global temperatures spiralling catastrophically higher.

If we continue on our current path we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature, and ocean food chains – and if the natural world can no longer support the most basic of our needs, then much of the rest of civilisation will quickly break down.

Please make no mistake: “climate change” – MANMADE GLOBAL HEATING – is the greatest threat to security that modern – sorry, any – humans have ever faced.

So as we all must immediately endeavour to “put aside childish things” – those of us who are male and might care to be remembered as real men and not postmodern Foucaultian post-fact tits once we’re gone here’s a hunk of popular debate amongst the aristoi intelligentsia of the City of London from, say, 1860..

CR RV Sampson’s profoundly alarming read on a spellbinding dialectical read of Christian religious belief animating hatred, violence, exclusion, colonisation and ultimately genocide.

So here you go you @Toyota #Yakuza #Camry #Crows from Adelaide and crazy-arsed Australian lawyers …

“Once again we discern the familiar argument, caught and ironically pinioned by Matthew Arnold, that there is no unity of truth binding upon men, but only a plurality of echoing voices. Life ceases to be a challenge to evoke a response from our highest selves. It is whittled down to the level of a shabby mart where bargains are struck to obtain an accommodation between competing interests. Arnold continues:

“And, on the other hand, we have another philosophical theory rife among us, to the effect that without the labour of perverting ourselves by custom or example to relish right reason, but by continuing all of us to follow freely our natural taste for the bathos, we shall, by the mercy of Providence, and by a kind of natural tendency of things, come in due time to relish and follow right reason.

“The argument is the familiar one that reliance on our common frailty combined with a comfortable belief in Providence will better serve our welfare in this world than any strenuous and awkward striving after self-perfection.

“The argument of our contemporary apologists for the contradictions of our liberal, Christian, nuclear-armed fortress bear a striking resemblance to the ‘philosophical theory’ Arnold was at such pains to castigate. The followingquotation is the concluding extract from a review by one of the most influential political theorists in Britain of the doyen of political thought on the other side of the Atlantic:But central to his entire discourse is Dr Niebuhr’s justly celebrated view of man as being doomed to imperfection, unable and unwilling to face this truth, and lured by a fatal mirage of an earthly paradise conceived in terms incompatible with human capacities, engaged in destroying the real world in which alone at least some of his values could be realised. It is the eloquence and insight with which he urges h is central thesis – that man’s idealism and belief in the perfectibility of his species, so far from promoting either freedom or democracy, can be their worst enemy, and that it is man’s realistic vision of his own imperfection that alone makes life tolerable on earth – that has made Dr Niebuhr one of the most interesting and influential thinkers of our day¹

“The ‘original sin’ part of the argument is familiar enough. The theology apart, it reiterates the dictum that you can’t change institutions until you have changed human nature, and combines with it a resigned assurance that human nature is eternally ‘doomed.’ On this diagnosis the world suffers on the one habd from a dearth of people endowed with a ‘realistic vision’ of man’s imperfection, and on the other from a glut of self-satisfying, altruistic wretches striving to improve the lot of their fellows. In fact, the remedy for the evil consequences that flow from violentintolerance is twofold: those who provoke it by their selfish behaviour should be rebuked, while those who seek to remedy injustice should confine themselves to non-violent resistance. But the ‘realistic’ are precluded from making those simple observations, since the privilleged would be the first to be convicted by them. THey accordingly prefer generalities which purport to demonstrate some mysterious connection between good and evil – a paradox whereby the true welfare of men is put in jeopardy by their seeking to develop their own best selves; and their real interests are best served by a faithful reliance upon their wonted compromises.

“It is time to turn from what Arnold termed ‘genial but pernicious anodynes’ to conclude with a brief restatement of the positive response with which this book has attempted to concern itself. We may concede that there may be a relatively unchanging human nature. The important thing is that there is no fixed pattern or level of human behaviour. What can be attained by one individual, a microcosm of human nature, cannot in principle dbed excluded as beyond the reach of others. human behaviour is made up of many elements, but the standard of aspiration which is accepted is crucially significant. And this is subject to influence by others. Nothing is more potent than the general level of expectation, accepted by those we respect and in whose eyes we wish to stand well. The whole purpose of the ‘detached rea;ist’s’ descri[ption of how the world functions is to discourage us from adopting different standards, denounced as utopian and disastrous. In practice, people frequently appear equally hostile to those who describe common practice truthfully and to those who are uncompromising in their moral aspiration. If the latter rtuns the risk of being labelled a ‘prig,’ the former is assured of the title of ‘cynic.’ Truth of description undiluted by wishful thinking is a necessary safeguard against false optimism. But to allow our moral standards to be determined by the generally accepted level of behaviour is to put ourselves at the mercy of those of least repute. For they too affect tyhe general standards of behaviour. An average is made up of the worst as well as the best. However difficult it may be to practice what we preach, there is no justification for preaching down to our standard of practice. For incessant struggle is a necessary part of the moral life. Phrases such as ‘not allowing the best to be the enemy of the good’ shpould put us on our guard, lest the purpose be to provide an excuse for doing that which is easiest. Circumstances may be stubborn, the dilemma fraught with anguish, the will driven beyond endurance. The really serious evil begins when we begin to persuade ourselves that what was done in extenuating circumstances was on that account the right thing to do. To engage in self-deception leads to a new and lower standard of value. Another common plea of the devil’s advocate is to reproach the moral aspirant with his fallibility. I those who would seek to raise our standards can themselves be shown to be less than perfect, our own lack of effort is obscurely felt to have been vindicated. Archbishop Tillotson once saw fit to remind us that there is ambition in declining preferment as well as in seeking it.He may well have been right, but the remark would have come better from one less exalted.

“As regards the facts of inequalitywhich are allegedly inherent in human nature, no one wishes to deny the obvious truth that some people are more beautiful or more clever or strong than other people. Realists and pessimists often seem to suggest that their opponents are blind to these elemental facts, and thus distract attention from arguments which are as relevant as they are rarely met, They need to be stated briefly;

“(1) Difference of sta

“ …

“When a man like William Morris beheld the human consequences of the inequalities of condition of the industrial society he inhabited, the spectacle was intolerably painful to him driven by compassion and anger he found himself impelled to leave the artists comfortable retreat for the inconvenience atmosphere of a street corner has things in his determination to do something to fight the evil how he asked can we help the victims of oppression at the same time with ourselves of the guilt of participation in the injustice and he answered the question in this way by announcing our class and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the classes casting in our lot with the victims With those who are condemned at the best to lack of education refinement leisure pleasure and renowned and at the worst to a life lower than that of the most brutal of savages in order that the system of competitive, this may endure..

^“1 Isaiah Berlin, review of Reinholt Niebuhr’s Nation and Empires, The Guardian 23 Nov 1960”

So now, dear reader, you get what I get up to in the Mount Barker Community Library when Mr Musk and highly electorally contestant The Hon Clare O’Neil MP who never seems to get any actual work done decide that I’ve been just too naughty and need my @HP and 7s shut down for a couple of weeks eek.

It’s our country and we’re having it back*

John BLUNDELL

Philosophy of Science 🇦🇺

*original usage, probably global but who cares about that historical-lines neoclassical Romance Era 1500 -2000 mindf.ck, Green Economist worldwide newsletter 1995