Jon Cogburn's Blog

Judy Collins covered this song

I can't post it here; it's just too much worse than the Royal Shakespeare Company version, `a droite. Also check out Charlotte Courdet's great song at 6:40, mourning all that we once read in Rousseau.

Collins would have pulled it off if Tom Waits had organized the music. For all of Collins' mamoth skills (among other things, she discovered Leonard Cohen) the instrumentation on her cover masks over herky jerky syncopation of the original.

Anyhow, here's lyrics from the libretto, which I just ordered from Amazon.

4 years after the revolution
and the old kings execution
4 years after remember how
those portia took their final bow

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests and let then live on their fat

Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps up with his writing
Four years after the bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell

Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their ass

Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power why why why why why
Do they have the friends at the top

Why do they have the jobs at the top

We've got nothing always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes
Dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and
Holes in our clothes

South puts off rising again for yet another year

In THIS POST I discussed reasons why conservative Christians are far more likely to have various forms of long term brain degeneration.

The video at left, with pastor Dennis Terry (from Louisiana's own Greenwell Springs Baptist Church), Tony Perkins (formerly Louisiana Representative, currently president of the hate group "the Family Research Council"), and presidential candidate Rick Santorum beautifully illustrates the dangerous pathology that is conservative Christianity.

I hate that these hypocrites get away with speaking for me as a Christian or as a Southerner. I hate that they claim to speak for Jesus.

Compare what Terry says in this video about praying in public with what Jesus says:

5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Compare Terry's "Get out!" with the parable of the good samaritan or Jesus eating with and blessing prostitutes, adulterers, pagan soldiers and tax collectors. I mean, it's simply not possible for a non-brain damaged person to read the synoptic Gospels and claim to believe them while spouting Terry's dangerous nonsense.

As far as Santorum's cafeteria Catholocism, consider THIS LIST of Roman Catholic doctrines (also cf. Bobby Jindal, whose policies on unions directly contradict no less than five papal encyclicals):

1. So for instance, Pope John Paul II was against anyone going to war against Iraq I think you’ll find that Rick Santorum managed to ignore that Catholic teaching.

2.The Conference of Catholic Bishops requires that health care be provided to all Americans. I.e., Rick Santorum’s opposition to universal health care is a betrayal of the Catholic faith he is always trumpeting.

3. The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty for criminals in almost all situations. (Santorum largely supports executions.)

4. The US Conference of Bishops has urged that the federal minimum wage be increased, for the working poor. Santorum in the Senate repeatedly voted against the minimum wage.

5. The bishops want welfare for all needy families, saying “We reiterate our call for a minimum national welfare benefit that will permit children and their parents to live in dignity. A decent society will not balance its budget on the backs of poor children.” Santorum is a critic of welfare.

6. The US bishops say that “the basic rights of workers must be respected–the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions…”. Santorum, who used to be supportive of unions in the 1990s, has now, predictably, turned against them.

7. Catholic bishops demand the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Rick Santorum denies that there are any Palestinians, so I guess he doesn’t agree with the bishops on that one.

8. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops ripped into Arizona’s law on treatment of immigrants, Cardinal Roger Mahony characterized Arizona’s S.B. 1070 as “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” saying it is based on “totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources.” He even suggested that the law is a harbinger of an American Nazism! Santorum attacks ‘anchor babies’ or the provision of any services to children of illegal immigrants born and brought up in the US.

9. The Bishops have urged that illegal immigrants not be treated as criminals and that their contribution to this country be recognized.

10. The US Conference of Bishops has denounced, as has the Pope, the Bush idea of ‘preventive war’, and has come out against an attack on Iran in the absence of a real and present threat of an Iranian assault on the US. In contrast, Santorum wants to play Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and ride the rocket down on Isfahan himself.

One bit of good news is that I've noticed that my evangelical students and colleagues are now actually more likely to be left wing on all of the above issues, and others such as the usury that defines our civilization as well as the so-called "right to work" laws which are necessary part of hoovering wealth from the disappearing middle class up to the .01% (these laws unconstitutionally abrogate union's rights to make contracts, a right explicitly defended in the most recent encyclical on labor). So, at least with respect to educated people of good will, it is a mistake to equate either Roman Catholocism or evangelical christianity with hypocrites like Terry, Perkins, Jindal, and Santorum. This is a huge sea change from a decade ago.

But let's be honest. The flip side of this is that most people are neither educated or of good will (we Prebyterians call this "the depravity of man" and it's true), which means there will always be marks for the kind of religiouss hypocrites that Jesus condemned in his own day.

possibly the first time I've been actually proud of being an analytic philosopher

Tremendous article HERE about high school students learning philosophy in Brazil. I realize that reporters can get a lot of this stuff wrong, but even if the thing is only half correct, then the picture of the influence of some French thought on dominant strains of academic philosophy in Brazil seems absolutely vile to me.

The influence:

According to the narrative I hear time and again, philosophy started in Brazil in the 1930s, when French scholars founded the philosophy department at the University of São Paulo. They put an end to the “dilettante period” characterized by the oratory of lawyers and the scholasticism of priests that had dominated Brazilian philosophy until then. Among the French scholars were Martial Guéroult and Victor Goldschmidt, who taught that doing philosophy is no longer possible, only history of philosophy: reconstructing systems of thought through a painstaking analysis of their immanent structure. Since then, studying the history of Western philosophy has been the paradigm of serious philosophy in Brazil.

O.K. Let's be honest. Bad SPEP philosophy tends towards just this kind of prison. You learn the classics with at least more depth than the average analytic dude, then when you put on your first pair of big boy pants you write hagiography about Parisian 68er or maybe one of their students. And in the United States at least, the next level of Hell (going from big boy pants to a ruined version of Bradbury's vanilla white suit) is when you get enough institutional pull to graduate from hagiographic exposition to actually yourself aping the style (English language translations) of Heidegger and the worst writers among the aforementioned Soixante Huitards (cf. Michael Marder for sad evidence that, for all our once vaunted ability to see through the outright cons foisted upon us by the Boomers, many gen ex SPEPers did not see through this one). . . good work if you can get it I guess, though see Jesus on what happens when you win the world.* 

But, according to the article at least, some prominent Brazilian academic continental philosophers** with political connections have been using this very kind of fetishism to do everything possible to undermine the ability of Brazilian students to learn and do philosophy!

meditation on Bingo

Bingo fascinates me because it involves no skill whatsoever, but somehow feels like it involves skill to people who play it.

How many other things in life are like this?

Certainly the following: Monopoly, Parcheesee, slot machines. But these are all as artificial as Bingo.

In real life even marginally successful people systematically under-rate how lucky they are, both in terms of random events and in terms of genetic and environmental gifts. I mean Rauls' thought experiment is correct, and somewhere in the universe there is a morally decent society that lives up to it. . . but the chance that humans will seems dim to me. Too much Monopoly. Too many slot machines. And that damned farmer with his dog.

I'm sure that we commit the gambler's fallacy when not even gambling or playing a boring game? There must be some Kahneman/Taversky type research on this somewhere.

yet another hierarchy of failure

My basic view is that almost everyone is a failure at most things, and those who aren't are still slaves to entropy, always just on the edge of falling down.

In these regards, it's sometimes hard to be an anthropologist about your own culture. I probably don't have many insightful things to say about all of the multifaceted ways to fail at being a philosophy professor. However, I've been to just enough (and not too many) "writer's conferences"* to have a sharp eye for the various ways in which writers fail. Here's the hierarchy from top to bottom.

1. Authored multiple best sellers- Almost certainly writes in a genre such as romance, urban fantasy, or police procedurals. Surprisingly, more likely than not to still have a day job s/he hates, just to handle the health insurance! If lucky, this is at a university. If doesn't have a day job, then still spends about twenty hours a week on "the business end" of writing.
2. Authored one best seller- Will it be repeated? Probably not.
3. Self published and built enough of a "platform" to move around 40,000 units. This has only happened a handful of times. . . The sharks circle and this person will find themselves elsewhere on this list in the next few years. 
4. Authored book(s) with good distribution, but last one not a best seller, so major press has passed on exercising option, back at the conference still pitching manuscripts with all the other mopes. Platform may or may not help. One person I met had three good novels published by three different presses and was still standing in line to do five minute pitches. It made me sad.
5. Unpublished but won one of the contests supported by the conference. The agents and editors might be effusive in praise. But while they say things like, "this is quite possibly the next Confederacy of Dunces," their behavior will in no way be that of someone who really believes that. I mean, no matter what your list focuses on, you would still publish the next Confederacy of Dunces. You just would. The problem is, the industry is very small, and if it's even remotely possible the author might be a best seller some day, people will be very, very nice on the surface. But the corollary of this is that the overwhelming majority of people who win these contests still never get anything published.
6. Unpublished but with no platform whastoever. You are a mope. Enjoy the buffet, alcohol, and life affirming talks.
7. Self published, but didn't move appreciably more than 10,000 units. You are lower than the mope. The stench of failure on you is nearly suffocating, and your inability to realize this embarasses everyone else.
8. Effing crazy person, almost always paranoid in subtley frightening ways. I don't know how agents do their job, listening to pitches by people like this all day.
9. Memoir writers. A cut below that boring guy at work who won't shut up about that "really weird dream" he had last night. And nobody cares about the fact that your memoir is "Eat, Pray, Love meets X." And the contest to see who has the most effed up childhood is unseemly at this point. And stop titling books "The So and So's Daughter." It's horrible.

I won't divulge where I am in this hierarchy, other than to note that nothing I've written has yet been a best seller. On the flip side though, I don't write memoirs. That's worth something at least.

[Notes:

*writer's conference = hundreds of people drinking themselves silly in between (a) futile attempts to pitch manuscripts to a handful of agents and (b) new agey talks that fail to fortify the alcohol's wondrous despair blocking power.]

Why I took some posts down off of Newapps

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please go HERE to read the full text of the petitition titled "SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution, and if you are a member of SPEP please consider signing your name. Also go HERE where I encourage people to join SPEP (and become eligible to sign the aforementioned petition).]

I decided to take the following three posts down from NewAPPS. There is a consensus that they might work to undermine the kind of rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy that the Newapps bloggers are trying to establish. Also, they infuriated more than one dear friend for whom I have a lot of respect and love. Finally, there's a weird dynamic that when one posts about controversial issues in a group blog, then people tend to perceive the posts to somehow be reflective of the group itself. This certainly is not the case with the three posts I've moved here, and I'm moving them in part to forestall any such confusion.

If I was writing them today I'd change a couple of things about them, but would not change the very things that have gotten me the most angry e-mail from people I don't know.

George Washington's Rules of Civility

It's really amazing how much of the same behaviors were both pervasive and irritating to be noted by one of our Founding Fathers two hundred years ago. I mean you could write a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode around over half of these. I think I prefer Ms. Manners over President Washington on this, just because she gives such incisive and entertaining ethical analysis of manners. But President Washington is pretty great too. Anyhow, here's the complete list:

1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.

2d When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered.

3d Shew Nothing to your Freind that may affright him.

4th In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet.

5th If You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately; and Speak not in your Yawning, but put Your handkercheif or Hand before your face and turn aside.

6th Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop.

7th Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chamber half Drest.

8th At Play and at Fire its Good manners to Give Place to the last Commer, and affect not to Speak Louder than Ordinary.

9th Spit not in the Fire, nor Stoop low before it neither Put your Hands into the Flames to warm them, nor Set your Feet upon the Fire especially if there be meat before it.

10th When you Sit down, Keep your Feet firm and Even, without putting one on the other or Crossing them.

11th Shift not yourself in the Sight of others nor Gnaw your nails.

12th Shake not the head, Feet, or Legs rowl not the Eys lift not one eyebrow higher than the other wry not the mouth, and bedew no mans face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak.

13th Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks &c in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexteriously upon it if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who puts it off.

14th Turn not your Back to others especially in Speaking, Jog not the Table or Desk on which Another reads or writes, lean not upon any one.

15th Keep your Nails clean and Short, also your Hands and Teeth Clean yet without Shewing any great Concern for them.

16th Do not Puff up the Cheeks, Loll not out the tongue rub the Hands, or beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them or keep the Lips too open or too Close.

17th Be no Flatterer, neither Play with any that delights not to be Play'd Withal.

18th Read no Letters, Books, or Papers in Company but when there is a Necessity for the doing of it you must ask leave: come not near the Books or Writings of Another so as to read them unless desired or give your opinion of them unask'd also look not nigh when another is writing a Letter.

19th let your Countenance be pleasant but in Serious Matters Somewhat grave.

20th The Gestures of the Body must be Suited to the discourse you are upon.

21st: Reproach none for the Infirmaties of Nature, nor Delight to Put them that have in mind thereof.

22d Shew not yourself glad at the Misfortune of another though he were your enemy.

23d When you see a Crime punished, you may be inwardly Pleased; but always shew Pity to the Suffering Offender.

24th Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick Spectacle.

25th Superfluous Complements and all Affectation of Ceremonie are to be avoided, yet where due they are not to be Neglected.

26th In Pulling off your Hat to Persons of Distinction, as Noblemen, Justices, Churchmen &c make a Reverence, bowing more or less according to the Custom of the Better Bred, and Quality of the Person. Amongst your equals expect not always that they Should begin with you first, but to Pull off the Hat when there is no need is Affectation, in the Manner of Saluting and resaluting in words keep to the most usual Custom.

27th Tis ill manners to bid one more eminent than yourself be covered as well as not to do it to whom it's due Likewise he that makes too much haste to Put on his hat does not well, yet he ought to Put it on at the first, or at most the Second time of being ask'd; now what is herein Spoken, of Qualification in behaviour in Saluting, ought also to be observed in taking of Place, and Sitting down for ceremonies without Bounds is troublesome.

28th If any one come to Speak to you while you are are Sitting Stand up tho he be your Inferiour, and when you Present Seats let it be to every one according to his Degree.

29th When you meet with one of Greater Quality than yourself, Stop, and retire especially if it be at a Door or any Straight place to give way for him to Pass.

30th In walking the highest Place in most Countrys Seems to be on the right hand therefore Place yourself on the left of him whom you desire to Honour: but if three walk together the middest Place is the most Honourable the wall is usually given to the most worthy if two walk together.

31st If any one far Surpassess others, either in age, Estate, or Merit yet would give Place to a meaner than himself in his own lodging or elsewhere the one ought not to except it, So he on the other part should not use much earnestness nor offer it above once or twice.

32d: To one that is your equal, or not much inferior you are to give the cheif Place in your Lodging and he to who 'tis offered ought at the first to refuse it but at the Second to accept though not without acknowledging his own unworthiness.

33d They that are in Dignity or in office have in all places Preceedency but whilst they are Young they ought to respect those that are their equals in Birth or other Qualitys, though they have no Publick charge.

34th It is good Manners to prefer them to whom we Speak before ourselves especially if they be above us with whom in no Sort we ought to begin.

35th Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.

36th Artificers & Persons of low Degree ought not to use many ceremonies to Lords, or Others of high Degree but Respect and highly Honour them, and those of high Degree ought to treat them with affibility & Courtesie, without Arrogancy.

37th In Speaking to men of Quality do not lean nor Look them full in the Face, nor approach too near them at lest Keep a full Pace from them.

38th In visiting the Sick, do not Presently play the Physicion if you be not Knowing therein.

39th In writing or Speaking, give to every Person his due Title According to his Degree & the Custom of the Place.

40th Strive not with your Superiers in argument, but always Submit your Judgment to others with Modesty.

41st Undertake not to Teach your equal in the art himself Proffesses; it Savours of arrogancy.

42d Let thy ceremonies in Courtesie be proper to the Dignity of his place with whom thou conversest for it is absurd to act the same with a Clown and a Prince.

43d Do not express Joy before one sick or in pain for that contrary Passion will aggravate his Misery.

44th When a man does all he can though it Succeeds not well blame not him that did it.

45th Being to advise or reprehend any one, consider whether it ought to be in publick or in Private; presently, or at Some other time in what terms to do it & in reproving Shew no Sign of Cholar but do it with all Sweetness and Mildness.

46th Take all Admonitions thankfully in what Time or Place Soever given but afterwards not being culpable take a Time & Place convenient to let him him know it that gave them.

47th Mock not nor Jest at any thing of Importance break no Jest that are Sharp Biting and if you Deliver any thing witty and Pleasent abstain from Laughing there at yourself.

48th Wherein wherein you reprove Another be unblameable yourself; for example is more prevalent than Precepts.

49th Use no Reproachfull Language against any one neither Curse nor Revile.

50th Be not hasty to beleive flying Reports to the Disparagement of any.

51st Wear not your Cloths, foul, unript or Dusty but See they be Brush'd once every day at least and take heed that you approach not to any Uncleaness.

52d In your Apparel be Modest and endeavour to accomodate Nature, rather than to procure Admiration keep to the Fashion of your equals Such as are Civil and orderly with respect to Times and Places.

53d Run not in the Streets, neither go too slowly nor with Mouth open go not Shaking yr Arms kick not the earth with yr feet, go not upon the Toes, nor in a Dancing fashion.

54th Play not the Peacock, looking every where about you, to See if you be well Deck't, if your Shoes fit well if your Stokings sit neatly, and Cloths handsomely.

55th Eat not in the Streets, nor in the House, out of Season.

56th Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad Company.

57th In walking up and Down in a House, only with One in Company if he be Greater than yourself, at the first give him the Right hand and Stop not till he does and be not the first that turns, and when you do turn let it be with your face towards him, if he be a Man of Great Quality, walk not with him Cheek by Joul but Somewhat behind him; but yet in Such a Manner that he may easily Speak to you.

58th Let your Conversation be without Malice or Envy, for 'tis a Sign of a Tractable and Commendable Nature: And in all Causes of Passion admit Reason to Govern.

59th Never express anything unbecoming, nor Act agst the Rules Moral before your inferiours.

60th Be not immodest in urging your Freinds to Discover a Secret.

61st Utter not base and frivilous things amongst grave and Learn'd Men nor very Difficult Questians or Subjects, among the Ignorant or things hard to be believed, Stuff not your Discourse with Sentences amongst your Betters nor Equals.

62d Speak not of doleful Things in a Time of Mirth or at the Table; Speak not of Melancholy Things as Death and Wounds, and if others Mention them Change if you can the Discourse tell not your Dreams, but to your intimate Friend.

63d A Man ought not to value himself of his Atchievements, or rare Qualities of wit; much less of his riches Virtue or Kindred.

64th Break not a Jest where none take pleasure in mirth Laugh not aloud, nor at all without Occasion, deride no mans Misfortune, tho' there Seem to be Some cause.

65th Speak not injurious Words neither in Jest nor Earnest Scoff at none although they give Occasion.

66th Be not forward but friendly and Courteous; the first to Salute hear and answer & be not Pensive when it's a time to Converse.

67th Detract not from others neither be excessive in Commanding.

68th Go not thither, where you know not, whether you Shall be Welcome or not. Give not Advice without being Ask'd & when desired do it briefly.

69th If two contend together take not the part of either unconstrained; and be not obstinate in your own Opinion, in Things indiferent be of the Major Side.

70th Reprehend not the imperfections of others for that belongs to Parents Masters and Superiours.

71st Gaze not on the marks or blemishes of Others and ask not how they came. What you may Speak in Secret to your Friend deliver not before others.

72d Speak not in an unknown Tongue in Company but in your own Language and that as those of Quality do and not as the Vulgar; Sublime matters treat Seriously.

73d Think before you Speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring out your Words too hastily but orderly & distinctly.

74th When Another Speaks be attentive your Self and disturb not the Audience if any hesitate in his Words help him not nor Prompt him without desired, Interrupt him not, nor Answer him till his Speech be ended.

75th In the midst of Discourse ask not of what one treateth but if you Perceive any Stop because of your coming you may well intreat him gently to Proceed: If a Person of Quality comes in while your Conversing it's handsome to Repeat what was said before.

76th While you are talking, Point not with your Finger at him of Whom you Discourse nor Approach too near him to whom you talk especially to his face.

77th Treat with men at fit Times about Business & Whisper not in the Company of Others.

78th Make no Comparisons and if any of the Company be Commended for any brave act of Vertue, commend not another for the Same.

79th Be not apt to relate News if you know not the truth thereof. In Discoursing of things you Have heard Name not your Author always A Secret Discover not.

80th Be not Tedious in Discourse or in reading unless you find the Company pleased therewith.

81st Be not Curious to Know the Affairs of Others neither approach those that Speak in Private.

82d undertake not what you cannot perform but be carefull to keep your promise.

83d when you deliver a matter do it without passion & with discretion, however mean the person be you do it too.

84th When your Superiours talk to any Body hearken not neither Speak nor Laugh.

85th In Company of these of Higher Quality than yourself Speak not til you are ask'd a Question then Stand upright put of your Hat & Answer in few words.

86th In Disputes, be not So Desireous to Overcome as not to give Liberty to each one to deliver his Opinion and Submit to the Judgment of the Major Part especially if they are Judges of the Dispute.

87th Let thy carriage be such as becomes a Man Grave Settled and attentive to that which is spoken. Contradict not at every turn what others Say.

88th Be not tedious in Discourse, make not many Digressigns, nor repeat often the Same manner of Discourse.

89th Speak not Evil of the absent for it is unjust.

90th Being Set at meat Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there's a Necessity for it.

91st Make no Shew of taking great Delight in your Victuals, Feed not with Greediness; cut your Bread with a Knife, lean not on the Table neither find fault with what you Eat.

92d Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy.

93d Entertaining any one at table it is decent to present him wt. meat, Undertake not to help others undesired by the Master.

94th If you Soak bread in the Sauce let it be no more than what you put in your Mouth at a time and blow not your broth at Table but Stay till Cools of it Self.

95th Put not your meat to your Mouth with your Knife in your hand neither Spit forth the Stones of any fruit Pye upon a Dish nor Cast anything under the table.

96th It's unbecoming to Stoop much to ones Meat Keep your Fingers clean & when foul wipe them on a Corner of your Table Napkin.

97th Put not another bit into your Mouth til the former be Swallowed let not your Morsels be too big for the Gowls.

98th Drink not nor talk with your mouth full neither Gaze about you while you are a Drinking.

99th Drink not too leisurely nor yet too hastily. Before and after Drinking wipe your Lips breath not then or Ever with too Great a Noise, for its uncivil.

100th Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.

101st Rince not your Mouth in the Presence of Others.

102d It is out of use to call upon the Company often to Eat nor need you Drink to others every Time you Drink.

103d In Company of your Betters be not longer in eating than they are lay not your Arm but only your hand upon the table.

104th It belongs to the Chiefest in Company to unfold his Napkin and fall to Meat first, But he ought then to Begin in time & to Dispatch with Dexterity that the Slowest may have time allowed him.

105th Be not Angry at Table whatever happens & if you have reason to be so, Shew it not but on a Chearfull Countenance especially if there be Strangers for Good Humour makes one Dish of Meat a Feast.

106th Set not yourself at the upper of the Table but if it Be your Due or that the Master of the house will have it So, Contend not, least you Should Trouble the Company.

107th If others talk at Table be attentive but talk not with Meat in your Mouth.

108th When you Speak of God or his Atributes, let it be Seriously & wt. Reverence. Honour & Obey your Natural Parents altho they be Poor.

109th Let your Recreations be Manfull not Sinfull.

110th Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial fire Called Conscience.

Finis

All the cool kids are dropping facebook

Graham Harman beautifully summarizes almost all of the reasons I gave up facebook a couple of months ago HERE. Michael Zimmer and Henry of Crooked Timber have a supporting posts HERE and HERE.

Harman goes beyond the valid concerns about privacy and talks about the massive unpleasantness that happens once you have so many facebook friends from different milieus of your life.

In addition, I really started to hate all of the little uplifting things people wrote. Facebook somehow brings out the worst and most trite aspects of our therapeutic culture. Crap like "God doesn't give me any challenge that I'm not equal to." Lucky you! I don't want to hear about it.

refuting some down-low forms of bigotry

[NOTE: IT IS INDICATIVE OF A DEEP AND FRIGHTENING FAILURE IN OUR CULTURE THAT THIS SHOULD HAVE TO BE EXPLAINED.]
It should be transparent to any educated person that the revisionist fan of the Confederacy is on par with the Holocaust denier.  But from my experience as a college professor, I have learned that we are not educating people very well, or maybe some people don't want to be educated.  I don't know, but here goes.

The official declaration of causes of secession for Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina are on line here. [Note that the "ordinances of dissolution" by the other states are very short and give no explicit reason for secession; Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee all seceded after Lincoln called for troops in reaction to the original secessions, and were conceived by their authors to be taking sides in a war already about slavery for the same reasons given by the original seceding states.]  Please open the link above and then hit "control f" and then type "slavery" in the window, and read what the authors of the catastrophe thought.  You can also read the transcript of some of the secession debate in the South Carolina legislature archived here. After all the verbiage about rights, you will see that the main reason (explicitly stated as such) was the southerners' fear of being part of a country where non-slave states were in the majority (due to the entry of new states into the Union).  In this context, the secessionists warned that states had to secede before slavery was made illegal by the United States.

The background of all of this was Bleeding Kansas (good book here, wikipedia article here), the incredibly vicious civil war in Kansas over whether slavery would be legal in the new state.  The ultimate 2 to 1 electoral defeat of the pro-slavery "border ruffians," was the trigger to secession of the southern states

Prior to secession a text of New Orleans preacher Benjamin Morgan Palmer's vile, yet incredibly influential, "Thanksgiving Day Sermon" (archived here) was widely distributed throughout the slave states. In it, he argued that the threat to slavery mandated secession.  After going on about how much Jesus likes slavery this horrible person actually has the evil temerity to argue that the "providential trust" God has placed in South was, "to conserve and perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing."  Sadly, as history was to show, the citizens of the slave owning states were all too ready to listen to Palmer's satanic sophistry.

Please also consider the Confederacy's Vice President Alexander Stephens infamous, "cornerstone" speech (archived here) which stated that the new confederacy "rest[ed] upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition."  In reference to this "great truth," he went on to say, "This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."  Has Lady Philosophy's name ever been invoked with more vanity and evil?

Some apologists for the Confederacy at this point in the argument change the subject, saying that even if the elites' reasons for seceding were primarily and almost exclusively focused on slavery, the common soldiers' were not (most of them did not own slaves), and moreover that the cause of the common soldier in the Confederacy was somehow grand and noble.  First, it should be noted that this response is somewhat incoherent, unless one can specify what the common soldier's cause was.

Second, the response is antecedently implausible, evincing the same kind of naivety as pre Frankfurt School/Gramscian Marxists who were confident that the working classes would refuse to fight in World War I because the ideology of the war was so much against their interests.  Like the common soldier of World War I, all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of non-slaveholding Confederate Soldiers enthusiastically embraced the pro-slavery ideology that caused the civil war.

One might ask how we could possibly identify the governing ideology and relevant views taking as common sense by soldiers of the Confederacy.  First, note that such a rhetorical question assumes that the objective study of history is impossible (unsurprisingly, this selective skepticism, that is setting such ridiculously high standards for historical knowledge that disagrees with one's prejudice, is also the trademark argumentative strategy of the Holocaust denier).  Second, note that the same historical techniques used to understand the thinking of the average World War I soldier have been used to understand the thinking of the average Confederate Soldier.  And it ain't pretty.

Harvard historian Monica Goodling's excellent book on this issue (you can order it here) presents the result of her research into letters and diaries of soldiers on both sides (illiterate soldiers during this period dictated their letters home).  The norm she discovered is that the average Union and Confederate soldier overwhelmingly explicitly saw slavery as the primary justification for fighting.  Interestingly, poor Southern whites explicitly viewed their position of state enforced superiority to black people as what they were fighting for.  Goodling shows that morale initially stayed high in Confederate troops, even after the Union started racking up victories.  However it dropped precariously when manpower issues forced the Confederacy to try to put slaves (those willing to fight were to be freed for their service) on the front lines at the end of the war.  At this point the white Confederate soldiers tended to see the fight as not worth making, since their prerogatives over the slaves were so badly slighted by having to fight alongside them.  The hundreds of thousands of African American Union soldiers by the end of the war did not have this effect on Union morale, because the abolitionist cause was the cause of the average Union soldier.

The best thing about Goodling's book is that it does not rely entirely on after-the-fact memories or writings by officers, but rather rests upon a trove of documents concerning the non-rich people doing the vast majority of the killing and dying.  On the Union side, the soldiers were way ahead of the northern political establishment in explicitly viewing the fight in terms of abolition, rather than just preserving our country.  Over a year prior to the Gettysburg Address the common Northern soldier (to his great credit) saw the fight as a fight to end slavery, and throughout the war common Confederate soldier (to his immense shame) saw it as defending slavery.  Again, while it is true that most of the Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, the psychic benefit derived by having a whole race of others treated vastly worse than themselves was both explicit governing ideology and common sense to the soldiers. 

Note that nobody is saying that all the Confederate soldiers were fighting for slavery.  Most soldiers in most wars fight for their buddies.  But just as most American soldiers early in Vietnam believed that we were there to defend a free people against communist aggression, and most German soldiers early in World War I believed ardently in the reasons given by German elites for their aggression, there is very strong historical evidence that most Confederate soldiers internalized the reasons given by their elites to fight.  That these reasons involved defending a society where the poorest white soldier got to feel superior to a whole race of people he interacted with, made it that much easier for the white soldiers to internalize the reasons.  To believe otherwise is naive and contradicts Goodling's evidence.

In Minima Moralia Adorno asks himself how many times he heard casual comments in pre-World War II Germany that implicated genocide. He agonizes at how many times he did this, said nothing, and continued to be polite.  Those who lie about slavery and the Confederate Flag are morally equal to Holocaust deniers, and the rest of us have a moral obligation to treat them as such.

Why am I incensed because some of my students and ex-students go in for the canards about the glorious cause of the Confederacy and lies about the Confederate Battle flag?  Here's one of many reasons.  The person in the picture to the left of this text is Michael Donald. He was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981 in my childhood Alabama.  My high school friend Ellie Dees' father Morris brought a lawsuit against the Klan on behalf of Donald's mother.  For his pains, Dees' office was bombed and snipers shot at him.  Donald's family's life was ruined, and Mr. Dees has had to have twenty-four hour a day armed guards because of the violent people that waive that symbol of slavery and apartheid. 

As a child, I watched one of the last large scale Klan marches in Montgomery, Alabama.  The ubiquity of the Confederate Battle Flag among these racist terrorists told me all I needed to know about it.  Nothing I have learned since (e.g. that its modern mass resurgence as a symbol began when George Wallace flew it from the roof of the Alabama statehouse as a symbol (that everyone got) against desegregation on the day Bobby Kennedy visited; that pro-segregation politicians in the south in the 1950's signalled this by flying the flag, etc.) contradicts what I learned that horrible day.  None of the historical evidence presented here contradicts what I learned on that day.  The flag symbolizes slavery and apartheid.  It symbolizes a society that institutionalized rape by the elite.  It symbolizes the mass murder, terrorism, and torture necessary for maintaining slavery and then apartheid.  It symbolizes the cause of Michael Donald's murder.

In this regard, the moral obtuseness of the student waivers of that flag is astounding and despicable.  What kind of person would think that the psychological trauma at giving up a not-so-noble myth about the supremacy of his heritage is any way comparable with the pain and destruction (still) caused by slavery and Jim Crow?. 

To have truth and reconciliation after hundreds of years of slavery and a hundred years of Apartheid you need truth. Until we have truth, the American South (my home and the home of my people) will continue to be last in every meaningful measure of people's health.  Until elites decide they would rather live as equals in a better society than be on top of a bad one, we will continue to be last in everything.  Until those of us who are not elites decide we will no longer get a psychic charge from feeling superior to those lower down than us, we will continue to be last.  Those of us moving our state past this dysfunction (black, white, latino, asian, rich, poor, everybody of good will) can only do this if we follow Adorno and stand up for truth, even when it requires rudeness, even when we think it may not matter. It does matter.