Neoliberalism - Solving the Problem of Democracy

"Privatizing profits and socializing losses"

On the Tragedy of the Commons

EROSION OF THE MYTH OF ADMINISTRATORS OF THE COMMONS: "Indeed, the process has been so widely commented upon that one writer postulated a common life cycle for all of the attempts to develop regulatory policies. The life cycle is launched by an outcry so widespread and demanding that it generates enough political force to bring about establishment of a regulatory agency to insure the equitable, just, and rational distribution of the advantages among all holders of interest in the commons. This phase is followed by the symbolic reassurance of the offended as the agency goes into operation, developing a period of political quiescence among the great majority of those who hold a general but unorganized interest in the commons. Once this political quiescence has developed, the highly organized and specifically interested groups who wish to make incursions into the commons bring sufficient pressure to bear through other political processes to convert the agency to the protection and furthering of their interests. In the last phase even staffing of the regulating agency is accomplished by drawing the agency administrators from the ranks of the regulated." [p.p. 60-61]

More on the origins of Capitalism from George Monbiot.

Excerpt from video above:

Hedges: ...They have accelerated exploitation, especially of the most vulnerable. I teach in a prison. So, everything's been privatized in the prisons. These are the poorest families in the country and their phone rates, their money transfer rates, are exorbitant. Far higher than you or I pay. So, let's talk about that with the consolidation of wealth, and the consolidation of political power. Especially in the United States, which is at this point just a system of legalized bribery. It comes with a turbocharging of what you call rent or roner (louer) in French. The French, the economists, will use the French term often. So explain that.


Monbiot: So what Neoliberalism claims to be is an Entrepreneurial Society, but what in reality it creates is a Rentiere Society. Because it has stripped away the protections, the social protections, which prevent our gross exploitation by Capital, and that gross exploitation, in a monopolistic situation, is effectively rent. And rent is the unearned income you get from monopolizing an asset which people need for their survival, or for their well-being. So, a classic case you've just discussed, of Communications in prisons. You know, if you've got a corporation sitting on that erecting a toll booth through which everyone must pass in order to communicate. They can charge pretty well whatever they want for that. And everything above what could be seen as a normal rate of profit, 5% or so on Communications, everything above that is rent. It's just the money that you can take because you are in a monopolistic position, and there's no one to stop you taking it. 

The same goes with privatized Public Services of all kinds. Prisons is one example. Here in the UK, our water has been entirely privatized, and the companies which own our water supply can charge exorbitant fees while investing as little as possible. With the result that they are instead, now using our Rivers as open sewers, whilst still charging people through the nose for the water that comes out of their faucets. We have no choice, we have to use the water. There's only one supplier in each region of the UK, so we have to go with that supplier. So they can charge pretty well what they want. There is a Regulator which is supposed to limit that, but the Rgulator, as so often happens with neoliberalism, has been completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. That's another aspect of the neoliberal approach. And everywhere, we see this tremendously rich class of oligarchs emerging out of the Rentiere economy and using their exclusive capture of assets, assets which the rest of us need, to ensure that we pay way over the odds to them in order to you use those assets. And and that has that's "mission accomplished" for neoliberalism. Those figures you cited for the transfer of wealth away from the poorer sections of society into the hands of the richest people, that is exactly what neoliberalism exists to do.

Vicious Circles

Slavoj Zizek, "Nothing new on the Middle Eastern front"

Israel, Hamas and Ukraine: History repeats amid the echoes of global conflict

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia – The title of this commentary, a twist on the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s famous 1929 novel about everyday life in the trenches of World War I, seems fitting for the first anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

While the media covers each new and surprising development — the killing of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah; Israel’s attacks in southern Lebanon; Iran’s ballistic-missile strikes on Israel — the fact is that things are becoming what they always were. Potentialities that were present from the beginning are being realized.

From a broader historical and philosophical perspective, Israel’s critics miss the point when they claim that it is failing in its mission to destroy Hamas and is merely killing Palestinians and razing Gaza. Recall Israel’s strategy before Oct. 7. For years, it ensured that foreign financing reached Hamas in order to keep the Palestinians divided, thus preventing any progress toward a two-state solution.

Of course, Israel is acting in self-defense in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. But much depends on how one defines “self.” If Russia occupies part of Ukraine and proclaims it part of Russia, can it then claim self-defense when it crushes those who resist? When Germany invaded Belgium at the start of World War I, a Belgian minister supposedly observed that, “Whatever historians will say later about this war, nobody will able to say that Belgium attacked Germany.” Yet since Russia’s invasion, respect for settled facts no longer holds. The Kremlin and its allies have become increasingly effective at claiming that Ukraine started the conflict.

Israel’s rhetoric is not dissimilar. When the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched its “limited ground operation” in Lebanon on Oct. 1, one was reminded of Russia’s euphemistic description of its invasion as a “special military operation.” In both cases, we can paraphrase Groucho Marx: It may look like war, and it may hurt like war; but don’t let that fool you. This really is war.

Again, things are becoming what they always were. In late July, a coterie of Israeli ministers, MPs, journalists and TV commentators decried an IDF military police raid on the Sde Teiman base in southern Israel, following reports of Israeli reservists abusing Palestinian detainees. The raid and arrests triggered large public protests, even though it was other Israeli reservists who had blown the whistle. Horrified by what they had witnessed, they heroically came forward with allegations that security personnel on the base were torturing Palestinian prisoners by sodomizing them with metal rods. Some of the prisoners then bled to death.

Yet rather than being outraged by such atrocities, some Israeli officials were outraged at those prosecuting the case. Consider the following transcript from a debate in the Knesset (parliament), aired by the British journalist Peter Oborne:

Unidentified Israeli MP: “This is insanity, someone in the prosecutor’s office thinks it’s possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba (Hamas Elite Unit) terrorists. We can’t continue as usual. ...”

(Interjection): “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is this legitimate?”

MP: “Shut up! Yes, if he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”

Or consider this clip from a panel discussion on Israeli TV (also shared by Oborne):

First panelist: “Soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner — this doesn’t concern you?”

Second panelist: “I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do to that Hamas man. The only problem I see is that it’s not state policy to abuse detainees. First, they deserve it and it’s a great form of revenge. Second, maybe it will act as a deterrent.”

Imagine our reaction if all this had happened in Russia. Crazy as it may sound, the best way to account for our moral predicament may be to entertain a conspiracy theory. Almost a year ago, I imagined a phone call between Israeli and Hamas hardliners:

Israeli hard-liner: “Hi, do you remember how we discreetly supported you against the Palestine Liberation Organization? Now you owe us a favor: Why don’t you attack and slaughter some Jews close to Gaza? They’re friends to Arabs, peaceniks, so we don’t need them. What we need is something to end the civil protests against us and to distract from the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The world will be shocked at your brutality and we will be able to play the victim, achieve national unity and accelerate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank!”

Hamas hard-liner: “Okay, but we need a favor: To avenge our slaughter, you must bomb civilians in Gaza, killing thousands, especially children. That will foment anti-Semitism around the world, which is our true goal!”

Israeli hard-liner: “No problem, we also need a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which allows us to keep playing the role of the victim and do whatever we want in self-defense!”

This imaginary scenario is obscene, of course. But recall Robert Harris’s novel "The Ghost" (later a film by Roman Polanski). A ghostwriter for Adam Lang, a former U.K. prime minister modeled on Tony Blair, discovers that his client has been planted in the Labour Party and manipulated by the CIA all along. Commenting on the book’s “shock-horror revelation,” a critic for the Observer wrote that it was “so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.”

Like Harris’s invention, my own abhorrent scenario teases out the logic of today’s perverse tango: It isn’t true, but if it was, it would explain everything. My imaginary phone call is not part of reality, but it is real. Since victims are in principle permitted to strike back, the war gives Israel a chance to pursue ethnic cleansing in Greater Israel. According to Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza is the “right humanitarian solution” for the besieged enclave and for the region.

The parallel between Ukraine and Palestine has grown stronger as some key distinctions have become blurred. The pro-Israel West (especially the United States) now frames its support for Ukraine and its support for Israel as two initiatives in the same global war, as if Israel is no different from Ukraine. Meanwhile, on the pseudo-left, many claim that the initial attacks by Russia and Hamas were both justified defensive measures in response to historical provocations and oppression, as if Donetsk is the Russian West Bank.

In the new world order that is emerging, the Gaza war is a nodal point that condenses all the defining antagonisms of the modern era. It is where everything will be decided. “Palestine” today is a universal symbol — a stand-in for all European sins and a font of anti-Semitism.

The tragedy is that Israel, which resulted from Europe’s guilt over the Holocaust, is becoming a symbol of European oppression and colonization. Europeans gave the survivors of that genocide land that other people had inhabited for centuries. It is that original sin which, unexpiated, is once again preventing peace and quiet on the Middle Eastern front.

Physics is a Bad Joke Today

Yarvinomics

Octonions and Aliens... and Gauge Symmetry, Oh MY!

Octonions are an eight-dimensional number system that are non-commutative and non-associative, meaning the order of multiplication matters, and grouping of multiplications can change the result; however, they are considered "alternative" which means they satisfy a weaker form of associativity, and are also power associative; they are considered the largest normed division algebra over real numbers, making them an extension of complex numbers and quaternions.


Key properties of octonions:

Dimensionality:

Eight dimensions, making them a higher dimensional extension of quaternions.

Non-associativity:

Unlike real numbers, complex numbers, and quaternions, the order of multiplication in octonions can affect the result.

Non-commutativity:

Multiplication is not commutative, meaning a * b is not necessarily equal to b * a. 

Alternative property:

While not fully associative, octonions satisfy the alternative property, which means that for any three octonions a, b, and c, the following holds: a(ba) = (ab)a and a(aa) = (aa)a.

Power associative:

Raising an octonion to a power is associative.

Normed division algebra:

Octonions form a normed division algebra, meaning every non-zero octonion has a multiplicative inverse.

Cayley-Dickson construction:

Octonions can be constructed using the Cayley-Dickson process, which is also used to build quaternions from complex numbers. 

C. elegans is remarkable in that every worm has the same exact number of cells: 959 in the adult hermaphrodite (not counting the cells that will become eggs or sperm). 302 of these cells are neurons. Researchers in Brenner's group created two first-of-their-kind resources documenting the details of this biology.

from Wikipedia: 

In mathematics, any Lagrangian system generally admits gauge symmetries, though it may happen that they are trivial. In theoretical physics, the notion of gauge symmetries depending on parameter functions is a cornerstone of contemporary field theory.

A gauge symmetry of a Lagrangian L is defined as a differential operator on some vector bundle E taking its values in the linear space of (variational or exact) symmetries of L. Therefore, a gauge symmetry of L depends on sections of E and their partial derivatives.[1] For instance, this is the case of gauge symmetries in classical field theory.[2] Yang–Mills gauge theory and gauge gravitation theory exemplify classical field theories with gauge symmetries.[3]

Gauge symmetries possess the following two peculiarities.

1) Being Lagrangian symmetries, gauge symmetries of a Lagrangian satisfy Noether's first theorem, but the corresponding conserved current Jμ takes a particular superpotential form Jμ=Wμ+dνUνμ where the first term Wμ vanishes on solutions of the Euler–Lagrange equations and the second one is a boundary term, where Uνμ is called a superpotential.[4]

2) In accordance with Noether's second theorem, there is one-to-one correspondence between the gauge symmetries of a Lagrangian and the Noether identities which the Euler–Lagrange operator satisfies. Consequently, gauge symmetries characterize the degeneracy of a Lagrangian system.[5]

Note that, in quantum field theory, a generating functional may fail to be invariant under gauge transformations, and gauge symmetries are replaced with the

BRST symmetries, depending on ghosts and acting both on fields and ghosts.[6]

Hopf Fibration

Ukraine Again, Naturally...

Slavoj Zizek, "Putin’s Ukraine Magic"

Defying common sense, the Kremlin continues to proclaim with a straight face that its attack on Ukraine was an act of self-defense. Unfortunately, such propaganda strategies matter, not because they might fool us, but because they limit the potential for any serious peace negotiations.

LJUBLJANA – I sometimes listen to podcasts about the secrets behind the best-known magic tricks (the three-shell game, mentalism, levitation), and after reading recent news from Russia, I saw an analogy to how Russian propaganda has achieved the seemingly impossible. Defying common sense, the Kremlin continues to proclaim with a straight face that its attack on Ukraine was an act of self-defense.

Most magic tricks combine two strategies, one to produce the desired effect, and another to distract the audience from what is really going on. Russia is doing the same with recent statements that are clearly designed to raise regional tensions around Ukraine. First, the Russian government approved a list of 47 foreign states and territories whose neoliberal attitudes supposedly threaten people with “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” Those on the list are now officially designated as “enemy states.” Gone is any pretense of supporting a “multipolar” world. If you do not share Russia’s values, you are the enemy.

Among those who apparently share Russia’s values are North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran. The common element across these regimes is that they regard the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil. The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level, and whenever religion enters directly into politics, the threat of deadly violence is never far behind. Beneath all the talk of a new multipolar world is an eschatological vision of a total war to extinction between two opposites.

Hence, soon after releasing his “enemies list,” Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine that expands “the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out.” In a pointed warning to the West, he announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a nuclear-armed one would be considered a “joint attack.” Moreover, the Kremlin reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to an attack on Belarus, which forms part of its “Union State.” In other words, any case where an enemy “creates critical danger to our sovereignty” is a potential casus belli for a nuclear conflict.

Such statements cannot but make us nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War, when both sides wisely avoided direct nuclear threats and announced that they would use nuclear arms only in response to a nuclear strike by the other side. Under the conditions of “mutual assured destruction,” nobody dared to raise the possibility of a nuclear first strike. But now, Russia is not only asserting its right to a first strike; it is even expanding the conditions for justifying it.

Of course, an actual Russian first strike remains unlikely. But in military matters, words are never just words. It is all too easy for one side to become trapped by its own rhetoric. After thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, Iran’s delegate to the United Nations said that Israel had again “crossed a red line.” But at a time when “red lines” are being crossed regularly, such statements can only make the situation more dangerous. After all, there must be real red lines somewhere, but they may not be well understood, implying that we will not know where they lie until they have been crossed.

The obvious response to Putin is that he is the one who crossed the red line by issuing nuclear threats. Like those commentators who see the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war as a proxy war between Russia and NATO, he would have us believe that Russia was attacked first. Can this be true? Israel would say that it is just acting in self-defense in Gaza, the West Bank, in Lebanon, but much is riding on how one defines “self” here. If I occupy territory that is not mine and then proclaim it mine (like the West Bank, or parts of Ukraine), and if the people who live there resist me, am I acting in self-defense when I crush them?

This brings us back to the magician strategies of Russian state propaganda. By accusing his opponents of what he is already doing, Putin wants to divert attention from the fact that he has stolen land and declared it his own. If you accept that Crimea, Donbas, and any other area with “traditional Russian” values (perhaps the Baltic countries or Moldova?) is being threatened, or that the Ukrainian nation is some fanciful modern construct, you have fallen for Putin’s trick.

Understanding Putin’s sleight of hand matters for the near term, because his combination of propaganda strategies has rendered rational peace negotiations practically impossible. When the terms of negotiation have been falsified from the outset, what progress can be made? Reflecting on the perpetual calls for peace in Ukraine, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič of Central European University is right to caution that, “Peace is all too precious to be left to peaceniks.”

Add Putin’s third strategy of deception – presenting a brutal war of conquest as a defense of spiritual values – and his legerdemain looks almost insuperable. All our hope now resides in that “almost.”

Putin be so DARVO now!  What's up with dat? 

When Math is Mistaken for Physics...

A Rant from Someone Who Did Both...

Frederic Jameson: "The End of Temporality"

Excerpt from above video:

...but such descriptions are clearly predicated on the operative dualism, the alleged historical existence of the two Alternatives. The Moderns were obsessed with the secret of time, the Post-Moderns with that of space. The secret being now diet what Andre Malraux called the Absolute. We can observe a curious slippage in such investigations. Even when philosophy gets its hands on them, they begin by thinking they want to know what time is and end up trying more modestly to describe it by way of what Whitman called "language experiments" in the various media. So we have renderings of time from Gertrude Stein to Husserl, from Mala to Le Corbusier who thought of his static structures as so many trajectories. We cannot say that any of these attempts is less misguided than the more obvious failures of analytic cubism or Siegfried Gideon's relativity aesthetic. Maybe all we do need to say is contained in Derrida's laconic Epitaph on the Aristotelian philosophy of temporality in a sense it is always too late to talk about time. Can we do any better with space? The stakes are evidently different. Time governs the realm of interiority in which both subjectivity and Logic, the private, and the epistemological self-consciousness and desire are to be found. Space, as the realm of exteriority, includes cities and globalization, but also other people and nature. 

It is not so clear that language always falls under the aegis of time. We busily name the objects of the spatial realm for example well as for Sight the inner light and literal as well as figurative reflection are well-known categories of introspection. Indeed, why separate the two at all? Did not Kant teach us that space and time are both a priori conditions of our experience or perception, neither one to be gazed at with the naked eye and quite Inseparable from each other? And did not Bakhtin wisely recombine them in his notion of the chronotope, recommending a historical account of each specific Space-time Continuum as a gelled or crystallized? But it is not so easy to be moderate or sensible in the force field of Modernism where time and space are at war in a Homeric combat. Indeed, each one, as Hegel said about something else, desires the death of the other. You only have to look again at those pages in which the bard of Davos goes to the movies...

Hans-Georg Moeller on Zizek (ft. Brook Ziporyn)

"Purpose creates the disease--

and deification of purpose is offered as the cure."

Chicken vs. Egg speculation:  If Zombies developed consciousness, would they then develop purposefulness? 

Consciousness Levels: Life's Purpose is to survive... requires a body allowing an interaction in an environment to develop an ability to infer causal relations (interventionist theory of causation)

Level 0: Unconscious (a rock)

Level 1: Hard(?) Coded (a protozoa)[likely coded genetic (hard) AND bioelectric (soft)]

Level 2: Learning (a nematode)[ala C. Elegans]

Level 3: 1st order self (a housefly makes interventions in environment)

Level 4: 2nd order self (a raven makes interventions AND anticipates reactions to it)

Level 5: 3rd order self (a human makes interventions AND anticipates reactions to it, including its' own reaction; self-aware)

Paper seems to ignore the consciousness of collectivities (like digital zombies)... social groups, cellular groups, etc., consuming information/ data with no practical individual or group survival purpose other than exercising and maintaining their inter-communication media-system for the purpose of possible future collective engagement/intervention in the environment.  Maybe that's the "stage" between each level above.