<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">from Glen's post:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><i>Holton: [...] Can you and I, as an intellectual exercise, think of anything wrong with, all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights? That’s not the whole story, but I can’t find anything wrong with that. Can you?</i><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">"endowed by their creator" is really really wrong, IMHO.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"> — any rights you may have are given to you, not intrinsic.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"> — God certainly is entitled to endow different individuals and different groups with a different set/subset of certain inalienable rights and it is God's doing not man, so men are not responsible.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"> — God gave rights but did s/ he give the "license key" that enables one to exercise those rights?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"> — if God is Dead, are the rights no longer?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">On Tue, Oct 26, 2021, at 8:45 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Very cool! I've added Fragments to my wishlist. I'm wondering how/if it <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> relates to black radicalism, of which I'm still completely ignorant. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Egalitarianism was briefly covered in the podcast:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Holton: [...] Can you and I, as an intellectual exercise, think of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> anything wrong with, all people are created equal, endowed by their <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> creator with certain inalienable rights? That’s not the whole story, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> but I can’t find anything wrong with that. Can you?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Bouie: [...] I find it difficult to find something wrong with it as <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> well because, to me, it is a statement of sort of the inherent dignity <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> of all human beings and an inherent dignity that must be respected in <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> our governments and our institutions. It’s such an extraordinarily <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> powerful statement that, for as much as I can recite every criticism of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Jefferson, it makes it hard to dismiss him, right, as a person worth <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> taking seriously and worth, in some sense, even admiring, at least <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> admiring the part of him that wrote that.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> As I alluded in my previous post to this thread, this is charisma of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> the *idea*, despite all and any evidence that the idea is obvious <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> garbage. It's like the hype around AI ... or consciousness. We *want* <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> to believe in things like "equality". So we believe in them, in spite <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> of all the evidence around us that such a thing doesn't exist.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> But if we steal a bit of persnickety semantics from the philosophers, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> we can better express the sentiment as "moral deserts", treating <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> persons as ends, not means. We can be equivalent in our moral status, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> yet wildly different from every other perspective. Although this smacks <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> of dualism, it doesn't have to be.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> On 10/23/21 12:23 PM, Prof David West wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> This seems like an appropriate point to recommend a small book:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> /Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology/<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> David Graeber (asst. Prof, anthroplogy, Yale)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> Prickly Paradigm Press [love the publisher name]<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> Chicago<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu">www.press.uchicago.edu</a> <<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu">http://www.press.uchicago.edu</a>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <a href="http://www.prickly-paradigm.com">www.prickly-paradigm.com</a> <<a href="http://www.prickly-paradigm.com">http://www.prickly-paradigm.com</a>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> I believe that, within the book, some seeds for answers to Nick's question "how do we achieve coalition without charisma," and contributions to a lot of other ideas that have popped up in various threads: "great man theory," egalitarian societies, post-capitalism, political theory, etc., might be found.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> From page 1:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> /"What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos — all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possible exist at some point in the future./<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> /Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn't — or, for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn't exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science."/<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> I also have on order — prepublication — Graeber's 500 page rewrite of history. Supposed to be full of insights like:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> /"Before [Marcel] Mauss, the universal assumption had been that economies without money or markets had operated by means of "barter"; they were trying to engage in market behavior (acquire useful goods and services at the least cost to themselves, get rich if possible ...) they just hadn't yet developed very sophisticated ways of going about it. Mauss demonstrated that in fact, such economies were really "gift economies." They were not based on calculation, but on a refusal to calculate; they were rooted in an ethical system which consciously rejected most of what we we would consider the basic principles of economics. It was not that they had not yet learned to seek profit through the most efficient means. They would have found the very premise that the point of an economic transaction — at least, one with someone who was not your enemy— was to see the greatest profit deeply offensive."/<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> -- <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ☤>$ uǝlƃ<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 <a href="http://bit.ly/virtualfriam">bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> un/subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> archives:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div></body></html>