“Many years ago I visited Bertrand Russell in his rooms at Trinity College and he showed me a manuscript of his in which there was not a single correction for many pages. With the help of his pen, he had instructed the paper. This is very different indeed from what I do. My own manuscripts are full of corrections – so full that it is easy to see that I am working by something like trial and error; by more or less random fluctuations from which I select what appears to me fitting. We may pose the question whether Russell did not do something similar, though only in his mind, and perhaps not even consciously, and at any rate very rapidly…
“We may indeed conjecture that Bertrand Russell produced almost as many trial formulations as I do, but that his mind worked more quickly than mine in trying them out and rejecting the non-fitting verbal candidates.”
— Karl Popper, “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind”, Dialectica, vol. 32, no. 3-4, 1978, p. 347.
Posted inPhilosophy|Comments Off on Russell’s Mind
Was “Hey Jude” written about the Jews, specifically the Jewish sense of self and history? (“Jude” means “Jew” in German.)
And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain
Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders
For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder…
Apocryphally, McCartney wrote the song, released as a single in 1968, to comfort a young Julian Lennon during his parents’ divorce, and this is still the most likely inspiration for the song. But, lyrically, a pop song need not have only one meaning to it.
The Wikipedia entry for “Hey Jude” notes two sources that, among the many different theories about whom the song is about, speculate “Hey Jude” was directed at Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman), who was in his post-motorcycle-accident, semi-retirement phase in Woodstock, NY. There’s also this interesting bit:
A failed early promotional attempt for the single took place after the Beatles’ all-night recording session on 7–8 August 1968.[101] With Apple Boutique having closed a week before, McCartney and his girlfriend, Francie Schwartz, painted Hey Jude/Revolution across its large, whitewashed shop windows.[102] The words were mistaken for anti-Semitic graffiti (since Jude means “Jew” in German),[102] leading to complaints from the local Jewish community,[81][103] and the windows being smashed by passers-by.[104] Discussing the episode in The Beatles Anthology, McCartney explained that he had been motivated by the location – “Great opportunity. Baker Street, millions of buses going around …” – and added: “I had no idea it meant ‘Jew’, but if you look at footage of Nazi Germany, ‘Juden Raus’ was written in whitewashed windows with a Star of David. I swear it never occurred to me.”[13] According to Barry Miles, McCartney caused further controversy in his comments to Alan Smith of the NME that month when he said: “Starvation in India doesn’t worry me one bit, not one iota … And it doesn’t worry you, if you’re honest. You just pose.”
It’s known that in those early, un-PC days, The Beatles could get cheeky in the studio. Some sources indicate that during recordings for the 1967 song “Baby You’re A Rich Man”, John vocally riffed with humorous lyrics about The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, singing: “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew.”
“No Pakistanis” is a spontaneous studio jam from early 1969 and a precursor to what would eventually become “Get Back”:
Don’t want no black man! Don’t dig no Pakistanis Taking all the people’s jobs…
Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis Living in a council flat Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is Won’t you tell us where you’re at?…
Oh, get back, get back Get back to where you once belonged! Get back, get back, Get back to where you once belonged!
Another line of the jam includes:
Don’t need no Puerto Ricans Living in the USA.
In 1986, Paul (obviously aware of the bootleg circulations of these songs) would tellRolling Stone:
When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to “Get Back” which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of “Get Back”, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about ‘too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’ – that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis… If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favourite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown.
I never harbored any racist sentiments! Some of my best friends are black!
Around this same time, Paul and John jammed in the studio on what is known as “The Commonwealth Song”. By today’s standards, the spontaneous jam is chock full of politically incorrect phrases, with the lyrics centering around Enoch Powell’s famous 1968 “River of Blood” speech and its political fallout. Some of the lyrics are difficult to decipher, but the gist comes through.
Tonight, Enoch Powell said, “Get out immigrants, Immigrants had better go home.” Tonight, Wilson said to the immigrants, “You’d better get back to your Commonwealth homes.” Yeah, yeah, yeah He said “You’d better get back home!”…
I went to Pakistani I went to India I been to old Calcutta And I’ve had enough of that I’m coming back (yes?!) To England town (Yes, welcome!) And dirty Enoch Powell And he’s had enough of colored men [or does he say “Parliament”?]
Commonwealth! (Yes!) Commonwealth! (Yes!) Commonwealth! (Yes!) Well Enoch Powell, you gotta go back to home!
Well I checked off to Australia And I said to New Zealand: “You better go in with us Because we’re gonna have some fun. We’re going out to India We’re going to Pakistan.. I hear that Enoch Powell… he’s fixing for that…
Commonwealth! (Yes!) Commonwealth! (Yes!) Can you hear me talking Commonwealth? Yeah the Commonwealth But it’s much too wealthy for me (It’s much too common or me) Much too common for me, oh yes…
Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom…
An early version of the song, known to bootleggers as “No Pakistanis,” began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.”…
In a recording known as “Back to the Commonwealth” or “The Commonwealth Song,” the band blasts the politician by name. “Dirty Enoch Powell said to the immigrants, immigrants you better get back to your commonwealth homes,” McCartney warbles over a skittering beat. Soon enough, however, we learn that “Heath said to Enoch Powell you better get out, or heads are gonna roll.” As the song slides into a rollicking boogie, McCartney recounts his travels around the old British empire, from the West Indies to India and Pakistan, as Lennon chimes in occasionally, in the voice of a prim old English woman, “The Commonwealth is much too common for me.”
For what it’s worth, it is not a “prim old English woman” that Lennon is imitating here, but a Peter Sellars-styled imitation of an Indian.
Cummings also addresses the Beatles quasi-blues studio jam often called “White Power”:
Then there is the matter of “White Power.” In this recording, Lennon and McCartney free-associated names of popular figures over a blues jam, drifting from Malcolm X and Cassius Clay to the likes of Judy Garland and British pop pianist Russ Conway. The juxtapositions are intriguing: Mary Whitehouse, a British crusader for morals and decency, comes up, as does Dusty Springfield, the legendary soul imitator. The Beatles were up to something when they coupled Richard Nixon and Malcolm X with the incessant refrains of “white power” and “can you dig it?” but it was not something they intended to share with the public. The recording has never seen release. A somewhat similar song, “Dig It,” made it onto the “Let It Be” album, but the racial dimension was missing. Instead, Lennon rambled about the BBC, B.B. King and soccer player Matt Busby.
[Kanye] West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
Digest this man’s hatred of whiteness.
In a few decades time, imagine what’s in store for our society’s remaining whites when this guy and his ilk hold the whip.
It’ll be ‘payback time’, with a vengeance unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
“Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value — he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.”
— From The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq.
In The Spectator, Sam Leith asks “Might LSD be good for you?” There is something of a parallel between the sociology of psychedelics research and promotion and the Alt Right as a research and social movement.
And there’s an uncanny parallel between the jester-like figure of Timothy Leary, who was a Harvard scholar before becoming the Pied Piper of Psychedelia, and Richard Spencer:
Ah, Leary. Publicity-crazed, perma-grinning Timothy Leary was the worst possible ambassador for psychedelics. Not only did his stunts contribute substantially to the atmosphere in which governments cracked down both on street use and clinical research, his fame occluded the serious work that has been done on them before and since.
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Even by the dizzying standards of New York City philanthropy, a recent $6.24 million donation to the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side was a whopper — the largest single gift from an individual to the social service group in its 125-year history.
It was not donated by some billionaire benefactor, but by a frugal legal secretary from Brooklyn who toiled for the same law firm for 67 years until she retired at age 96 and died not long afterward in 2016.
Her name was Sylvia Bloom and even her closest friends and relatives had no idea she had amassed a fortune over the decades. She did this by shrewdly observing the investments made by the lawyers she served.
“She was a secretary in an era when they ran their boss’s lives, including their personal investments,” recalled her niece Jane Lockshin. “So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.”
A question that comes to mind: who benefits? It appears the college scholarships are limited to students of the Henry Street Settlement, which is itself limited to residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side:
Henry Street Settlement is located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which has historically been and continues to be one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the nation.
While Henry Street provides services to all New Yorkers, the agency remains firmly rooted in the Lower East Side, as a trusted advocate for our community since 1893.
True to its legacy as an immigrant enclave and the hub of Progressivism in New York, the Lower East Side today remains rich in diversity, activism, and artistic experimentation. At the same time, it suffers from one of the highest poverty rates in Manhattan, with 30% of households in our district earning under $20,000 a year.
The accompanying website photos depicts lots of nice POCs. But what percentage of the beneficiaries, I wonder, are POCs?
While there are many risk factors in the neighborhood, there are also many strengths. The changing face of New York City is reflected by demographic shifts in our community, which is 33% Asian, 31% White, 25% Hispanic, and 7% Black or African-American, with a foreign-born population of 36 per cent. Our residents include members of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Bangladeshi, Puerto Rican, and Dominican communities, as well as descendants of the Jewish families who first immigrated to the Lower East Side in the 19th century. The rich cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity of our community underlies a sense of community among residents, providing a strong foundation for our Community Board; a vibrant artistic community; and culture-based values among many families that emphasize the involvement of the extended family in the care of children as well as older adults.
We can assume the ‘white’ category is 95% (if not higher) Jewish.
How, I wonder, does the demographic racial breakdown noted above compare to the breakdown in dispensation of scholarships by race? You can’t go to college unless you’ve graduated high school. Blacks and browns have high school dropout rates in the 50% vicinity.
I wonder if the percentage of scholarship monies dispensed to ‘whites’ exceeds the 31% noted above?
I do hope I am wrong in my speculation, because if my speculations were show to be correct, this would be a significant blow to curbing anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Perhaps the SPLC can donate some monies to me to investigate this. Together, we could put a stop to the spreading of vile stereotypes of Jewish ethnocentrism & Jewish Privilege.
Posted inJewish, NYT|Comments Off on NYT: 96-Year-Old Secretary Donates $8.2 Million… But To Whom?
Douthat said there’s tension between that prescription and the description Deneen gives of a late modern civilization that has the power to roll over all resistance. He said that if Deneed is right in the first 9/10 of his book, “then we need a more capacious politics of resistance, not just ‘let a thousand Bruderhofs flower.’”
Huh, I wonder what form this more capacious politics of resistance take? This coming from a guy who is, like Dreher, horrified at the idea of white identitarianism, let alone white nationalism.
Rod himself (of all people, and against his own inner angels) weighs in:
I thought of something Chris Arnade had said to me earlier: that people find meaning in life from three places — race, place, and/or faith. If faith is denied to people, and they don’t feel any particular loyalty to their place for whatever reason, that leaves one thing … and that’s one reason why the future is so scary.
In the mornings, poor Rod must look in the mirror and curse himself for the dreams he had the night before.
Douthat then adds:
“… My concern is that the Republic is just dead. We just an empire. We have a vestigial legislature, and an elected Emperor, and courts that serve as a kind of check on that Emperor. So maybe the path to localism and decentralization is through Empire. Maybe the US should become a kind of Austria-Hungary.”
Douthat then posits 5 ways that our decadent era can end:
1) from outside, via cataclysmic invasion or some rival, nondecadent civilization taking over. Closest we can imagine now is China, or mass immigration from Mideast and North Africa into weakened Europe.
2) A dramatic technological breakthrough that stresses society to breaking point
3) Religious revival or development of a new religion
4) A return of ideology intimated by these online debates. “Weimar Germany was kind of decadent, but the 1930s weren’t stagnant.” Rather, it was a time of great ideological conflict
5) Discovery of a new frontier or new horizon.
Hmm, if only there were some dissident right thinkers entertaining these 5 aspects…
Fitts Ward, Mako. “Queen Bey and the New Niggerati: Ethics of Individualism in the Appropriation of Black Radicalism”, Black Camera, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Fall 2017), pp. 146-163:
ABSTRACT:
This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture. Their promotion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shift in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé’s hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cultural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé’s fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ultimately sustain her personal empire.
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Having gone through Billy Joel’s entire catalog recently (fun fact: his then wife Christie Brinkley, the ultimate shiksa, painted the wonderful album cover of River of Dreams), the song “Allentown” has been stuck in my head for nearly 2 weeks straight. I’ve long known the song, of course, but it has thoroughly lodged itself into my brain.
It is a very well-crafted song, with lyrics as poignant today (even more poignant, actually) than in the early ‘80s. The song’s last line is a chilling anticipation of the White Death.
Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we’re living here in Allentown
But the restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to stay
Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coal
And chromium steel
And we’re waiting here in Allentown
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away
Every child has a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face
Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be giving up today
And we’re living here in Allentown
Posted inMusic|Comments Off on Billy Joel – Allentown (1982)
