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John Sinclair

2005-06-16T17:36:00.000+05:30

John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941 in Flint, Michigan) Detroit poet, ex-manager of the MC5, Chairman of the White Panther Party from November 1968-July 1969.; jailed during 1969 over the sale of two joints to undercover narcotics officers.

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The John and Leni Sinclair Papers, 1957-1999

Ayn Rand and Objectivism

2005-06-02T09:47:00.000+05:30

Ayn Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982; first name pronounced (IPA) /aɪn/ (rhymes with 'mine')), born Alissa "Alice" Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was a popular and controversial American philosopher and novelist, best known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize, above all, her concepts of individualism, egoism, "rational self-interest," and capitalism.

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The Objectivist movement was a movement to popularize Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy that began with the founding of the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1960. With that event, Objectivism became an organized movement, with its own events, speakers, and publications. This movement has gone through a number of "excommunications" and "schisms" since that time, with various individuals being publicly denounced for their views.

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Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. In summary, Objectivism holds that there is an independent reality that human beings are conscious of through their senses, that reason is the only way of gathering knowledge and only the individual rational mind can process this data, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is to pursue one's own rational self-interest, and that the only moral social system is full laissez-faire capitalism with a government strictly limited to courts, police, and a military, because it is the only system where humans are barred from initiating the use of physical force upon each other.

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Laissez-faire is short for "laissez faire, laissez passer," a French phrase meaning to "let things alone, let them pass". First used by the eighteenth century Physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it is now used as a synonym for strict free market economics. Laissez-faire economic policy is in direct contrast to statist economic policy. Adam Smith played a large role in popularizing laissez-faire economic theories in English-speaking countries, though he was critical of a number of aspects of what is currently thought of as laissez-faire.

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The beatels & John Lennon

2005-05-22T20:18:00.001+05:30

The Beatles were the most influential and successful popular music group of the rock era. Few artists of any sort, in any era, have achieved The Beatles' combination of popular success, critical acclaim and broad cultural influence.

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John Winston Lennon, later John Ono Lennon, (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980), was best known as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist for The Beatles. His creative career also included the roles of solo musician, political activist, artist, actor, and author. As half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting team, he heavily influenced the development of rock music, leading it towards more serious and political messages. He is recognized as one of the musical icons of the century, and his songs (such as "Imagine" and "Strawberry Fields Forever") are frequently ranked among the best songs of the 20th century. In 2002, the BBC conducted a vote to discover the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. The British public voted Lennon into 8th place.

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The Assassination Of John Lennon

Even so, Bresler's book a little too often substitutes rhetorical questions ("What does that steady repetition of a voice saying 'Do it, do it, do it,' over and over again in Mark's head sound like to you?") for evidentiary argument. We can forgive him for that failing. Bresler tracked the case for eight years, conducted unprecedented interviews, and extracted a ream of previously unreleased government documents. But unlike researchers into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, he did not have volumes of evidence gathered by any official investigation, even a flawed one, to fall back on. The New York police had their man, the case was closed the very night of the murder - and, anyway, what political reason could possibly exist for gunning down the composer of "I Am the Walrus"?

Richard Nixon, his administration and other right-wing politicians (including ultraconservative ancient Senator Strom Thurmond, who personally memoed Attorney Gerneral John Mitcell on the matter) were fixated on what they saw as the Lennon problem. To them, the politically outspoken singer-songwriter was an insidious subversive of the worst kind, the famous and beloved kind.

A final note to the mystery of Mark David Chapman: As he was ready to go to trial and his diligent public defender was winding up six months spent assembling Chapman's defense, the accused killer suddenly decided to change his plea to guilty. His lawyer was perplexed and more than a little perturbed. But Chapman was determined. He said he was acting on instructions from a "small male voice" that spoke to him in his cell.

Chapman interpreted it as the voice of God.

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Epistemology

2005-05-21T15:03:00.000+05:30

Epistemology, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech) is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin and scope of knowledge.

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René Descartes (IPA: [rəne.dekɑʁt], March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Cartesius, worked as a philosopher and mathematician. He is equally notable for both his groundbreaking work in philosophy and mathematics. As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system, he formulated the basis of modern geometry (analytic geometry), which in turn influenced the development of modern calculus.

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The Latin phrase cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") is possibly the single best-known philosophical statement and is attributed to René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum is a translation of Descartes' original French statement, Je pense, donc, je suis.

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Continental Rationalism is a school of philosophy based on the thesis that human reason is the source of knowledge. It originated with René Descartes and spread during the 17th and 18th centuries, primarily in continental Europe. In contrast, its contemporary rival, British Empiricism, held that all knowledge comes to us through experience or through our senses. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and what the proper techniques are for verifying what we think we know. (See Epistemology.)

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Meditations on First Philosophy (subtitled In which the existence of God and the real distinction of mind and body, are demonstrated), written by René Descartes (1596 - 1650) and first published in 1641, expands upon Descartes' philosophical system, which he first introduced in his Discourse on Method (1637).

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Philosophical skepticism (UK spelling, scepticism) is the philosophical school of thought in which one critically examines whether the knowledge and perceptions one has are true, and whether or not one can ever be said to have true knowledge.

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Rationalism, also known as the rationalist movement, is a philosophical doctrine that asserts that the truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching.

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A priori is a Latin phrase meaning "from the former" or less literally "before experience". In much of the modern Western tradition, the term a priori is considered to mean propositional knowledge that can be had without, or "prior to", experience. It is usually contrasted with a posteriori knowledge meaning "after experience", which requires experience instead of propositions.

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Empirical or a posteriori knowledge is propositional knowledge obtained by experience. It is contrasted with a priori knowledge, or knowledge that is gained through the apprehension of innate ideas, "intuition," "pure reason," or other non-experiential sources.

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Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience) is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than purely deductive logic.

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Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology (typically, theories of justification, but also of knowledge) that holds that beliefs are justified (known, etc.) based on what are called basic beliefs (also commonly called foundational beliefs). Basic beliefs are beliefs that give justificatory support to other beliefs, and more derivative beliefs are based on those more basic beliefs. The basic beliefs are said to be self-justifying or self-evident, that is, they are justified, although not justified by other beliefs. Typically and historically, foundationalists have held that basic beliefs are justified by mental events or states, such as experiences, that do not constitute beliefs (these are called nondoxastic mental states).

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Coherentism is belief in the coherence theory of justification — an epistemological theory opposing foundationalism and offering a solution to the regress argument. In this epistemological capacity, it is a theory about how belief can be justified. Coherentism also refers to the coherence theory of truth.

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Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of epistemology, has been advanced both as a theory of knowledge and of justified belief (as well as other varieties of so-called positive epistemic status).

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The philosophy of perception concerns how mental processes and symbols depend on the world internal and external to the perceiver. Our perception of the external world begins with the senses, which lead us to generate empirical concepts representing the world around us, within a mental framework relating new concepts to preexisting ones. Because perception leads to an individual's impression of the world, its study may be important for those interested in better understanding communication, self, id, ego —even reality.

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In philosophy naive realism is used to describe the belief that physical objects continue to exist when they are no longer perceived. It can be contrasted with solipsism.

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Solipsism (from the Latin ipse = "self" and solus = "alone") is the metaphysical belief that only oneself exists, and that "existence" just means being a part of one's own mental states — all objects, people, etc, that one experiences are merely parts of one's own mind.

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Representationalism, or the representational theory of perception, is a philosophical doctrine that in any act of perception, the immediate (direct) object of perception is a sense-datum that represents an external object, which is the mediate (indirect) object of perception.

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Representative Realism is a philosophical concept, largely developed by Bertrand Russell. It does, unlike naïve realism, take into account sense data (the way in which the object is interpreted, not simply the objective, mathematical object) - this induces the veil of perception wherein we are unsure the table we look at exists due to there being no objective proof of its existence.

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In philosophy, idealism is any theory positing the primacy of spirit, mind, or language over matter. It includes claiming that thought has some crucial role in making the world the way it is--that thought and the world are made for one another, or that they make one another.

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Transcendental idealism, also called formalistic idealism, is a doctrine founded by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and influential in much subsequent German Philosophy.

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Subjective idealism is a theory in the philosophy of perception. It describes a relationship between human experience of the external world, and that world itself, in which objects are nothing more than collections (or bundles) of sense data in those who perceive them.

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In the philosophy of perception, phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist. In particular, we may reduce talk of physical bodies to talk of bundles of sense-data.

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The philosophical concept of causality or causation refers to the set of all particular "causal" or "cause-and-effect" relations.

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The Gettier problem is a fundamental problem in contemporary epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), issuing from counterexamples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief.

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When Christ was Gay

2005-05-13T19:50:00.000+05:30

No Treason

2005-05-12T12:45:00.000+05:30

No Treason

By Lysander Spooner

Kinsey

2005-05-10T20:57:00.000+05:30

It is ironic that Kinsey's critics insist to this day that he brought about this behavior by his report, when in fact all he did was discover that the behavior was already a reality. There's controversy about his sample, his methods and his statistics, but ongoing studies have confirmed his basic findings. The decriminalization of homosexuality was a direct result of Kinsey's work, although there are still nine states where oral sex is against the law, even within a heterosexual marriage.

The movie shows Kinsey arriving at sex research more or less by accident, after a young couple come to him for advice. Kinsey and his wife Clara McMillen (Laura Linney) were both virgins on their wedding night (he was 26, she 23) and awkwardly unsure about what to do, but they worked things out, as couples had to do in those days. Current sexual thinking was summarized in a book called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, by Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, a volume whose title I did not need to double-check because I remember so vividly finding it hidden in the basement rafters of my childhood home. Van de Velde was so cautious in his advice that many of those using the book must have succeeded in reproducing only by skipping a few pages.

The strength of "Kinsey" is finally in the clarity it brings to its title character. It is fascinating to meet a complete original, a person of intelligence and extremes. I was reminded of Russell Crowe's work in "A Beautiful Mind" (2001), also the story of a man whose brilliance was contained within narrow channels. "Kinsey" also captures its times, and a political and moral climate of fear and repression; it is instructive to remember that as recently as 1959, the University of Illinois fired a professor for daring to suggest, in a letter to the student paper, that students consider sleeping with each other before deciding to get married. Now universities routinely dispense advice on safe sex and contraception. Of course there is opposition, now as then, but the difference is that Kinsey redefined what has to be considered normal sexual behavior.

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Are we all Kinseyans now?

Everybody's Sin is Nobody's Sin

2005-05-10T20:42:00.000+05:30

What Kinsey found was that American men and -- worse, much worse -- American women, were more sexually active, more sexually adventurous, more diverse in their sexual desires and activities, more sexually exploratory, more likely to step outside the box of socially approved sexual behavior, than anyone would ever have imagined. Much more.

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Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey

2005-05-10T20:37:00.000+05:30

Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 - August 25, 1956) was a professor of entomology and zoology who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University – Bloomington, now called the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. His research on human sexuality profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States especially in the 1960s and was an important cause of the sexual revolution.

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Some Kinsey Quotes:

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
The inherent physiologic capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient stimulus seems, then, the basic explanation of the fact that some individuals respond to stimuli originating in other individuals of their own sex-and it appears to indicate that every individual could so respond if the opportunity offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses. There is no need of hypothesizing peculiar hormonal factors that make certain individuals especially liable to engage in homosexual activity, and we know of no data which prove the existence of hormonal factors (p. 758). There are no sufficient data to show that specific hereditary factors are involved. Theories of childhood attachments to one or the other parent, theories of fixation at some infantile level of sexual development, interpretations of homosexuality as neurotic or psychopathic behavior or moral degeneracy, and other philosophic interpretations are not supported by scientific research, and are contrary to the specific data on our series of female and male histories...
Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity.
The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

Visual Jokes ... Religious

2005-05-08T11:46:00.000+05:30

Visual Jokes ... Religious

White Citizens' Council

2005-05-07T20:52:00.000+05:30

The White Citizens' Council movement was a U.S. movement against racial desegregation. It began in the 1950s as a protest against federal court decisions which ordered racial desegregation, most notably Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

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Forced busing

2005-05-07T20:43:00.000+05:30

Forced busing is the concept of achieving racial or economic integration in schools by transportation of schoolchildren by bus to schools outside their neighborhoods. This approach has been used in a wide variety of school systems, including Wilmington, Delaware, Boston, Massachusetts, Richmond, Virginia, Pasadena, California, and San Francisco, California.

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Massive Resistance

2005-05-07T20:28:00.000+05:30

Massive Resistance was a policy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., to unite other white Virginian politicians and leaders in taking action to prevent school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

2005-05-07T20:27:00.000+05:30

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) was a landmark case of the United States Supreme Court which explicitly outlawed de jure racial segregation of public education facilities (legal establishment of separate government-run schools for blacks and whites), ruling so on the grounds that the doctrine of "separate but equal" public education could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans.

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Rosa Lee Parks

2005-05-07T19:52:00.000+05:30

Rosa Lee Parks (born February 4, 1913 as Rosa Lee McCauley) is a retired African-American seamstress and figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, most famous for her refusal in 1955 to give up a bus seat to make room for whites and her subsequent arrest.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

2005-05-07T19:44:00.000+05:30

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political protest campaign in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. The ensuing struggle eventually led to a United States Supreme Court decision on November 13, 1956 that declared illegal the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses.

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Emmett Till

2005-05-07T19:28:00.000+05:30

Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American youth native to Chicago, Illinois whose brutal murder in Mississippi was one of the key events leading up to the American Civil Rights Movement.

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Maoism

2005-05-07T19:27:00.000+05:30

Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought (Chinese: 毛泽东思想, pinyin: Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng), is a variant of Marxism-Leninism derived from the teachings of Mao Zedong (1893–1976). In the People's Republic of China (PRC) it is the official doctrine of the Communist Party of China. Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping started in 1978, however, the definition and role of Mao Zedong's ideology in the PRC has radically changed.

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Stalinism

2005-05-07T19:26:00.000+05:30

Stalinism is a brand of political theory, and the political and economic system implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky described the system as totalitarian, and this description has become widely used by critics of Stalinism.

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Trotskyism

2005-05-07T19:24:00.000+05:30

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. The term is sometimes used more loosely to denote various political currents claiming a tradition of Marxist opposition to both Stalinism and capitalism.

Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of "permanent revolution", and he argued that in countries where the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not triumphed already (in other words, in places that had not yet implemented a capitalist democracy, such as Russia before 1917), it was necessary that the proletariat carry out the tasks of that revolution and make it permanent by carrying out the tasks of the social revolution (the "socialist" or "communist" revolution) at the same time, in an uninterrupted process. Trotsky believed that a new socialist state would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as well. This theory was advanced in opposition to the position held by the Stalinist faction within the Bolshevik Party that "socialism in one country" could be built in the Soviet Union.

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Leninism

2005-05-07T19:23:00.000+05:30

Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism (a form of Communism); it is a branch of Marxism (and it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920's). Leninism was developed mainly by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, and it was also put into practice by him after the Russian Revolution. Lenin's theories have been a source of controversy ever since their inception, having critics both on the Left (for example, social democrats, anarchists, and even other Marxists), from the center (for example, liberals), and on the Right (for example, conservatives, fascists, etc).

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Marxism

2005-05-07T19:22:00.000+05:30

Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on Georg Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith, Ricardian economics, and 19th century French socialism to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital).

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Communism

2005-05-07T19:14:00.000+05:30

Communism is a term that can refer to one of several things: a social and economic system, an ideology which supports that system, or a political movement that wishes to implement that system.

As a theoretical social and economic system, communism would be a type of egalitarian society with no state, no privately owned means of production, no money and no social classes. In communism, all property is owned cooperatively and [[collectively, by the community as a whole, and all people have equal social and economic status and rights. Theoretically, under communism, human need or advancement is not left unsatisfied because of poverty, and is rather solved through distribution of resources as needed. This is thus often the system proposed to solve the problem of the capitalist poverty cycle.

Perhaps the best known maxim of a communist society is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This economic model is also referred to as a gift economy.

As a political movement, communism is a more radical branch of the broader socialist movement. The communist movement differentiates itself from other branches of the socialist movement through their wish to completely do away with all aspects of market society under the final stage of the system, as well as their unshakable commitment to armed revolutionary strategies for overthrowing capitalism, and their focus on the international working class as key in that revolution. As a practical matter, however, most revolutions that attempted to implement a communist society and were successful at overthrowing the state, have resulted in totalitarian dictatorships. Whether they were actually communist is often disputed by Anarcho-communists.

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Utilitarianism

2005-05-07T17:24:00.000+05:30

Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximisation of happiness for society or humanity. It is a form of consequentialism. Utilitarianism is sometimes summarized as "The greatest happiness for the greatest number."

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Epicureanism

2005-05-07T16:58:00.000+05:30

Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus (c. 340–c. 270 BC), founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus—about whom we know very little—Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures such as tranquility and freedom from fear through knowledge. Although some equate Epicureanism with hedonism or a form of it (as "hedonism" is commonly understood), professional philosophers of Epicureanism deny that.

Some would interpret this doctrine of the gods as really a disguised atheism. Fully aware of the fate of Socrates when brought up on a charge of impiety, Epicurus avoided expressing an overt atheism. Instead, he reduced the gods to mere physical beings, shut them up in a distant part of the cosmos, without a thought or care for what happens to mankind. This renders his philosophy atheistic on the practical level, but avoids the charge of atheism on the theoretical level.

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