October 1, 2011 at 11:15 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected.
September 28, 2011 at 1:29 P.M. A number of obstructions make it difficult for me to access this blog in order to write today. I will struggle to reach this site every day, against a great deal of computer crime, to continue writing these essays. The size of the print copies has become tiny at this blog, for me, through no action of mine. I will try not to allow these tactics to prevent me from communicating or retaining copies of my work. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review." Please compare "God is Texting Me!" with the CBS show "A Very Gifted Man.")
Ben Horowitz, "Prosecutor: Man Accused of Killing Priest Impregnated Girl, 11," in The New York Times, September 13, 2011, at p. A25.
William Glaberson, "Shock in Court Over a Lurid Confession," in The New York Times, September 22, 2011, at p. A26.
Kim Swenson, "Georgia Inmate Executed: Raised Racial Issues in Death Penalty," in The New York Times, September 22, 2011 at p. A1.
Donald G. McNeil, "Panel Hears Grim Details of V.D. Test On Inmates," in The New York Times, August 31, 2011 at p. A4.
Among the strange features of current American life is the renewed pervasiveness of dehumanization. Racism aimed against African-Americans -- while still devastatingly real -- is not something nice people admit to in polite society. An exception to this rule may found among some New Jersey Superior Court judges whose "opinions" I recall only too well -- judges who, happily, still admit to disliking "dark people." Otherwise, one does not, say, admit publicly to KKK membership in Bergen County's legal circles. ("New Jersey's KKK Police Shocker" and "Organized Crime Group in New Jersey's State Police.")
Dehumanization of Muslims and assorted "other" little brown people from bizarre places in the world is permissible and popular among our self-described social superiors. The Muslims may even be American citizens, who are now subject to assassination without due process of law. William James spoke for many Americans in concluding that "little brown men are only objects for us." ("Little Brown Men Are Only Objects for Us" and "John Rawls and Justice.")
I can neither confirm nor deny that a plaque bearing this quotation from William James may be found in Christopher Christie's office in Trenton. If so, then Mr. Christie will become even more popular than he is already with arch-conservatives and T-Party members. ("Is Christopher Christie 'Mentally Deranged' and a 'Liar'?" then "U.S. Attorney Says New Jersey is a 'Culture of Corruption.'")
The reduction of others to the ontological status of objects, "things," to which we assign monetary or instrumental value based on OUR goals is thriving: nubile women receive cash value (for a while) in the Hollywood system; Pakistanis killed by robot bombs have "negligible worth" in terms of our "objectives in Asia"; immigrants (legal and illegal) are glorified slaves in the factories of the nation and world; Africa and Latin America are places where we test our drugs in order to make effective medications available to wealthy sick people who can pay outrageous fees for them. Territorial integrity of other nations means nothing to our use of robot bombs. The "little brown people" who suffer and die in our Third World drug tests are "collateral damage." ("'The Constant Gardener': A Movie Review.")
"Gruesome details of American run venereal disease experiments on Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients in the years after World War II were revealed this week during hearings before a White House bioethics panel investigating the study's sordid history."
American prisoners and mental patients as well as undisclosed others in society are still subjected to secret experiments, including "psychological torture tests," emerging from intelligence efforts to cope with the so-called "Communist threat." ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "U.S. Courts Must Not Condone Torture.")
Sadism is one of the ugliest aspects of human nature that seems to arise, spontaneously, with power and secrecy given to scientists who are invited to test their theories on unsuspecting victims.
Manipulations of persons and behind-the-scenes techniques of social control, developed with the eager assistance of lawyers and psychologists oblivious to the evil they have caused, are among the horrors that my child's generation of Americans will struggle against -- if they are to retain their freedoms. I am not optimistic about the survival of Americans' civil liberties. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "American Doctors and Torture" then "Foucault, Rose, Davis and Meanings of Prison.")
I fear that future generations will live in a far less free and democratic America (and world) than the country I have known in my life. U.S. lawyers continue to offer assistance to corporations and government -- they do so (willingly) for a small fee -- in the effort to deny Americans their civil liberties for the sake of an illusory security.
Security is always the fascist mantra. Legal professionals who refuse to assist in these security efforts (those who seek to oppose them) will be deemed "unethical" and disbarred, like Lynne Stewart or myself, perhaps. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
" ... American taxpayers paid for syphilis infected Guatemalan prostitutes to have sex with prisoners. When some of the men failed to become infected through sex, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on their penises or faces, or even injected by special puncture into their spines." ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
I do not now and I have never suffered from any Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD). ("Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?")
"About 5,500 Guatemalans were enrolled, about 1,300 of whom were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. At least 83 DIED, but it was not clear if the experiments killed them. [Plausible denial?] About 700 were treated with antibiotics, records showed; it was not clear if some were never treated."
As usual, mental patients were seen as perfect specimens for sexual violation and objects of cruelty: A mental patient named "Berta" was "first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service, who led the experiments described her as so unwell that 'she appeared [like] she was going to die.' Nevertheless, he injected pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, uretha and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died."
Was this experiment for Berta's own good, Terry Tuchin? Is this treatment of a helpless "little brown woman" by American professionals not a matter of genuine "feminist" concern? Perhaps Rachel Maddow will be interested in this issue if Lesbians are afflicted? ("A Killing in New Jersey's House of Healing.")
"We live in the era of debased psychology and its 'ingenious experiments in the field of dehuman engineering [-- Ms. Poritz was an engineer before becoming a lawyer and judge --] all for the purpose (as Aldous Huxley recognized half a century ago) of producing good behavior in a craven new world." ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
What is meant by "dehuman engineering" or "decoherence" of the functional psyche? How does a person set out to destroy the mind of another human being, through induced-anxiety resulting from artificial frustrations, without feeling guilt or moral shame? ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
"... a sense of outrage at Watson's indifference to the human havoc he had wrought in his cold blooded manipulation of a child's developing personality -- his [the child's] capacity for trust, his ability to love, his openness to the world, his human potentialities. Watson [behaviorist] had taken a normal, healthy, happy infant -- one that reached out to the world and its living forms with intelligent curiosity and delight -- and he had traumatized that infant" -- anyone would have similar aversive reactions! -- "shocking it again and again with strange and clamerous noise, introducing into its vulnerable life and mind a dimension of [unpredictable and permanent] terror which (unidentified and unresolved) must surely have induced a profound and lasting state of neurotic anxiety -- a lifetime of nightmares -- if not a more critical derangement of mental faculties in the form of paranoid schizophrenia."
Ashley Montague & Floyd Matson, The Dehumanization of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1983), p. xv, pp. 64-65.
A list of sources detailing corruption and dehumanization will be added to this essay in the days ahead.
Sources:
Books:
Lionel Rubinoff, The Pornography of Power: A Brilliant Inquiry Into Man's Capacity for Evil (New York: Ballantine, 1967).
Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion, 2007).
Periodicals:
Karen Rouse, "N.J. Still Facing Bill for Tunnel: A Year Later, But Grows to $274 Million," in The Record, September 30, 2011, at p. A-1. (Millions "disappeared" from the cancelled tunnel project "New Jersey Must Cough Up $271 MILLION." Is this all connected to the P.A. overtime controversy and possible inquiry and/or indictments? Ethics?)
John C. Ensslin, "Accused Doctor Was Disciplined in 2011," in The Record, September 30, 2011, at p. A-1. (Dr. Patricia G. Ilim, possibly linked to Deborah T. Poritz, "distributed controlled dangerous substances beyond the bounds of medical process." "Dr." Terry Tuchin, did you do the same thing? Is the medication that you use in your hynosis interrogation sessions also the so-called "rape drug," Diana Lisa Riccioli and Terry Tuchin? Are your victims informed concerning the great dangers associated with hypnosis and drugging, Terry and Diana?)
Mark Mazetti, Eric Schmidt, Robert F. Worth, "C.I.A. Strike Kills U.S.-Born Militant In a Car in Yemen," in The New York Times, October 1, 2011, at p. A1. (U.S. citizen killed without due process of law by U.S. drone weapons.)
"An Indefensible Punishment: The Death Penalty, Unjust and Arbitrary, Cannot be Made to Conform to the Constitution," (Editorial) in The New York Times, September 22, 2011, at p. A28. (Too little, too late for Troy Davis.)
"Justice and the Suffolk County Police," (Editorial) in The New York Times, September 26, 2011, at p. A28. (County Executive, STEVE LEVY, has cultivated a national reputation as a "hard-liner" on immigration. Would Mr. Levy have taken the same attitude to the arrivals in Ellis Island early in the twentieth century? I doubt it. Mr. Levy is accused of sanctioning violence and other human rights abuses against Latino immigrants and other dark-skinned people. Irony?)
Herb Jackson, "Politics Ties Up Autism Research: 2 GOP Senators Block Funding Bill," in The Record, September 26, 2011, at p. A-1. (Persons like Diana Lisa Riccioli, allegedly, suffering from Autism will be the losers as well as the general public. I sincerely hope that Diana receives the help she needs in an institution, if one is necessary. I trust that we will all be meeting soon, Mr. Christie.)
Nick Clunn & Richard Cowen, "Mayor and Aides Got OT for Irene: Paterson Paid Four $20,000 After Irene," in The Record, September 23, 2011, at p. A-1. (Irene was really good for some people who now get to scam the relief money even if they were untouched by the storm. That's life in the Soprano State.)
Shawn Boburg, "Port Authority to Undergo Audit: Costs, Salaries Questioned After the Toll Hike," in The Record, September 23, 2011, at p. A-3. (Audit of P.A. for scams concerning overtime -- O.T. for architects, right? -- and other forms of compensation. Ethics? The PA chairperson or CEO is now gone and others will be leaving their jobs.)
Joel Schactman, "Schools Fail Performance Test: Paterson's Hopes of Control Dashed," in The Record, September 23, 2011, at p. L-1. (N.J. education continues to decline. "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
Hannan Adeley, "Clifton Seeks Cause of Sewage," in The Record, September 23, 2011, at p. L-5. (I think I can explain this mystery to the leadership at the home of the mafia. Diana Lisa Riccioli?)
A. P, "Judge Calls FBI Tactics Into Question," in The Record, September 8, 2011, at p. A-15. (Synagogue bombing arranged by FBI agents looking to make an arrest and get themselves in the paper.)
Karen Sudol, "Beldini Conviction Upheld: 3 Years for Bribery, Result of FBI Sting," in The Record, September 7, 2011, at p. A-4. (Leona Beldini is on her way to prison, despite her friendship with Diana Lisa Riccioli -- prison where Ms. Beldini belongs. Will Ms. Riccioli be next?)
Zach Patberg, "Questions Arise Over Timing of Contract: Water Commission Raises Counsel's Pay on Pact Day Awarded," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. L-1. ($25,000 bonus for George T. Hanley, Esq., who "took care" of Medina Consultant/Carillo Engineering who will probably show their appreciation to Mr. Hanley's "superiors" in political office later on.)
Nick Clunn, "Developer Fined $1.9 MILLION for Defying DEP Orders: Had No Permit for Work That Remade Hudson Waterfront," in The Record, September 13, 2011, at p. A-1. (Who allowed him to proceed without a permit over a period of years and why was no action taken against this developer before completion of his project? Now it's a "done deal.")
Peter J. Sampson, "Attorney Allowed to Represent Himself: Charged With Plot to Murder Witnesses," in The Record, September 13, 2011, at p. L-3. (Paul J. Bergrin, Esq., attorney who owned whorehouses at which he entertained distinguished members of the bar and judiciary in New Jersey, allegedly, is charged with drug trafficking and plotting with another Paramus attorney" -- on the ethics committee, perhaps? -- "to murder witnesses." Mr. Rabner may appoint his old buddy from the U.S. Attorney's Office, Mr. Bergrin, to the Supreme Court bench along with Mr. Stern. "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
Carlotta Gall, "Pakistanis Tied to Attack On Americans: New Details Emerge of Ambush at Border," in The New York Times, September 27, 2011, at p. A1. ("Carlotta Gall" is one of the names used by the person or persons also calling him or herself "Manohla Dargis," probably "belonging" to Ros-Leghtinen, Rubio and/or Menendez, who has just discovered what people have been saying for several years. Robot bombs are not the best way to make friends, Carlotta. I wonder how many other names this person, acting for Cuban-American politicians, uses and whether she receives additional "compensation," besides any salary from the newspaper? Conflict-of- interest, Carlotta?)
Alissa J. Rubin, "Gunman Kills C.I.A. Employee at Embassy Annex," in The New York Times, September 27, 2011, at p. A7. (Attacks on U.S. targets "increasing" indicating that multiple foreign intelligence agencies are assisting in the efforts of anti-U.S. forces in the region. Time to go home, Mr. Obama.)
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
N.J.'s Raymond O'Malley, Esq. Pleads Guilty!
September 27, 2011 at 3:15 P.M. The card for copies purchased at my local library branch was, mysteriously, illegible to the copying machine. I will purchase several cards at different library branches in order to copy my writings. I will also make use of printing establishments for this purpose. A woman was sitting at the computer that I was assigned to at the library with her laptop connected to this PUBLIC computer at which several new obstructions to my blogs have appeared, suddenly and strangely. Coincidence?
Mathew Gartland, "Ex-Official Pleads Guilty in Loan Scam: O'Malley Admits He Conspired to Commit Mortgage Fraud," in The Record, August 24, 2011, at p. A-1. (How's life treating you, Mr. Garcia? Ms. Kricko?)
"Ronald J. O'Malley, the former chairman of Bergen County's financing arm, pleaded guilty in federal court on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud contained in a 68-count indictment filed a year ago."
Sweetheart deal for Mr. O'Malley? Only one count was acceptable in the plea bargain -- out of 68 original counts or charges?
"O'Malley, 48, who led the Bergen County Improvement Authority and was CEO of a private mortgage brokerage firm, was indicted on charges of using his position at the authority to falsify employment records so he could secure loans for his firm's clients."
Do you honestly believe that O'Malley could have operated this business for so long without sharing some of the "goodies" with local law enforcement and judges, politicians and/or "others"? Ms. Poritz was rumored for years to look the other way at offenses committed by attractive young women. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Many of these "prominent and highly ethical" people took no interest in O'Malley's activities for a very long time, for some reason, and have no complaints regarding the dismissal of over 95% of the "counts" in the indictment against him.
O'Malley gets a slap on the wrist while young African-American offenders are doing more time than O'Malley will ever get on car theft and other convictions where the value of the stolen goods is less than a thousand dollars. ("America's Holocaust.")
"His [O'Malley's] firm, the Ridgewood-based Residential Mortgage Corp., collected clients 'fees based on the loans, according to the 68-count indictment.' ... " ("More Toruble for Ridgewood, New Jersey.")
Terry Tuchin, "The Jewish Mengele," is Ridgewood-based. Is that where you keep the torture files, Terry Tuchin, in good-old Ridgewood? Is that town really "White Man's Country," gentlemen? Is "Short Hills" really "White Man's Country," Stuart Rabner? ("Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
"O'Malley declined to comment after his plea in Newark and referred questions to one of his attorneys who accompanied him to court Tuesday. ... "
The sentencing in this matter is scheduled for December 12, 2011. I urge the court to impose the maximum sentence in this case because "one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch." New Jersey's legal profession is obviously the bunch of spoiled apples, as continuing cybercrime against me -- probably emanating from Trenton's OAE -- confirms.
Naturally, the OAE will lie about their responsibility for these crimes and any "relation" they may now enjoy -- or have enjoyed in the past -- with Terry Tuchin and/or Diana Lisa Riccioli. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Cement is Gold," finally: "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
A severe sentence for Mr. O'Malley sends a message to his "unindicted co-conspirators," (allegedly, including Mr. John Molinelli, Bergen County's prosecutor), that these "business-as-usual" tactics in the Soprano State are no longer acceptable.
Mr. O'Malley has remained silent concerning whatever "assistance" (if any) he received from Mr. Rabner or other judges and/or public officials in O'Malley's creative -- was O'Malley "successful"? -- business ventures. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
A list of sources detailing further corruption and ineptitude in New Jersey and elsewhere will be added to this essay when censorship and cybercrime permits me to access my blogs.
Sources:
New York and the World:
Kim Swenson, "Georgia Execution to Proceed: Bids to Halt It to Go On," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A21. (Many of us were up late last night hoping for a miracle in the Troy Davis case. No miracles. Mr. Davis was executed despite overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and of his innocence. The death -- or murder? -- of Mr. Davis will render many issues "moot" for those tainted officials covering-up evidence of his innocence. How convenient -- for them, if not for Mr. Davis. Sounds like the OAE and Rabner's soiled New Jersey Supreme Court.)
Jim Dwyer, "Snared Into Prostitution at 13, and Now Given a Chance for a Clean Slate," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A23. (Minors involved in sex industry -- especially, young women -- are victims, not criminals. "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!" and "New Jersey Superior Court Judge is a Child Molester.")
Danny Hakim, "Alleged Abuse by Cattle Prod Is Investigated," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A25. (Cattle prod used on a "developmentally disabled resident" at a group home -- a gentle young woman who is not a criminal -- will be investigated, finally, even if this torture "was for her own good." Diana Lisa Riccioli is said to like cattle prods. When did the romance with Ms. Poritz take place, Diana, if it did?)
"A Grievous Wrong," (Editorial) in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A30. (Horror of possible execution of an innocent man, Troy Davis, is greeted with indifference by America's highest courts and most U.S. media. Legal ethics? "American Lawyers and Torture" and "New Jersey's Legal Ethics.")
New Jersey:
"Self-Improvement: Former BCIA Chairman Guilty of Fraud," (Editorial) in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. A-10. (Ronald O'Malley, Esq. adds a chapter to "New Jersey's anthology of corruption.")
Mathew McGrath & Richard Cowen, "Doctor Charged in Sex Assault: Previous Incident Led to Monitoring," in The Record, September 15, 2011, at p. A-1. (N.J.'s incompetence has allowed another child molester to commit his crimes. The alleged offender is "Dr." Leonard Joachim, a CIA psychiatrist perhaps. Trenton authorities were probably monitoring the wrong suspects, as usual, or committing crimes themselves. "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "New Jersey is the Home of Child Molesters.")
Scott Fallon, "Newest Superfund Site: Garfield Neighborhood Listed as Toxic," in The Record, September 16, 2011, at p. A-1. (More problems for cancer alley due to incompetent inspections and, probably, officials who were BRIBED for decades. How many will die this year because of New Jersey "toxic" corruption, Mr. Rabner?)
Michael Gartland & John Reitmeyer, "'Pay-to-Play' Exemption 'More Than a Loophole,' State Report Calls the Law Deeply Flawed," in The Record, September 16, 2011, at p. A-1. (New Jersey's hypocrisy about dealing with lethal levels of corruption permits this "farce" of toothless legislation to proceed.)
Justo Bautista, "Teaneck Lawyer Michael Cole Dies," in The Record, September 19, 2011, at p. L-1. (Michael R. Cole, Esq. has died and, no doubt, been appointed to the state's legal ethics committee even as he continues to bill clients for his services, allegedly: "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Amanda Baskind, "Council Candidates Issued $90,000 Bad Check," in The Record, September 19, 2011, at p. L-2. (Jose Als De Castro, of Jersey City, filed a civilian complaint against Deepak Kavadia, Esq., for writing a $90,000 bad check. Any account troubles, Mr. Garcia? Ms. Kricko? Navarete family? Mr. Ginarte? "Ladies and Gentlemen?")
Peter J. Sampson, "Ex-Mayor Asks for Reversal of Conviction: Cites Insufficient Evidence of Bribery," in The Record, September 20, 2011, at p. L-3. (Dennis Elwell denies there was sufficient evidence of bribery without disputing, factually, whether he actually accepted bribes. This is what lawyers call "the Jersey Shuffle." Mr. Elwell may have served as a "lay" member of the Hudson County Attorney Ethics Committee. Montecristo cigar?)
Michael Gartland, "'Pay-to-Play' Ordinance is Meeting Resistance: Some Freeholders Want 'Fair and Open' Loophole Eliminated," in The Record, September 21, 2011, at p. A-1. (N.J.'s corrupt public contracts are still a joke despite legislative attempts to deal with the issue, thanks to lobbyists like "Idira Rodriguez." Still in the "lobbying" game, "Idira" a.k.a. "Idida"? Say hello to "El Bobo" Menendez.)
Mathew Gartland, "Ex-Official Pleads Guilty in Loan Scam: O'Malley Admits He Conspired to Commit Mortgage Fraud," in The Record, August 24, 2011, at p. A-1. (How's life treating you, Mr. Garcia? Ms. Kricko?)
"Ronald J. O'Malley, the former chairman of Bergen County's financing arm, pleaded guilty in federal court on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud contained in a 68-count indictment filed a year ago."
Sweetheart deal for Mr. O'Malley? Only one count was acceptable in the plea bargain -- out of 68 original counts or charges?
"O'Malley, 48, who led the Bergen County Improvement Authority and was CEO of a private mortgage brokerage firm, was indicted on charges of using his position at the authority to falsify employment records so he could secure loans for his firm's clients."
Do you honestly believe that O'Malley could have operated this business for so long without sharing some of the "goodies" with local law enforcement and judges, politicians and/or "others"? Ms. Poritz was rumored for years to look the other way at offenses committed by attractive young women. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Many of these "prominent and highly ethical" people took no interest in O'Malley's activities for a very long time, for some reason, and have no complaints regarding the dismissal of over 95% of the "counts" in the indictment against him.
O'Malley gets a slap on the wrist while young African-American offenders are doing more time than O'Malley will ever get on car theft and other convictions where the value of the stolen goods is less than a thousand dollars. ("America's Holocaust.")
"His [O'Malley's] firm, the Ridgewood-based Residential Mortgage Corp., collected clients 'fees based on the loans, according to the 68-count indictment.' ... " ("More Toruble for Ridgewood, New Jersey.")
Terry Tuchin, "The Jewish Mengele," is Ridgewood-based. Is that where you keep the torture files, Terry Tuchin, in good-old Ridgewood? Is that town really "White Man's Country," gentlemen? Is "Short Hills" really "White Man's Country," Stuart Rabner? ("Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
"O'Malley declined to comment after his plea in Newark and referred questions to one of his attorneys who accompanied him to court Tuesday. ... "
The sentencing in this matter is scheduled for December 12, 2011. I urge the court to impose the maximum sentence in this case because "one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch." New Jersey's legal profession is obviously the bunch of spoiled apples, as continuing cybercrime against me -- probably emanating from Trenton's OAE -- confirms.
Naturally, the OAE will lie about their responsibility for these crimes and any "relation" they may now enjoy -- or have enjoyed in the past -- with Terry Tuchin and/or Diana Lisa Riccioli. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Cement is Gold," finally: "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
A severe sentence for Mr. O'Malley sends a message to his "unindicted co-conspirators," (allegedly, including Mr. John Molinelli, Bergen County's prosecutor), that these "business-as-usual" tactics in the Soprano State are no longer acceptable.
Mr. O'Malley has remained silent concerning whatever "assistance" (if any) he received from Mr. Rabner or other judges and/or public officials in O'Malley's creative -- was O'Malley "successful"? -- business ventures. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
A list of sources detailing further corruption and ineptitude in New Jersey and elsewhere will be added to this essay when censorship and cybercrime permits me to access my blogs.
Sources:
New York and the World:
Kim Swenson, "Georgia Execution to Proceed: Bids to Halt It to Go On," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A21. (Many of us were up late last night hoping for a miracle in the Troy Davis case. No miracles. Mr. Davis was executed despite overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and of his innocence. The death -- or murder? -- of Mr. Davis will render many issues "moot" for those tainted officials covering-up evidence of his innocence. How convenient -- for them, if not for Mr. Davis. Sounds like the OAE and Rabner's soiled New Jersey Supreme Court.)
Jim Dwyer, "Snared Into Prostitution at 13, and Now Given a Chance for a Clean Slate," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A23. (Minors involved in sex industry -- especially, young women -- are victims, not criminals. "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!" and "New Jersey Superior Court Judge is a Child Molester.")
Danny Hakim, "Alleged Abuse by Cattle Prod Is Investigated," in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A25. (Cattle prod used on a "developmentally disabled resident" at a group home -- a gentle young woman who is not a criminal -- will be investigated, finally, even if this torture "was for her own good." Diana Lisa Riccioli is said to like cattle prods. When did the romance with Ms. Poritz take place, Diana, if it did?)
"A Grievous Wrong," (Editorial) in The New York Times, September 21, 2011, at p. A30. (Horror of possible execution of an innocent man, Troy Davis, is greeted with indifference by America's highest courts and most U.S. media. Legal ethics? "American Lawyers and Torture" and "New Jersey's Legal Ethics.")
New Jersey:
"Self-Improvement: Former BCIA Chairman Guilty of Fraud," (Editorial) in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. A-10. (Ronald O'Malley, Esq. adds a chapter to "New Jersey's anthology of corruption.")
Mathew McGrath & Richard Cowen, "Doctor Charged in Sex Assault: Previous Incident Led to Monitoring," in The Record, September 15, 2011, at p. A-1. (N.J.'s incompetence has allowed another child molester to commit his crimes. The alleged offender is "Dr." Leonard Joachim, a CIA psychiatrist perhaps. Trenton authorities were probably monitoring the wrong suspects, as usual, or committing crimes themselves. "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "New Jersey is the Home of Child Molesters.")
Scott Fallon, "Newest Superfund Site: Garfield Neighborhood Listed as Toxic," in The Record, September 16, 2011, at p. A-1. (More problems for cancer alley due to incompetent inspections and, probably, officials who were BRIBED for decades. How many will die this year because of New Jersey "toxic" corruption, Mr. Rabner?)
Michael Gartland & John Reitmeyer, "'Pay-to-Play' Exemption 'More Than a Loophole,' State Report Calls the Law Deeply Flawed," in The Record, September 16, 2011, at p. A-1. (New Jersey's hypocrisy about dealing with lethal levels of corruption permits this "farce" of toothless legislation to proceed.)
Justo Bautista, "Teaneck Lawyer Michael Cole Dies," in The Record, September 19, 2011, at p. L-1. (Michael R. Cole, Esq. has died and, no doubt, been appointed to the state's legal ethics committee even as he continues to bill clients for his services, allegedly: "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Amanda Baskind, "Council Candidates Issued $90,000 Bad Check," in The Record, September 19, 2011, at p. L-2. (Jose Als De Castro, of Jersey City, filed a civilian complaint against Deepak Kavadia, Esq., for writing a $90,000 bad check. Any account troubles, Mr. Garcia? Ms. Kricko? Navarete family? Mr. Ginarte? "Ladies and Gentlemen?")
Peter J. Sampson, "Ex-Mayor Asks for Reversal of Conviction: Cites Insufficient Evidence of Bribery," in The Record, September 20, 2011, at p. L-3. (Dennis Elwell denies there was sufficient evidence of bribery without disputing, factually, whether he actually accepted bribes. This is what lawyers call "the Jersey Shuffle." Mr. Elwell may have served as a "lay" member of the Hudson County Attorney Ethics Committee. Montecristo cigar?)
Michael Gartland, "'Pay-to-Play' Ordinance is Meeting Resistance: Some Freeholders Want 'Fair and Open' Loophole Eliminated," in The Record, September 21, 2011, at p. A-1. (N.J.'s corrupt public contracts are still a joke despite legislative attempts to deal with the issue, thanks to lobbyists like "Idira Rodriguez." Still in the "lobbying" game, "Idira" a.k.a. "Idida"? Say hello to "El Bobo" Menendez.)
Monday, September 12, 2011
Can you lie to yourself?
This essay was first posted September 19, 2011 at 3:05 P.M. The address for the new Google sign-in sheet, allegedly, is as follows: http://account.google.com/ServiceLogin?Service=blogger&passive=1209600&continue=... (9/16/11)
Simon Blackburn, Philosophy: The Big Questions (New York: Metro Books, 2011).
Simon Blackburn's recent book examining several familiar philosophical questions is a great success. The author's enviable literary gifts -- his learning and charm -- are enlisted in the effort to seduce readers into philosophical pleasures leading to contented sleep. One is uneasy at the thought of being, as it were, "had" by this accomplished seducer of philosophical "virgins" or neophytes such as myself. Irony?
For a comparison to the ideas of Professor Blackburn see Owen Flanagan's, "Multiple Identity, Character Transformation," in G. Graham & G.L. Stevens, eds., Philosophical Psychopathology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 135-166 and Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 258-267.
The word "seduce" is apt because Professor Blackburn has also written a work entitled "Lust." There is indeed an "eros," according to Plato, in all philosophical dialectics. Dialectics is likened to coitus by the Athenians of the Periclean Age.
All of this seems distant from the quiet and highly civilized pleasures of Cambridge University where Professor Blackburn is happily tucked away like the March Hare in its burrow. It has been suggested (falsely) that sex is anti-British. The delicious sex scandals in British politics make this charge ludicrous. ("Oh, to be in India" and "There will always be an England.")
Among the topics examined in Blackburn's popular book is the question: "Can you lie to yourself?"
This was the formulation of the issue in the French high school examination in philosophy a few years ago. I prefer this "second-person" and, possibly, self-deceptive version to Blackburn's articulation of the question in the first person: "Can I lie to myself?" because the invitational aspect of the issue is heightened.
The question should draw you in by living inside your mind and forcing you to ponder the authenticity of your works and days.
Philosophical mysteries are about you and me despite our "ordinary" or "average" qualities.
I will comment on this old chestnut in philosophy. The metaphysical and psychological puzzle at the center of this discussion provides the inspiration for a great deal of literature. British intellectuals and artists are especially suited for this discussion being the inheritors of the world's greatest literature and living in a society burdened with a class system that imposes on everyone a task of performance or the need to create masks.
Brits are always in hiding. The establishment of an identity by any British person is, partly or importantly, a matter of performance, acting, more than in any other nation that I know of or can imagine. Men and women from the British isles -- together with more than a few of their American cousins -- are necessarily actors on the stage of self-invention, as distinct from from self-deception, but sometimes the performances wear thin.
English liberty and eccentricity is all about the process of self-creation. It may be that someone like Richard Nixon or the aptly-named, Mr. Weiner, engaged in a self-deceptive episode resulting in "decline" in their lives, but it is no less a matter of creative self-invention or "fictionalizing" for Churchill to inspire the masses with talk of "fighting them on the beaches and in the streets" and "blood, sweat, and tears."
For a book-length treatment of the phenomenon of self-deception in its most evil form, see Patrick McGrath's novel about a sadistic psychoanalyst, Asylum and then see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1985) and Adam Phillips, "Superiorities," in Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 3-32.
I begin with a clear statement of this issue. I then turn to some examples of the phenomenon of individual self-deception in order to analyze the even more dangerous and bizarre experience of social or collective self-deception, as in Nazism, or Fascist totalitarianism, or Stalinism, depending on your preferences and politics. I offer suggestions for a resolution of this mystery of self-delusion which may only amount to further evidence of my own self-deception or "mystification."
The greatest example of self-deception to which philosophers are prone is the alleged delusion that philosophy still matters in a scientific age.
I am among those sadly deluded persons who holds such an opinion.
This paradox concerning self-deception is a classic philosophical issue that can only be discussed intelligently, I believe, from a philosophically aware perspective. Science or scientists can not and will not answer this question for us. ("Has Science Made Philosophy Obsolete?")
"Dictionaries define the term unilluminatingly as the act of deceiving oneself or the true state of being deceived by oneself. Since deception involves intentional misleading, such a definition invites the question precisely how one can both intend to be misled by oneself and succeed in such an endeavor. ... Can the self perhaps be divided into a deceiving and a deceived part, as in Freud's view of the unconscious keeping information from the conscious self? Or must one adopt Sartre's paradoxical view, in Being and Nothingness, that 'I must know, as deceiver, the truth that is masked from me as deceived'? ..."
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 818-819.
Professor Blackburn says:
"The problem is that if the words are taken literally then it seems that the person who deceives himself or herself is at the same time both culprit and victim." Philosophy, at p. 57.
In Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 344-345, he further explains the paradox:
" ... Within a single agent the state appears to be impossible, since the agent must know [emphasis added] the truth to begin a process of deceiving him or herself about it."
The crucial question from an analytical and therapeutic perspective has to do with the various levels of the self, conscious and unconscious, that are allowed by the super-ego different degrees of knowledge and variable understandings of the challenges faced by the psyche -- this is especially true in extreme states -- because they, these aspects of the psyche, are assigned distinct tasks in order for the total person to meet the challenge of survival -- or even transcendence.
It may well be that the ego is not permitted to "know" what it does not yet "understand" by the entirety of the psychic system. ("Out of the Past" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
It may also be that one part of the mind knows something that all of the self -- in particular, the ego, or clear and conscious parts of the mind -- cannot know. These words, "know" and "understand," do not describe the same phenomena. Knowledge of one's inner motivations may be slight even where there is profound understanding of one's "reasons for actions." These distinctions will prove essential to our discussion later in this essay. I direct the reader to the works of Stuart Hampshire and P.F. Strawson as well as Colin McGinn and Jennifer Hornsby. ("William Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Mr. Bush may "know" that torture is illegal under core principles of international law -- certainly his lawyers must have known this! -- but he and they must find a way not to know it in order to convince themselves and others that there is some plausible basis for concluding that monstrous crimes against humanity, like torture and murder, may be described as "legal" (when the U.S. commits the crimes) under provisions of international human rights laws after 9/11. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "America's Drone Murders" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
Shakespeare's lesson is that ALL of us are engaged in elaborate efforts of self-deception that are often necessary to survival. Selfhood is a performance, artifice, theater. The Bard is also clear on the message that each of us is made up of a stage company of players or selves, some of these "players" (selves) cannot know or speak to the others until his or her crucial entrance and "action" is called for. John Fowles speaks of "The John Fowles Club":
"'The J.R. Fowles' is the name of the club to which I belong, for my sins. A number, indeed most, of its numerous other members consider that they barely do. Indeed, we're generally treated as sheer deadwood -- mere ciphers on some wretched mailing list, recipients of abuse for charity, badly written annual bulletins (mostly about people we can't even remember), invitations to nauseating reunion dinners (for which we have to pay ourselves, natch) ... I'm sure you'll all be only too familiar with this sort of horror and its ghastly varieties. As for the wretched president, Sir John Eye, and the never-available secretary, Mr. Mee, [sic.] honestly -- how the damn thing staggers on at all defeats reality. ... "
John Fowles, "The J.R. Fowles Club," in Wormholes (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), p. 62 (emphasis added). ("Master and Commander" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
"Defeating reality" (motive?) may well be the point to the business of fashioning an identity (reason for action).
We tell ourselves "stories" about our lives and those of others -- our national histories and religious myths are social versions of this necessary narrative task -- because we need our stories to make sense of events and lives. The distance between stories we tell to ourselves and then to one another, between our self-images and how others see us, is the source of much comedy and, sometimes, tragedies. ("What is Memory?" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
A number of philosophers have seen this literary task of assigning meaning to life as the essence of philosophy: Compare Richard Rorty, Contigency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 122-141 with Robert Brandom, "Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise," in C.P. Ragland & S. Heidt, eds., What is philosophy? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 74-95.
This hermeneutic theme is shared by novelists as diverse as John Banville and John Fowles, Ian McEwan and Gore Vidal. The greatest delusion and self-deception, for me -- I suspect also for Shakespeare -- is found in the person claiming a monopoly on truth and a single, monolithic understanding of reality (i.e., "it's all relative!") to which others must conform on penalty of being prevented from writing on-line while being deemed "delusional" and subject to "out-of-control fantasies" -- like Christopher Christie according to Ms. Oliver.
"Dellusion" and "delusion" are equally acceptable options, alternative realities for a single word, so that a hermeneutics of freedom permits you to choose the spelling that you prefer.
My latest experiences of computer crime suggest that my days writing at these blogs may be numbered. I will have to create another site for my texts. Truth cannot be suppressed as easily as many of us are denied Internet access Mr. Menendez.
The character of Mrs. Givings in Revolutionary Road -- a self-appointed guardian of normality and virtue especially in sexual matters -- is the essential example of self-deception on movie screens and in recent American literature. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
There are, of course, always different levels of the psyche or self actively engaged in the effort to adjust the individual to a "reality" that is as fictional and unfinished as personal identity must be in any living person. No identity is finished until one is dead. What is a crime is also a matter of construction or interpretation as opposed to an objective fact in the world. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Similarly, there is no single "reality" existing independently of the meanings and interpretations of persons, even if there is truth in a pretty objective sense of the word.
Given the epistemological and metaphysical distinctions involved in these statements many readers will feel puzzled at this point. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
In Continental philosophy -- which is not discussed by Professor Blackburn -- self-deception or narrativity is often the healthy product of imagination which is the source of selfhood. Carl Jung and the Jungians agree.
Phenomenological-hermeneutics is concerned precisely with these mysteries stripped of the condescension and contempt given them by the good Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, M.D. ("Studies in Hysteria"), who denied women's claims of violation as "hysterical" and absurd because they did not comport with Freud's myths of normality.
The origins of the word "hysteria" (meaning "from the womb") are instructive in this regard. Nonsense is what comes "from the womb" or women's minds, for Dr. Freud. Freud's militancy for adjustment to Victorian hypocritical middle-class morality as something called "the reality principle" is rightly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre and many feminists as the "epitome of bad faith." Those interested in researching this issue should examine the writings of Frederick Crews and Juliet Mitchell, a Freudian revisionist who is mistaken about R.D. Laing, but right about much else. For the etymology of the word "hysteria," consult The Oxford English Dictionary.
Reality is not something existing independently of human constructs as I never tire of insisting. Yes, there is objective truth nonetheless. After all, among those human constructs or systems of meaning is science. Nothing is as absurd, for many of us, as the notion that there is a single "reality" to which we must adjust in order to be as boringly ordinary, dull, ignorant and stupid as those who insist on "adjustment" in the first place.
Must we live in a nation filled with the likes of Mr. Perry or Mr. Boehner? Must we all become "Richie Cunningham" on Happy Days? Worse, must we go through life as Sarah Palin?
We can do better than that.
"Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves for taking their own lies for truth."
The OAE in New Jersey? Ethics? ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
"By such mystification, we achieve and sustain our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world. Simultaneously, we have been conned into the illusion that we are 'skin-encapsulated' egos. ... "
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 72-73 and R.D. Laing, "The False Self System," in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961), p. 99.
R.D. Laing and other psychoanalysts have studied the pathological extremes to which the psyche may be subjected in crisis states that often result in "splitting" the mind in order to allow for deception and distancing. One such method is the process of "mystification," to which I referred earlier, by which consciousness can be persuaded by the subconscious to believe soothing falsehoods -- falsehoods that permit the sanitizing of illicit secret desires such as the desire for power over others (which may explain continuing censorship efforts against me) -- delight in cruelty, for example, oppression and control of others that is deemed "therapy" for the victim's "own good." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "How censorship works in America.")
I found myself redirected to a bogus location aimed at denying me access to these blogs when I tried to write this morning. After I signed out of my blog, I was able to return to the site and write having been mysteriously signed-in, again, without my knowing it. Vandalism of this text is always expected. The goal is to discourage writing efforts and maximize psychological harm done to the victim. I am energized by each alteration of this text.
There is a so-called "positive" role of inspiration performed by the myths (or lies) we tell ourselves, individually and collectively, to achieve important personal and social goals.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche -- before Freud and Jung -- spoke of the "truths of memory" that are aimed at performing necessary and usually emergency surgery on the wounded psyche through reconfigurations of social truths, i.e., the truths of others. No, that's not me. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
Memory is the great diplomat, healer and advocate of the mind because it is devoted to adjusting the individual to a threatening environment -- or to the enigma of evil -- while finding a way to preserve the inner life as a refuge from the non-comprehending gaze of the Other. Yes, that's me.
I do not know how else one survives in a torture chamber. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
Evil defies rational understanding.
The person seeking to destroy these texts in order to prevent me from speaking/communicating (with the hope that I will collapse into psychosis or commit suicide) may be one example of the evil that I describe. Irrational powers of the mind are needed and are always connected, I believe, to human aesthetic faculties as well as the religious impulse in humanity.
When faced with the disgusting "reality" of sadism one sane response is to attempt to understand the evil through "narrative" rationality and logical analysis. ("'Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
We need stories even as we need eyes with which to orient ourselves in the empirical world. Stories (lies?) are means to guide us in the world of meanings in which we must live as persons. Lies are always found in the speeches of politicians, judicial opinions, advertising and all of the mass media. We live within a network of lies, every day, especially when we deny this obvious fact in America. ("Is truth dead?" and "On Bullshit.")
We proclaim ourselves defenders of human rights and are still operating torture camps to torment human beings who are often murdered -- murdered to provide cover for their murderers -- after our "soft" power and sanctions regimes, drones, have produced death and suffering for millions of persons in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. A little censorship is nothing by comparison. I may find myself at Guantanamo next week. http://www.criticalvision.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-courts-must-not-condone-torture.html and Joy Gordon, Invisible War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), entirety.
Our robot bombs are "peacekeepers" or "smart bombs" that only kill militants in Pakistan. I call those terms "lies." I call it a "lie" for the U.S. to proclaim a commitment to freedom of speech on-line while engaging in sanctioned cybercrime and censorship efforts against powerless dissidents.
You will not get away with these tactics emanating from New Jersey. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How censorship works in America.")
I call it hypocrisy to see ourselves as being entirely good while our enemies are all "evil."
I also call it hypocrisy to criticize China or Cuba for human rights failures because they suppress the speech of some dissidents, even as persons enjoying U.S. or N.J. government protection are busy trying to prevent me from writing freely on-line, or as Mumia Abu-Jamal continues to languish in prison, after a Circuit Court has acknowledged that his initial conviction was the finding of a racist jury panel and that the entire process to which Mr. Abu-Jamal has been subjected was and is contaminated by racism. ("Mr. Putin's Advice to America" and "Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
These are American society's lies that we cannot permit ourselves to see if we are to succeed, as a nation, in our efforts at self-deception or to be financially rewarded, professionally, as individuals by the powerful political bosses whom some of us serve.
Mr. Perry's myth of himself as a Gary Cooper-like sheriff riding into Washington, D.C. to clean-up the town and get rid of the bad guys is mild by comparison with Bush/Cheney fabrications. No government "shut-down" this week? ("Weapons of Mass Deception" and "America's Banana Republicans.")
I cannot be certain whether I will be able to write at these blogs from one day to the next. I do not know whether the harassment efforts and obstructions of my access to the Internet and these texts will finally silence my voice. I doubt it.
I will say this much about the universal effort of self-deception and the question to which this essay is devoted: Everyone must lie to him- or herself in order to construct an identity. There is no such thing as not lying to create a self-narrative complying with some mythical objective "reality" concerning our meanings. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Every human identity is a product of art and, hence, a work of fiction or literature -- lying, if you like. The question is not whether you will lie to yourself in creating your identity (you can be sure that you will do exactly that), but whether the fictions which we must create, individually and socially, are life-affirming or the opposite. Are your lies "true lies"? ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
There is no bedrock of reality in the realm of meanings. There are only (sometimes truthful) interpretations of what has mattered to us during our brief span of time on earth. The struggle against injustice is one collective narrative in which we may participate that has great meaning for many persons. ("What is Memory?")
Equally important is the effort to end censorship and hunger in the world, to allow for human creativity to find expression, even if the persons seeking self-expression have not attended Yale University and happen to be Africans, Latin-Americans, Asians or residents of Washington Heights or Harlem in New York and, thus, unlikely to be published in their own names in The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), entirety. ("Barack Obama and "The New Yorker.'")
Truths emerge from our fictions or not at all.
In answer to the question posed in this essay I suggest that we all lie to ourselves. However, sometimes our fictions inspire us to make stories "real" in the only way that we can do such a thing -- by living our adventures in the so-called "real" world that is shared with others. By becoming the persons we are for others who need us in order to achieve their best selves we make our lies into truths. ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
"Every person and every social group is to a greater or lesser extent blind to many of the injustices of its time, because its own culture and education, supporting a particular way of life, represents embedded and distinctive features of this way of life as unavoidable features of human life in general. So absolute monarchy, harsh conditions of labor in mines and factories, slavery, the subordination of women; so in our time the accumulation of vast fortunes in industrial countries, which can be used for political purposes and to consolidate the power and influence of wealth. No doubt our grandchildren will ask, 'How can they have failed to see the injustice of allowing billionaires to multiply while the very same economy allowed abject poverty to persist uncorrected [self-deception?] next door to preposterous luxury?' ... "
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 59. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
Simon Blackburn, Philosophy: The Big Questions (New York: Metro Books, 2011).
Simon Blackburn's recent book examining several familiar philosophical questions is a great success. The author's enviable literary gifts -- his learning and charm -- are enlisted in the effort to seduce readers into philosophical pleasures leading to contented sleep. One is uneasy at the thought of being, as it were, "had" by this accomplished seducer of philosophical "virgins" or neophytes such as myself. Irony?
For a comparison to the ideas of Professor Blackburn see Owen Flanagan's, "Multiple Identity, Character Transformation," in G. Graham & G.L. Stevens, eds., Philosophical Psychopathology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 135-166 and Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 258-267.
The word "seduce" is apt because Professor Blackburn has also written a work entitled "Lust." There is indeed an "eros," according to Plato, in all philosophical dialectics. Dialectics is likened to coitus by the Athenians of the Periclean Age.
All of this seems distant from the quiet and highly civilized pleasures of Cambridge University where Professor Blackburn is happily tucked away like the March Hare in its burrow. It has been suggested (falsely) that sex is anti-British. The delicious sex scandals in British politics make this charge ludicrous. ("Oh, to be in India" and "There will always be an England.")
Among the topics examined in Blackburn's popular book is the question: "Can you lie to yourself?"
This was the formulation of the issue in the French high school examination in philosophy a few years ago. I prefer this "second-person" and, possibly, self-deceptive version to Blackburn's articulation of the question in the first person: "Can I lie to myself?" because the invitational aspect of the issue is heightened.
The question should draw you in by living inside your mind and forcing you to ponder the authenticity of your works and days.
Philosophical mysteries are about you and me despite our "ordinary" or "average" qualities.
I will comment on this old chestnut in philosophy. The metaphysical and psychological puzzle at the center of this discussion provides the inspiration for a great deal of literature. British intellectuals and artists are especially suited for this discussion being the inheritors of the world's greatest literature and living in a society burdened with a class system that imposes on everyone a task of performance or the need to create masks.
Brits are always in hiding. The establishment of an identity by any British person is, partly or importantly, a matter of performance, acting, more than in any other nation that I know of or can imagine. Men and women from the British isles -- together with more than a few of their American cousins -- are necessarily actors on the stage of self-invention, as distinct from from self-deception, but sometimes the performances wear thin.
English liberty and eccentricity is all about the process of self-creation. It may be that someone like Richard Nixon or the aptly-named, Mr. Weiner, engaged in a self-deceptive episode resulting in "decline" in their lives, but it is no less a matter of creative self-invention or "fictionalizing" for Churchill to inspire the masses with talk of "fighting them on the beaches and in the streets" and "blood, sweat, and tears."
For a book-length treatment of the phenomenon of self-deception in its most evil form, see Patrick McGrath's novel about a sadistic psychoanalyst, Asylum and then see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1985) and Adam Phillips, "Superiorities," in Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 3-32.
I begin with a clear statement of this issue. I then turn to some examples of the phenomenon of individual self-deception in order to analyze the even more dangerous and bizarre experience of social or collective self-deception, as in Nazism, or Fascist totalitarianism, or Stalinism, depending on your preferences and politics. I offer suggestions for a resolution of this mystery of self-delusion which may only amount to further evidence of my own self-deception or "mystification."
The greatest example of self-deception to which philosophers are prone is the alleged delusion that philosophy still matters in a scientific age.
I am among those sadly deluded persons who holds such an opinion.
This paradox concerning self-deception is a classic philosophical issue that can only be discussed intelligently, I believe, from a philosophically aware perspective. Science or scientists can not and will not answer this question for us. ("Has Science Made Philosophy Obsolete?")
"Dictionaries define the term unilluminatingly as the act of deceiving oneself or the true state of being deceived by oneself. Since deception involves intentional misleading, such a definition invites the question precisely how one can both intend to be misled by oneself and succeed in such an endeavor. ... Can the self perhaps be divided into a deceiving and a deceived part, as in Freud's view of the unconscious keeping information from the conscious self? Or must one adopt Sartre's paradoxical view, in Being and Nothingness, that 'I must know, as deceiver, the truth that is masked from me as deceived'? ..."
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 818-819.
Professor Blackburn says:
"The problem is that if the words are taken literally then it seems that the person who deceives himself or herself is at the same time both culprit and victim." Philosophy, at p. 57.
In Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 344-345, he further explains the paradox:
" ... Within a single agent the state appears to be impossible, since the agent must know [emphasis added] the truth to begin a process of deceiving him or herself about it."
The crucial question from an analytical and therapeutic perspective has to do with the various levels of the self, conscious and unconscious, that are allowed by the super-ego different degrees of knowledge and variable understandings of the challenges faced by the psyche -- this is especially true in extreme states -- because they, these aspects of the psyche, are assigned distinct tasks in order for the total person to meet the challenge of survival -- or even transcendence.
It may well be that the ego is not permitted to "know" what it does not yet "understand" by the entirety of the psychic system. ("Out of the Past" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
It may also be that one part of the mind knows something that all of the self -- in particular, the ego, or clear and conscious parts of the mind -- cannot know. These words, "know" and "understand," do not describe the same phenomena. Knowledge of one's inner motivations may be slight even where there is profound understanding of one's "reasons for actions." These distinctions will prove essential to our discussion later in this essay. I direct the reader to the works of Stuart Hampshire and P.F. Strawson as well as Colin McGinn and Jennifer Hornsby. ("William Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Mr. Bush may "know" that torture is illegal under core principles of international law -- certainly his lawyers must have known this! -- but he and they must find a way not to know it in order to convince themselves and others that there is some plausible basis for concluding that monstrous crimes against humanity, like torture and murder, may be described as "legal" (when the U.S. commits the crimes) under provisions of international human rights laws after 9/11. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "America's Drone Murders" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
Shakespeare's lesson is that ALL of us are engaged in elaborate efforts of self-deception that are often necessary to survival. Selfhood is a performance, artifice, theater. The Bard is also clear on the message that each of us is made up of a stage company of players or selves, some of these "players" (selves) cannot know or speak to the others until his or her crucial entrance and "action" is called for. John Fowles speaks of "The John Fowles Club":
"'The J.R. Fowles' is the name of the club to which I belong, for my sins. A number, indeed most, of its numerous other members consider that they barely do. Indeed, we're generally treated as sheer deadwood -- mere ciphers on some wretched mailing list, recipients of abuse for charity, badly written annual bulletins (mostly about people we can't even remember), invitations to nauseating reunion dinners (for which we have to pay ourselves, natch) ... I'm sure you'll all be only too familiar with this sort of horror and its ghastly varieties. As for the wretched president, Sir John Eye, and the never-available secretary, Mr. Mee, [sic.] honestly -- how the damn thing staggers on at all defeats reality. ... "
John Fowles, "The J.R. Fowles Club," in Wormholes (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), p. 62 (emphasis added). ("Master and Commander" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
"Defeating reality" (motive?) may well be the point to the business of fashioning an identity (reason for action).
We tell ourselves "stories" about our lives and those of others -- our national histories and religious myths are social versions of this necessary narrative task -- because we need our stories to make sense of events and lives. The distance between stories we tell to ourselves and then to one another, between our self-images and how others see us, is the source of much comedy and, sometimes, tragedies. ("What is Memory?" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
A number of philosophers have seen this literary task of assigning meaning to life as the essence of philosophy: Compare Richard Rorty, Contigency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 122-141 with Robert Brandom, "Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise," in C.P. Ragland & S. Heidt, eds., What is philosophy? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 74-95.
This hermeneutic theme is shared by novelists as diverse as John Banville and John Fowles, Ian McEwan and Gore Vidal. The greatest delusion and self-deception, for me -- I suspect also for Shakespeare -- is found in the person claiming a monopoly on truth and a single, monolithic understanding of reality (i.e., "it's all relative!") to which others must conform on penalty of being prevented from writing on-line while being deemed "delusional" and subject to "out-of-control fantasies" -- like Christopher Christie according to Ms. Oliver.
"Dellusion" and "delusion" are equally acceptable options, alternative realities for a single word, so that a hermeneutics of freedom permits you to choose the spelling that you prefer.
My latest experiences of computer crime suggest that my days writing at these blogs may be numbered. I will have to create another site for my texts. Truth cannot be suppressed as easily as many of us are denied Internet access Mr. Menendez.
The character of Mrs. Givings in Revolutionary Road -- a self-appointed guardian of normality and virtue especially in sexual matters -- is the essential example of self-deception on movie screens and in recent American literature. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
There are, of course, always different levels of the psyche or self actively engaged in the effort to adjust the individual to a "reality" that is as fictional and unfinished as personal identity must be in any living person. No identity is finished until one is dead. What is a crime is also a matter of construction or interpretation as opposed to an objective fact in the world. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Similarly, there is no single "reality" existing independently of the meanings and interpretations of persons, even if there is truth in a pretty objective sense of the word.
Given the epistemological and metaphysical distinctions involved in these statements many readers will feel puzzled at this point. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
In Continental philosophy -- which is not discussed by Professor Blackburn -- self-deception or narrativity is often the healthy product of imagination which is the source of selfhood. Carl Jung and the Jungians agree.
Phenomenological-hermeneutics is concerned precisely with these mysteries stripped of the condescension and contempt given them by the good Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, M.D. ("Studies in Hysteria"), who denied women's claims of violation as "hysterical" and absurd because they did not comport with Freud's myths of normality.
The origins of the word "hysteria" (meaning "from the womb") are instructive in this regard. Nonsense is what comes "from the womb" or women's minds, for Dr. Freud. Freud's militancy for adjustment to Victorian hypocritical middle-class morality as something called "the reality principle" is rightly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre and many feminists as the "epitome of bad faith." Those interested in researching this issue should examine the writings of Frederick Crews and Juliet Mitchell, a Freudian revisionist who is mistaken about R.D. Laing, but right about much else. For the etymology of the word "hysteria," consult The Oxford English Dictionary.
Reality is not something existing independently of human constructs as I never tire of insisting. Yes, there is objective truth nonetheless. After all, among those human constructs or systems of meaning is science. Nothing is as absurd, for many of us, as the notion that there is a single "reality" to which we must adjust in order to be as boringly ordinary, dull, ignorant and stupid as those who insist on "adjustment" in the first place.
Must we live in a nation filled with the likes of Mr. Perry or Mr. Boehner? Must we all become "Richie Cunningham" on Happy Days? Worse, must we go through life as Sarah Palin?
We can do better than that.
"Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves for taking their own lies for truth."
The OAE in New Jersey? Ethics? ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
"By such mystification, we achieve and sustain our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world. Simultaneously, we have been conned into the illusion that we are 'skin-encapsulated' egos. ... "
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 72-73 and R.D. Laing, "The False Self System," in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961), p. 99.
R.D. Laing and other psychoanalysts have studied the pathological extremes to which the psyche may be subjected in crisis states that often result in "splitting" the mind in order to allow for deception and distancing. One such method is the process of "mystification," to which I referred earlier, by which consciousness can be persuaded by the subconscious to believe soothing falsehoods -- falsehoods that permit the sanitizing of illicit secret desires such as the desire for power over others (which may explain continuing censorship efforts against me) -- delight in cruelty, for example, oppression and control of others that is deemed "therapy" for the victim's "own good." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "How censorship works in America.")
I found myself redirected to a bogus location aimed at denying me access to these blogs when I tried to write this morning. After I signed out of my blog, I was able to return to the site and write having been mysteriously signed-in, again, without my knowing it. Vandalism of this text is always expected. The goal is to discourage writing efforts and maximize psychological harm done to the victim. I am energized by each alteration of this text.
There is a so-called "positive" role of inspiration performed by the myths (or lies) we tell ourselves, individually and collectively, to achieve important personal and social goals.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche -- before Freud and Jung -- spoke of the "truths of memory" that are aimed at performing necessary and usually emergency surgery on the wounded psyche through reconfigurations of social truths, i.e., the truths of others. No, that's not me. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
Memory is the great diplomat, healer and advocate of the mind because it is devoted to adjusting the individual to a threatening environment -- or to the enigma of evil -- while finding a way to preserve the inner life as a refuge from the non-comprehending gaze of the Other. Yes, that's me.
I do not know how else one survives in a torture chamber. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
Evil defies rational understanding.
The person seeking to destroy these texts in order to prevent me from speaking/communicating (with the hope that I will collapse into psychosis or commit suicide) may be one example of the evil that I describe. Irrational powers of the mind are needed and are always connected, I believe, to human aesthetic faculties as well as the religious impulse in humanity.
When faced with the disgusting "reality" of sadism one sane response is to attempt to understand the evil through "narrative" rationality and logical analysis. ("'Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
We need stories even as we need eyes with which to orient ourselves in the empirical world. Stories (lies?) are means to guide us in the world of meanings in which we must live as persons. Lies are always found in the speeches of politicians, judicial opinions, advertising and all of the mass media. We live within a network of lies, every day, especially when we deny this obvious fact in America. ("Is truth dead?" and "On Bullshit.")
We proclaim ourselves defenders of human rights and are still operating torture camps to torment human beings who are often murdered -- murdered to provide cover for their murderers -- after our "soft" power and sanctions regimes, drones, have produced death and suffering for millions of persons in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. A little censorship is nothing by comparison. I may find myself at Guantanamo next week. http://www.criticalvision.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-courts-must-not-condone-torture.html and Joy Gordon, Invisible War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), entirety.
Our robot bombs are "peacekeepers" or "smart bombs" that only kill militants in Pakistan. I call those terms "lies." I call it a "lie" for the U.S. to proclaim a commitment to freedom of speech on-line while engaging in sanctioned cybercrime and censorship efforts against powerless dissidents.
You will not get away with these tactics emanating from New Jersey. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How censorship works in America.")
I call it hypocrisy to see ourselves as being entirely good while our enemies are all "evil."
I also call it hypocrisy to criticize China or Cuba for human rights failures because they suppress the speech of some dissidents, even as persons enjoying U.S. or N.J. government protection are busy trying to prevent me from writing freely on-line, or as Mumia Abu-Jamal continues to languish in prison, after a Circuit Court has acknowledged that his initial conviction was the finding of a racist jury panel and that the entire process to which Mr. Abu-Jamal has been subjected was and is contaminated by racism. ("Mr. Putin's Advice to America" and "Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
These are American society's lies that we cannot permit ourselves to see if we are to succeed, as a nation, in our efforts at self-deception or to be financially rewarded, professionally, as individuals by the powerful political bosses whom some of us serve.
Mr. Perry's myth of himself as a Gary Cooper-like sheriff riding into Washington, D.C. to clean-up the town and get rid of the bad guys is mild by comparison with Bush/Cheney fabrications. No government "shut-down" this week? ("Weapons of Mass Deception" and "America's Banana Republicans.")
I cannot be certain whether I will be able to write at these blogs from one day to the next. I do not know whether the harassment efforts and obstructions of my access to the Internet and these texts will finally silence my voice. I doubt it.
I will say this much about the universal effort of self-deception and the question to which this essay is devoted: Everyone must lie to him- or herself in order to construct an identity. There is no such thing as not lying to create a self-narrative complying with some mythical objective "reality" concerning our meanings. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Every human identity is a product of art and, hence, a work of fiction or literature -- lying, if you like. The question is not whether you will lie to yourself in creating your identity (you can be sure that you will do exactly that), but whether the fictions which we must create, individually and socially, are life-affirming or the opposite. Are your lies "true lies"? ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
There is no bedrock of reality in the realm of meanings. There are only (sometimes truthful) interpretations of what has mattered to us during our brief span of time on earth. The struggle against injustice is one collective narrative in which we may participate that has great meaning for many persons. ("What is Memory?")
Equally important is the effort to end censorship and hunger in the world, to allow for human creativity to find expression, even if the persons seeking self-expression have not attended Yale University and happen to be Africans, Latin-Americans, Asians or residents of Washington Heights or Harlem in New York and, thus, unlikely to be published in their own names in The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), entirety. ("Barack Obama and "The New Yorker.'")
Truths emerge from our fictions or not at all.
In answer to the question posed in this essay I suggest that we all lie to ourselves. However, sometimes our fictions inspire us to make stories "real" in the only way that we can do such a thing -- by living our adventures in the so-called "real" world that is shared with others. By becoming the persons we are for others who need us in order to achieve their best selves we make our lies into truths. ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
"Every person and every social group is to a greater or lesser extent blind to many of the injustices of its time, because its own culture and education, supporting a particular way of life, represents embedded and distinctive features of this way of life as unavoidable features of human life in general. So absolute monarchy, harsh conditions of labor in mines and factories, slavery, the subordination of women; so in our time the accumulation of vast fortunes in industrial countries, which can be used for political purposes and to consolidate the power and influence of wealth. No doubt our grandchildren will ask, 'How can they have failed to see the injustice of allowing billionaires to multiply while the very same economy allowed abject poverty to persist uncorrected [self-deception?] next door to preposterous luxury?' ... "
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 59. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
Friday, September 9, 2011
Is Christopher Christie "Mentally Deranged" and a "Liar"?
September 16, 2011 at 12:55 A.M. There was a new sign-in page for Google and blogger today, at least at my blogs, which may mean that my access to these blogs is about to be blocked -- as my access to MSN is blocked.
Continuing inaction on the part of the OAE makes a mockery of the very idea of legal ethics, sir. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
If there is no new post over several days at these blogs, it means that I am PREVENTED from writing on-line. I will then seek to create another blog elsewhere on-line. If writings by me cease altogether to appear on-line, then you may be sure that I am prevented, illegally, from writing on-line. ("How censorship works in America" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")
September 9, 2011 at 1:36 P.M. A parcel sent by "Priority Mail" to a relative in New Jersey was delayed, for some reason, although it contained only a birthday card. I have retained possession of the receipt for this parcel. Perhaps it was only a "coincidence," as Muhammad or Marcel at Time/Warner would say.
Does New Jersey's efforts against me, including harassment and cybercrime, censorship and denials of information to which I am entitled under the law extend to such tactics aimed at harming innocent others, Mr. Rabner? Is this what New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics considers "ethical"? ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
Chris Megerian, "Oliver: 'Mentally Deranged' Christie Told Benefits-Deal Lie," in The Star Ledger, September 8, 2011, at p. 1.
"Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver yesterday called Gov. Chris Christie 'mentally deranged' and accused him of telling a blatant lie about her at a closed door retreat organized by wealthy conservative [sic.] businessmen." (emphasis added!)
Mr. Christie is a member of the bar in the state of New Jersey whose mental illness, if real, (it certainly seems to be real) and whose lies -- stated publicly, apparently, and before witnesses -- is grounds for an ethics action, especially if the subject or victim of the lies is a fellow member of the bar and public official in the state. Shame on you, Mr. Christie.
"According to a tape released yesterday by Mother Jones [sic.] magazine, Christie told the audience at the Koch brothers event that Oliver asked him to rally support for her among Assembly Republicans to ensure that her fellow Democrats couldn't oust her from the speakership because of her support for cuts to public worker benefits."
New Jersey's Assembly Speaker said: "Gov. Christie is more mentally deranged than some of us thought, ... That's a blatant lie."
Is it permissible for New Jersey's Governor and a man who is a lawyer to be a "blatant liar," in the words of Speaker Oliver, and also "mentally deranged"?
If Ms. Oliver is correct -- few have disputed her contentions -- then Mr. Christie is on tape lying about a professional colleague while offering pathological as well as venomous slurs about a well-respected politician. ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
Has politics come down to this disgusting spectacle in the putrid Garden State? Is this conduct "ethical," Mr. Rabner? If Mr. Christie's action is not "ethical," then should the OAE not investigate this allegation by Ms. Oliver in order to bring ethics proceedings against Mr. Christie?
Are there double standards among New Jersey lawyers based on political influence or cash payments to judges or the Chief Justice, perhaps? No other explanation of this extraordinary indifference to reprehensible conduct seems plausible. ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
Is it a fact that New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics also lies, covers-up solicitations of grievances and/or fabrication of witnesses and tampering with or obstructing a record, and worse crimes, in a highly selective pursuit of targeted attorneys, Mr. Rabner? Are you, Mr. Rabner, or is New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics (OAE) in any way responsible for obstructing my on-line writings, plagiarisms, or suppressions of my texts to avoid responding to my accusations and requests?
Continuing inaction on the part of the OAE makes a mockery of the very idea of legal ethics, sir. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
Additional sources detailing more corruption among politicians, judges, and lawyers in New Jersey will be added to this essay in the days and weeks ahead. ("New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House" and "New Jersey's Feces Covered Supreme Court.")
Sources:
September 16, 2011 at 1:00 P.M. A new sign-in page prevents my direct access to these blogs and my Google mailbox. The goal of this manouvre is probably to deny me access to these blogs, eventually, and to preclude my continued writing on-line. I am currently writing at a New York Public Library computer. However, I believe that the alteration I describe has been made at Google/blogger. The same method was used to deny me access to MSN and MSN Groups.
September 14, 2011 at 1:40 P.M. In scenes reminiscent of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan was attacked: 42 Americans have been killed over the past 48 hours (despite the "allegedly" completed mission in that nation). More causalty reports are coming in today. With the escalation of the hostilities in Iraq and Pakistan, the number of Americans wounded has climbed to over 100,000 in Mr. Bush's wars that are now President Obama's headaches. I urge readers to examine Joy Gordon's compelling book, Invisible War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). (As many as two million persons may have died as a result of our efforts in Iraq, including the various sanctions regimes.)
Monsy Alvarado, "Halting Bullies is New Priority: Law Forces Schools to Update Tactics," in The Record, September 6, 2011, at p. A-1. (Does this include "cyberbullying," Mr. Christie?)
Salmon Masood, "Pakistan and U.S. Hail New Qaeda Arrests," in The New York Times, September 6, 2011, at p. A11. (Finally, the so-called "success and cooperation" suggests that Secretary Clinton rescued the Pakistan operation -- except for the new friction over recent bombings and the continuing demand for notice by Pakistani intelligence agencies.)
Donald H. McNeil, "Panel Hears Grim Details of V.D. Test on Inmates," in The New York Times, August 31, 2011, at p. A4. (American physicians used persons as experimental animals, often injecting lethal agents into their bloodstreams, in order to "learn from them." I will be writing at greater length about this matter.)
Herb Jackson, "President Offers Help, Hope for Flood Victims," in The Record, September 5, 2011, at p. A-1. (N.J. is an official "disaster area" because of the flooding, corruption, cancer rates, together with the plague of mafia crime as well as control of local government.)
Barbara Williams, "Toxic Brew Sickened Thousands," in The Record, September 5, 2011, at p. A-1. (New Jersey "sickens" decent people everywhere.)
"Looking for Labor," (Editorial) in The Record, September 5, 2011, at p. A-13. (14 million Americans are out of work. We have lost 8.5 million jobs and failed to create the 300,000 new jobs per-month needed to restore the economy. 1 of 5 Americans is below the poverty line.)
John Brenan, "Builder Seeks $1 MILLION to Complete 'Dream': Downplays Risk of Bonding Project in Meadowlands," in The Record, August 23, 2011, at p. A-1. (More money to fill a hole with dirt in the Meadowlands in addition to the $2-3 BILLION spent on the "Xanadu/American Dream Mall.")
Michael Gartland, "Ex-Official Admits He Conspired to Commit Mortgage Fraud," in The Record, August 24, 2011, at p. A-1. ("Ronald J. O'Malley, 48, former Chairman of Bergen County's financing arm -- also reputed to be a member of the County legal Ethics Committee -- pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to one count to commit wire fraud. Mr. O'Malley, evidently, declined to implicate Richard J. Codey or Stuart Rabner in these shady deals.)
Zach Patberg, "Questions Arise Over Timing of Contract: Water Commission Raises Counsel's Fee on Pay Pact Awarded," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. L-1. (Water Commission raises counsel's pay on pay pact awarded that may involve a slight conflict of interest. George T. Hanly, Esq. gets an extra $25,000 "fee" after $749,303 contract was awarded to Medina Construction/Carrero Engineering to undertake a "feasibility" study.)
Jeff Pillets, "Eric Wisler, Figure in En-Cap Case, Dies: Was Ex-Partner at Prominent Law Firm," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. L-1. (Eric Wisler, Esq. former law partner at the soiled DeCotiis law firm -- which is prominent in legal ethics matters in New Jersey -- "kicked the bucket." Allegations that Mr. Wisler is still billing clients from beyond the grave and that DeCotiis is keeping all the cash he can find in Wisler's accounts are neither confirmed nor denied.)
Additional sources detailing more corruption, thefts, indictments among New Jersey lawyers, judges, and prominent politicians will be added to this post in the days ahead. Renewed efforts to destroy these writings and prevent me from speaking, publicly, of these matters are underway. I will attempt to continue writing for as long as I possibly can at these sites. If I can no longer return to these blogs, I will try to find another location at which to write on-line.
John Reitmeyer, "Towns' Lobby Must Open Files: Justice League Must Open Files," in The Record, August 24, 2011, at p. L-1. (How about the torture files, Mr. Rabner?)
Herb Jackson, "AG Vows 9/11 Hacking Probe: Families Say They'll Watch Holder's Progress," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. A-1. ((How about a probe into the hacking of my computer? Also, the new "sign-in sheet at Google" -- at least, for my e-mail box and blogs? I suspect that the "Cubanoids" are behind this latest caper as they are behind the denials of access to MSN, at least for me. Censorship is not the answer to criticisms, Mr. Menendez.)
Matt Apuzo & Adam Goldman, "Anti-Terror Tactics Crossing Legal Lines: CIA Helping NYPD to Spy on Minority Communities," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. A-4. (NYPD and CIA will engage in "domestic spying without judicial supervision.")
John Brenan, "Having Delayed in Case of Ex-EnCap Executive," in The Record, August 25, 2011, at p. A-4. (William Gauger, former En-Cap executive accused of extortion of $100,000 from a financial consultant.)
Salman Masood, "Double Suicide Bombings Strike Southwest Pakistan," in The New York Times, September 8, 2011, at p. A-1. (At least 21 people killed in latest bombing in Pakistan. So much for "cooperation" as Pakistani intelligence continues to insist that the U.S. disclose operations in their country.)
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
How to be Good.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "How to be Good," in The New Yorker, September 5, 2011, at p. 43.
Please compare Larissa MacFarquhar, "Two Heads: A Marriage Devoted to the Mind/Body Problem," in The New Yorker, February 12, 2007, at p. 58 with Juan Galis-Menendez, "The Mind/Body Problem and Freedom," http://www.criticalvision.blogspot.com/2007/02/mindbody-problem-and-freedom.html
I am embarassed for The New Yorker magazine and offended on behalf of Derek Parfit. I have never seen such a poorly written essay published in U.S. media, let alone in this hallowed magazine. A typical sentence by Ms. MacFarquhar reads: "But, assuming that we could be convinced, how should we think about it." (p. 44.) How indeed. There are worse sentences on the same page and throughout the article: "That seems quite different -- but the death of any person could hardly make a difference to the identity of another." (p. 44.)
I invite the reader to ponder the image of Mrs. Kennedy at her husband's -- President Kennedy's -- funeral, then to read the quoted statement again. The true author of this article (Manohla Dargis? David Remnick?) mistakes or fails entirely to understand or even appreciate Professor Parfit's philosophical theory. It is inaccurate or incomplete, at best, to suggest that, according to Parfit, "Personal identity is not what matters." (p. 43.)
Professor Parfit has argued, eloquently and suggestively, that survival may not be what matters to what we call "personal identity." This is not quite the same thing. Parfit's "closest continuer theory" is not mentioned by this author even though this concept is fundamental to Parfit's understanding of personal identity as well as to his ethics.
I fear that at least one person responsible for this article does not speak, read, or write the English language with ease -- or at all. I do not believe that the author of this article has read Professor Parfit's books. Worse, it may be that this author has not read any book. I hope never to see another article like this one in The New Yorker.
Philosophy is a difficult and highly technical subject. The thoughts of a respected metaphysician are not "data" to be absorbed in one hour before writing an essay. The writings of philosophers -- such as Derek Parfit or Jacques Derrida, Cornel West or John Rawls -- require years of effort and patient, devoted study. I am not an expert on Derek Parfit's works. However, I have been reading Parfit's texts since the eighties. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
I regard much of Parfit's thinking as suggestive and unusually imaginative, even when I believe that he is mistaken about the issues. Parfit is difficult and has never been a philosopher who is easily summarized. I regard Parfit as a utilitarian, much more influenced by Henry Sidgewick and (less so) by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell -- whom he reacts against -- as well as deeply affected by the death of Gareth Evans, which explains his "existentialist" concern with death in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), where Parfits comments:
"Seventeen years ago I drove to Andalusia with Gareth Evans. I hoped to become a philosopher, and as we drove through France I put to him my fledgling ideas. His merciless criticisms made me despair. Before we reached Spain, hope returned. I saw that he was almost as critical of his own ideas. Like many others, I owe much to the intensity of his love for truth, and his extraordinary vitality. I record this debt first because he died when he was 34." (Acknowledgements.)
Rawls and Nozick, Putnam and Rorty are much less important to Professor Parfit's thinking than many American students of Parfit's writings suppose. I nearly enjoyed the opportunity of studying with Professor Parfit at New York University since he was the university's "star" philosopher -- along with Ronald Dworkin -- when I applied and was admitted to the graduate program in philosophy at NYU. ("John Rawls and Justice" then "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real" and "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
For a competent critique of Parfit's works by a scholar who has actually read his books and who refrains from Soap Opera-like psychoanalysis, see: Harold Noonan, "Parfit and What Matters in Personal Identity," in Personal Identities (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 192-210.
Derek Parfit's self-summary is still the best concise statement of his views: " ... the importance of identity is derivative -- ... what matters in the continued existence of a person are various personal relationships. ..."
Derek Parfit, "Lewis, Perry, and What Matters," in A.O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), p. 101.
Parfit's ethics -- especially with respect to duties owed to future persons and responsibility for harm caused to anonymous others, i.e., by robot bombs -- is vitally important for officials in powerful countries to ponder as they debate the use of military force as an instrument of foreign policy:
"It is not enough to ask, 'Will my act harm other people?' Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, 'Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people? The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. ["Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture"] If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly, like the Harmless Torturers."
Reasons and Persons, at pp. 80-90.
Please compare Larissa MacFarquhar, "Two Heads: A Marriage Devoted to the Mind/Body Problem," in The New Yorker, February 12, 2007, at p. 58 with Juan Galis-Menendez, "The Mind/Body Problem and Freedom," http://www.criticalvision.blogspot.com/2007/02/mindbody-problem-and-freedom.html
I am embarassed for The New Yorker magazine and offended on behalf of Derek Parfit. I have never seen such a poorly written essay published in U.S. media, let alone in this hallowed magazine. A typical sentence by Ms. MacFarquhar reads: "But, assuming that we could be convinced, how should we think about it." (p. 44.) How indeed. There are worse sentences on the same page and throughout the article: "That seems quite different -- but the death of any person could hardly make a difference to the identity of another." (p. 44.)
I invite the reader to ponder the image of Mrs. Kennedy at her husband's -- President Kennedy's -- funeral, then to read the quoted statement again. The true author of this article (Manohla Dargis? David Remnick?) mistakes or fails entirely to understand or even appreciate Professor Parfit's philosophical theory. It is inaccurate or incomplete, at best, to suggest that, according to Parfit, "Personal identity is not what matters." (p. 43.)
Professor Parfit has argued, eloquently and suggestively, that survival may not be what matters to what we call "personal identity." This is not quite the same thing. Parfit's "closest continuer theory" is not mentioned by this author even though this concept is fundamental to Parfit's understanding of personal identity as well as to his ethics.
I fear that at least one person responsible for this article does not speak, read, or write the English language with ease -- or at all. I do not believe that the author of this article has read Professor Parfit's books. Worse, it may be that this author has not read any book. I hope never to see another article like this one in The New Yorker.
Philosophy is a difficult and highly technical subject. The thoughts of a respected metaphysician are not "data" to be absorbed in one hour before writing an essay. The writings of philosophers -- such as Derek Parfit or Jacques Derrida, Cornel West or John Rawls -- require years of effort and patient, devoted study. I am not an expert on Derek Parfit's works. However, I have been reading Parfit's texts since the eighties. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
I regard much of Parfit's thinking as suggestive and unusually imaginative, even when I believe that he is mistaken about the issues. Parfit is difficult and has never been a philosopher who is easily summarized. I regard Parfit as a utilitarian, much more influenced by Henry Sidgewick and (less so) by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell -- whom he reacts against -- as well as deeply affected by the death of Gareth Evans, which explains his "existentialist" concern with death in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), where Parfits comments:
"Seventeen years ago I drove to Andalusia with Gareth Evans. I hoped to become a philosopher, and as we drove through France I put to him my fledgling ideas. His merciless criticisms made me despair. Before we reached Spain, hope returned. I saw that he was almost as critical of his own ideas. Like many others, I owe much to the intensity of his love for truth, and his extraordinary vitality. I record this debt first because he died when he was 34." (Acknowledgements.)
Rawls and Nozick, Putnam and Rorty are much less important to Professor Parfit's thinking than many American students of Parfit's writings suppose. I nearly enjoyed the opportunity of studying with Professor Parfit at New York University since he was the university's "star" philosopher -- along with Ronald Dworkin -- when I applied and was admitted to the graduate program in philosophy at NYU. ("John Rawls and Justice" then "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real" and "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
For a competent critique of Parfit's works by a scholar who has actually read his books and who refrains from Soap Opera-like psychoanalysis, see: Harold Noonan, "Parfit and What Matters in Personal Identity," in Personal Identities (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 192-210.
Derek Parfit's self-summary is still the best concise statement of his views: " ... the importance of identity is derivative -- ... what matters in the continued existence of a person are various personal relationships. ..."
Derek Parfit, "Lewis, Perry, and What Matters," in A.O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), p. 101.
Parfit's ethics -- especially with respect to duties owed to future persons and responsibility for harm caused to anonymous others, i.e., by robot bombs -- is vitally important for officials in powerful countries to ponder as they debate the use of military force as an instrument of foreign policy:
"It is not enough to ask, 'Will my act harm other people?' Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, 'Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people? The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. ["Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture"] If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly, like the Harmless Torturers."
Reasons and Persons, at pp. 80-90.
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