Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 17:57:42 +0800
Subject: Re: Boomerang Bill and The Silly old Fart
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Monday, June 7, 2004, at 07:30  AM, GEVANS613-AT-aol.com wrote:

> So you want to mount your white horse and attempt to change human 
> nature do
> you?

No, the question is what should the term 'human nature' mean? You could 
just as easily say that it is in our nature to care for others and 
safeguard the natural world we dwell in for future generations and that 
self-destruction is a perversion of our nature. 'Human nature' is 
nothing other than the ability to look to the future and argue about 
how we should be doing things in the present based on the lessons of 
the past. Any assertion that our 'nature' is a fixed quality like 
predation is just that, a bare assertion, not a transcendental 
absolute. All bare assertions require the power to make them true.

> The will to will, or in plain English - 'an ongoing fixity
>  and persistent intent of thought or purpose, ' is only metaphysical 
> as part
> of  the cognitive rigidity of metaphysicalists

Your 'plain English' is never plain to me but rather a mixed bag of 
nominalist contortions salted with psychologism and peppered with 
rhetorical ejaculations. Generally a gobbledegook, at least that's how 
it reads to me.

> The question posed was: 'What is so different  with
> Iraq? Both Nietszche and Heidegger urged subjugation by action by the 
> strong over
> the weak.

No, subjugation was a problem according to Heidegger, and its origin is 
the metaphysics of subjectness but as you refuse to read him and only 
want to mine bits and pieces of his text for your rhetorical anti-Hun 
writing I don't imagine that will make any sense to you either.

> Malcolm in the bowels of Christ THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'GLOBAL 
> POWER'  and
> 'it' certainly doesn't have a 'brain' which is capable of exercising an
> ongoing fixity of purpose.

Your quasi nominalism constantly reduces you to absurdity and I 
understand you can only read everyone else through your absurd AIT lens 
which leads you to conclude that it is everyone else that is absurd. 
 From the other side of this dialogue however I can assure you that I 
find you as ludicrously pointless as you must do me.

> the problem facing humanity is humanity not technology ...
> It  is the way that humanity uses technology that counts - you can 
> either use a
>  boomerang to scratch your back or you can throw it and kill people.

Boomerangs were used for killing game and for ceremonial purposes, they 
were part of the tool set of traditional Aboriginal peoples who 
generally lived in a very stable complementary relationship with their 
lands. Nowadays the boomerang equivalent for us moderns is a shopping 
trolley in the meat section of a supermarket tied into local and 
international distribution channels to industrial abattoirs, meat 
farms, the industrial cereal agriculture that feeds the meat, 
logistical transport systems, the energy infrastructure that powers it 
all and provides the fertilizers, a biochemical industry to provide 
antibiotics, a banking and corporate system to finance the whole 
shebang, a government legislature to regulate it and armies of workers 
and managers to keep the meat moving onto the shelves day in day out.

The evolutionary pinnacle of predation is a mum reaching over to 
inspect a plastic wrapped chunk of dead flesh with a price tag and bar 
code attached to it. This act requires a very complex global network of 
technological innovation to support it, it requires a whole way of life 
as an 'equipmental totality of relations'. Part of Heidegger's question 
about technology is that it has become so complex and interwoven that 
the old notion that humans merely use technology to shape a chaotic 
world in their image overlooks the possibility that it is the 
technological setup itself that forms how we already understand the 
world within which we use technology.

Your assertion that 'it is the way that humanity uses technology that 
counts' doesn't take this possibility of a 'technological 
understanding' into account and merely subscribes reason and/or 
instinct as the arbiter of our use of technology. Your analogies are 
far too simplistic for me and I find Heidegger's problem concerning 
technology infinitely more philosophical.

Cheers,

Malcolm



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