by Neil Vodavzny

Democracy, as everyone knows, is a Greek invention. Nevertheless, their societies were just as much under the influence of the irrational as was medieval Europe. Signs and portents (check comic-book film 300), Delphic oracles, patron spirits and the gods themselves gazed with disdain on Man’s attempts to establish rational civilization. To counter the Apollonian light was Dionysian superstition and revelry. To the Greeks, pure order and rationality was not in the way of the divine muse. This also was the view of Christendom – until the Enlightenment. So, in fact, all societies bar our own recognize the irrational nature of being.

The more Talking Heads try to rationalise cyber-culture, the more irrational forces accumulate. Conversely, an irrational belief-system may create common-sense, simplified societies that may appear fairly rational (to an alien observer).  See also this:

Si j’ai toujours raison
Tu sais j’ai pas toute ma raison.

Why is this? Partly because information is tending towards the same cyber-flows, whether it’s genetic, global-markets, social-nets, advertising – it’s all information. Reality in essence is antagonistic, so the way to construct a sensible order is to recognize it and make sense of it via poetry and myth (or religion, which is a similar thing).

READ MORE...

by Neil Vodavzny

Old MacDonald’s Microcosmic Milieu, circa 1940s

By dint of a being a long-time comics fan (as well as a failed writer, though I do a fine-line in comics-themed mosaics if anyone’s interested), one gets imbued with the virtues of simplicity, not only in storytelling but more everyday things such as racial stereotyping or, as I prefer to call it, ethnicity, since that can apply to way of life, history, origins..as with Scottish dialect, say.

Even language is simplified if it’s dialect – Moira MacTaggert of X-Men just has to say the odd “och” or “dinna” and the art and story do the rest (past master John Byrne still hasn’t been bettered for taut line-work, by the way – nothing to excess). Actions are simplified, even if words aren’t. If words get complex, it’s often not clear what if any action or event they refer to.

The press are wont to say suchlike as, “There’s been an increase in anti-English racism in Scotland” – what does that mean? Both countries are relatively interbred, so the word race is just a redundant usage by the anti-racism establishment. In this case, anti-English means precisely what it says – mode of speech and possibly of exchange! It’s very clear what that means and anyone with the slightest imagination could conjure-up a mind’s eye picture of the interaction (or headbutt, Jimmy).

READ MORE...

The first chapter of another of my books that will never be written.  A fiction today.  But one hopes that one day the important parts of it will be fact.

Chapter One

“The Court will hear your opening statement if you please, Mr Truscott-Brown,” announced the presiding chief justice in perfectly fluent but by no means native English.  For that was to be the only language spoken in the room during the next three days.  No translators would be whispering into microphones, no one in Court would be hurriedly adjusting his or her earpiece to catch some mangled phrase.  This was an entirely English, or British, affair except that it was taking place at the Hague before one judge from Alsace, another from Heidelberg, and a third from Uppsala, all of whom had forgone the privilege of hearing the proceedings in their native tongue.

“Thank you, your Honour,” came the reply in ringing received pronunciation.  George Truscott-Brown QC OBE, lead advocate for the plaintiff, eternal renegade and inveterate fighter of lost causes, peered over his glasses at the unknown quantity which was the bench.  He steadied himself inwardly and, with a final, ever so slightly uncertain pat of the neat rectangle of papers on the table in front of him, began his work for the day.

“Learned judges will be fully aware that this is a complex and, in some quarters, controversial action which presents a number of tests for the 1948 Convention.  If the plaintiff is successful at this review, a subsequent plenary hearing may set precedent in several areas of high significance for the jurisdiction and practise of the ICC and to future interpretation of Article 2.

“Mindful, therefore, of the profound responsibility which would weigh upon the trial judges, it is our intention, at the kind invitation of the Office of the Prosecutor, to present you with the greatest possible wealth of evidence and legal argument within the time available to us.  It is our firm belief that all of the former will be ruled admissable and the latter applicable, and that your Honours will be led to the only possible conclusion that the Court must grant the Prosecutor leave to investigate the complicity of those individuals named in the Court papers.”

READ MORE...

A-Symmetry as Semiotic of European Evolutionary Advance

Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

While becoming the first geneticist to popularize Mendelism, William Bateson observed puzzlement in his colleagues over a strange morphological phenomenon in crustaceans.

His colleagues noted that some species of crabs have asymmetrical appendages, one being larger than the other, but when one of the pair was lost, another grew back in mirror image to the other. To this they were disposed to ask, how did the crab gain symmetry?

Through the extended analysis, Bateson hypothesized that his colleagues had been asking the wrong question. They should rather have been asking, “how did the crab lose asymmetry?”

It was in fact, in the course of this very investigation into the biological laws of symmetry that William Bateson first coined the term “genetics.”

…....

And from this inquiry he established “Bateson’s rule”, which asserts that when an asymmetrical appendage is regrown after loss, the resulting limb will be symmetrical, in mirror image with the other limb.

The rule by itself is not of particular relevance to our concerns for European ontology and nationalism. However, steps taken in ecological and cybernetic analysis and arrival at Bateson’s rule of morphology do have significant implications, suggesting hypotheses for semiotics of ecological (and ontological) correction -  including of human ecology.

READ MORE...

by Neil Vodavzny

Lest anyone thinks I’m a one-trick-pony, or some sort of idle dreamer, let’s get a bit more pragmatic, namely democratic. Behind every good democracy is an idea, whether it’s Israel – the chosen place, if not race – or the US ideal. Behind every bad democracy is a heavy machine of idle bureaucracy – men of inaction and fewer ideas.

Speaking of which, did anyone catch this in the Telegraph by Tim Stanley on Theo Roosevelt?

Tim must be a straight-A student because this is an exercise in misdirection on a cosmic scale. First of all, statements like, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th“ are par for the course. Which was how the west was won. Chief Seattle wasn’t yet recognized as a prophet for nature’s poison trail. Indians lived with nature, the white man lived against nature, so the one was obviously stronger than the other. Such anachronistic sentiments reflect nothing on Theo. Moving on to his power-mania, “I believe in power… The biggest [presidential] matters I managed without consultation with anyone, for when a matter is of capital importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only… I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.“

READ MORE...

Golden Dawn New York’s website has a post of video interviews with Greeks at a Golden Dawn food distribution in Athens (before Christmas, by the sound of it).  It is humbling to hear their righteous anger and expressions of faith in the only party that is fighting for them.

by Neil Vodavzny

Non-cultural signs apply to nature, and are found in myth, ie, mytho-culture

Example from folk lyrics of ethnicity with non-cultural signs
From border ballad Sir Patrick Spens (Fairport Convention)

The king sat in Dunfermline town
Drinking of the blood red wine
“Where can I get a good sea captain
To sail this mighty ship of mine?”

Then up there spoke a bonny boy
Sitting at the king’s right knee
“Sir Patrick Spens is the very best seaman
That ever sailed upon the sea”

The king has written a broad letter
And sealed it up with his own right hand
Sending word unto Sir Patrick
To come to him at his command

“An enemy then this must be
Who told a lie concerning me
For I was never a very good seaman
Nor ever do intend to be”

“Last night I saw the new, new moon
With the old moon in her arm
And that is the sign since we were born
That means there’ll be a deadly storm”

They had not sailed upon the sea
A day, a day, but barely three
When loud and boisterous grew the wind
And loud and stormy grew the sea

Then up there came a mermaiden
A comb and glass, all in her hand
“Here’s a health to you, my merry young men
For you’ll not see dry land again”

“Oh, long may my lady look
With a lantern in her hand
Before she sees my bonny ship
Come sailing home wards to dry land”

Forty miles off Aberdeen
The water’s fifty fathoms deep
There lies good Sir Patrick Spens
With the Scots lords at his feet.

There you have blood red, moon, sea and land (antagonistic opposites), storm, all non-cultural signs with mythic significance. The moon is often associated with the chaos of a storm, or in Joseph Campbells’ terminology a cosmic serpent (incidentally, the Odyssey must contain many such signs and portents). That implies all myths have non-cultural signs, which is why they’re iconic in an absolute sense and not the relative or conventional one of language and culture. This is what I call mythic-culture, being common to all cultures so, in a sense, outside culture.

READ MORE...

For those who might be put-off, initially or even ultimately, by the subject matter discussed here, I would refer to that old adage, that “if all you know well is one thing, then you really don’t even know that very well.”

Part 3 of the analysis of

John Shotter’s “Social Accountability and the Social Construction of ‘You”

READ MORE...