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Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in
ihcoyc's InsaneJournal:
| Monday, July 14th, 2008 | |
| 1:12 pm | Judge Dava J. Tunis, writing as the special referee in the Florida bar disciplinary case involving anti-game and anti-porn lawyer Jack Thompson, went beyond the Bar's recommendation for a ten year suspension from the practice of law, and came down in favor of permanent disbarment without leave to petition for reinstatement. She wrote: Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes. He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him. An "activist" is a person who makes enemies lists. Activism frequently results in a feedback loop that is harmful to the well being of the activist. After all, if you have a cause, it is likely that someone will applaud you for taking a stand. Eventually, the world becomes black and white. Your only true friends are those who are willing to applaud your every action. Everyone else is an enemy. This seems to be one of the things going on in Jack Thompson's case. Dr. Karl Menninger called paranoia the inoperable cancer of psychiatry: and paranoia is also one of the fruits of activism. Frankly, Mr. Thompson seems to be engaged in behavior that seems a classic example of the sort of thing you expect from people who require psychiatric treatment. His conviction of self-importance (i.e. "ideas of reference") leads him to self defeating behavior: Throughout these proceedings the Respondent faxed his pleadings, motions and correspondence to the Bar and the Referee herein. On a number of occasions the faxes Respondent sent to the Bar were incomplete. When the Bar requested the missing pages of the fax be resent, the Respondent stated the Bar was not to “expect any courtesies” from him. Thus, at the case management conference held on August 30, 2007, the Court granted the Bar’s Motion to Prohibit and issued a written order dated September 5, 2007, that “[a]ll communications and filings by the parties shall be sent by United States mail henceforth. The parties are not to fax each other herein.” . . . and led the referee to conclude that he was in fact incorrigible: "Respondent has repeatedly stated in these proceedings that he will not change his conduct. Thus, an enhanced disbarment is appropriate." I've read some of Thompson's filings, and frankly they do not read like anything a lawyer would have written. They read like the screeds written by stir-crazy jailhouse lawyers, and are filled with the same malicious fantasies of persecution. Thompson has filed pornographic pictures with various courts, apparently seeking to insinuate that any who would oppose him favors their publication. It seems clear that Thompson is an activist who has crossed the line, and veered into the realms of psychopathology. Let's hope and pray that he gets the treatment he needs. It may require a criminal prosecution to get him into treatment. |
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | |
| 10:17 am |  LET'S GIVE OURSELVES BACK TO ENGLAND Was there ever a war that had so trifling a set of causes as the American Revolution? At least, short of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. So the colonists didn't like paying taxes. Who does? By now, we know by harsh experience that the privilege of casting a ballot for a representative in a legislature doesn't really bring with it any guarantee that your opinions will be heard. It's a paltry thing to kill or die for. Afraid of being boxed in by French Canadians? What were they smoking? The important thing is that reasonable people ought to have been able to work all of this stuff out by means short of homicide. There's plenty of blame to spread around, but the colonists were hardly the blameless victims of unspeakable outrages portrayed by the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, the British policy of shipping religious malcontents, aristocrats' third sons, paupers, and Border bandits to the Americas to prevent them from creating inconveniences at home was a classic case of short term thinking. What kind of a commonwealth did they imagine they were founding by this stratagem? What they got was pretty much what you'd expect from a mixture of such people: a sanctimonious hotbed of republican sentiment, with an exaggerated opinion of its own specialness and entitlements, and a perennial chip on its shoulder; the exact sort of society that's on display in a deconstructionist reading of the Declaration of Independence. And that society hasn't really changed much in the intervening two and a half centuries, and the problems you'd expect to get from such a population continue today. Think of the benefits that would have been reaped if the United States had remained a British colony. Slavery would have been abolished by the early 1830s, avoiding a great deal of unpleasantness thirty years later. The sociopathic gun culture would have been stillborn. It too was the predictable outcome of what you'd expect when you allowed aristocrat wannabes to mix with bandits and raiders from the Celtic wildernesses. The United States would be more like Canada, and it is unlikely they would have been separated from it politically. The Native Americans would have been slightly better treated by the White population. So it's time to realize that American independence was a mistake. We're sorry. Let's call the whole thing off. Let's give ourselves back to England. All you guys need to do is restore the Stuarts. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 10:30 am |  By now, everybody's probably seen the pictures of Hillary Clinton drinking whisky. But if she wants to get my vote, I need to see some footage of her enjoying Grand Theft Auto IV. Current Music: Ladytron: Burning Up |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 11:25 am | Intégrisme II: Meeting the Empress's gaze Some time ago, on a discussion board, I posted some critical reflections on Jodorowsky and Costa's La Voie du Tarot. At that time, I was still using a variety of decks, including the RWS, regularly. I no longer use those illustrated decks nearly as often. I'm exploring why. And in the course, I'm also putting together some reflections on Flornoy's wonderful reconstruction of the Jean Noblet Tarot. Decks you don't have to argue with The use of any oracle raises obvious questions of authority. For me, this is key. To deal a handful of cards and hope to find insight and advice in what, to any external and objective opinion, is a merely random collection of symbols to which an entirely arbitrary set of meanings are attached, begs the question of why we expect insights from a game of chance. Anyone who uses the Tarot half seriously needs to answer this question for themselves. Now, throughout my fairly long career of using the Tarot, and using esoteric decks, I have found myself arguing with the cards and their creators. Every esoteric deck raises this kind of issue. And perhaps non-esoteric decks do also; for every esoteric author on Tarot from Court de Gébelin forwards has chosen to amend and correct the Tarot and its history. Court de Gébelin decided that ignorant printers had put Le Pendu upside down. In his illustrations, he "fixed" it. What this means in practice is that esoteric authors on Tarot - and esoteric users of Tarot - tend to argue with the cards. Arguing with the cards: if I were not a Gemini, I might never have noticed. But I'm an air sign, which in the Golden Dawn tradition makes the suit of Swords my representative. And the RWS and Crowley traditions uniformly treat the Swords negatively. This seemed to jive with neither their numerological or elemental attributions too well. It seemed almost a personal affront. I'm a Swords person. Hooray for Swords! (Their approach may, however, be following genuine traditions of inherited cartomancy. As such, we should tread cautiously before discarding it!) Arguing with the cards: it offends modern sensibilities to hear that officials of several churches sought to suppress the Popess and the Pope from the Tarot, for sectarian or pious reasons. So what do most esoteric decks do? All English language esoteric decks I know of seem to suppress the Popess and the Pope, giving them names that strip away some of their lovely ambiguity. Arguing with the cards: if you are Wiccan or neo-Pagan, you might take issue with some of the Christianizing imagery of the RWS deck, its Ace of Cups with a dove descending from heaven bearing a sacramental wafer marked with a cross. So instead you have paganizing decks like the Robin Wood tarot, a RWS tradition deck by a more recent fantasy illustrator, that removes all that. Somewhat oddly to me, the role of the male Wiccan cleric is given to the Magician rather than the Hierophant, who in the Robin Wood deck remains a Pope of sorts, though drawn unflatteringly. But Robin Wood remakes Judgment, with its traditional image of obviously Christian origin, into a new symbol of symbolic rebirth out of a cauldron. The awesomeness of ambiguity And the problem with this sort of remaking, the sort of thing that provokes argument, is that it also strips away ambiguities. And room for multiple interpretations is something that all oracles from Delphi forward have needed. Compare Robin Wood's Judgment with the traditional image of the angel sounding the trumpet and the earth yielding forth the resurrected dead. This is an unambiguously Christian image, showing that the card is a product of an unambiguously Christian culture. Spiritual rebirth is one meaning it easily encompasses: "The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." (I Cor. xv:52) That's one way of looking at it, informed by background and history. And there's another: Tuba, mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum Coget omnes ante thronum. "The trumpet, casting its awesome sound through the tombs of the nations, summons all before the throne" where the dead will face the judgment of God. This is why the card is called Judgment. And in at least some traditional decks, at least one of the resurrected figures meets the prospect of this judgment with terror and panic. You can't get this out of a cauldron of rebirth. This is why traditional Tarot is better than esoteric Tarot. All esoteric tarot decks begin with an interpretation of traditional images. As such, traditional tarot decks contain all the potential interpretations the esoteric decks make more explicit. And they also contain others that the esoteric decks exclude. Meeting the Empress's gaze The Popess remains one of the most enigmatic and intriguing images in the inherited cards. Almost all esoteric decks, following Court de Gébelin's lead, make her the high priestess of the mysteries. Historical speculations link her to the legendary Pope Joan, or a Visconti abbess who was executed for heresy. The game players who assigned a value to the Popess were apparently not too impressed with her. They assigned her the rank of II, one above the Mountebank. And, though it is politically incorrect to say so in a post-feminist age, the idea of a woman wearing a papal tiara would have raised questions of legitimacy, of the sources of authority, to the people who created the cards. You are reminded of the story of the fisherman and his wife, and the magic fish who raised her to the position of Pope, until she reached too far and wanted to become the equal of God. All of that gets stripped away when she turns into a High Priestess. Who would question the legitimacy of the priestess of the Mysteries? She wears a crown that is supposed to link her with Isis. The book she holds is changed: in the original, it might just be a symbol of native intelligence in the service of ambition, but here it becomes the scroll of sacred law. Now meet the gaze of the Empress in Flornoy's Noblet tarot. This woman is no Venus. She does not suggest sexual receptiveness or fertility. This woman is very much an earthly monarch who is not amused. We can use her also as a token for the meanings assigned to this card by an esoteric tradition. But we don't have to. Using traditional decks is not a matter of being snobs or fundamentalists. It's a matter of being open to multiple possibilities, of not being spoon fed the interpretations of a specific school. It is not austerity; it is liberation. |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 12:41 am | Meanwhile, in Britain. . . . . . . more sectarian strife breaks out. |
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |
| 11:08 am | Collection of desktop backgrounds Not sure if everyone is going to be able to get into this, but I've uploaded a whole bunch of my desktop backgrounds as a zip file that may be available here. The collection is mostly based on Old Master paintings, often with a vanitas or memento mori theme. Old patent medicine ads and war posters are prominent there also. |
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |
| 12:48 pm | Sovereignty, and politicians who "create jobs" According to Wikipedia, sovereignty is "the exclusive right to have complete control over an area of governance, people, or oneself. A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority, subject to no other . . . In constitutional and international law, the concept also pertains to a government possessing full control over its own affairs within a territorial or geographical area or limit ..." Now, in political campaign season, politicians like to claim that they "created jobs" or "brought jobs to" the territory they ostensibly govern. What this typically means is that they arranged for businesses to locate or relocate into their territories, where they could employ the constituents. Politicians and governments compete for "jobs" against other politicians and governments who wish to lure businesses elsewhere. They do so by promoting favourable regulatory environments and offering businesses tax concessions and exemptions from the general laws. Are governments who compete in a marketplace in this manner actually sovereign? Are they a "supreme lawmaking authority?" Does a government subject to these contingencies actually possess "full control over its own affairs?" It seems to me that the US government needs to regain its sovereignty; and that the process of doing so may be at least temporarily economically painful. And since sacrifice for the public good is foreign to the American character, it will not happen so. |
| Thursday, April 10th, 2008 | |
| 7:38 am | Guess where we're going? |
| Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 | |
| 10:45 am | The best cartoon ever made in the USA |
| Monday, March 31st, 2008 | |
| 12:59 pm | Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno "I see the Tiber foaming with great quantities of blood." The BBC World Service's Martin Frost recently broadcast a reminiscence of Enoch Powell's 1968 speech in which he quotes this line from Virgil's Aeneid, book VI. That line of Virgil always raises an eyebrow. The proper Latin word for the river Tiber is Tiberis. This is one of many Latin words that are quite difficult to fit into the imported Greek hexameter metre. Here Virgil chooses to remake it as a pseudo-Greek noun, *Thybris*, with exotic th- and exotic y, and gives it a pseudo-Greek case ending. Other poets resort to Tiberanus, the Tiber-an stream or some other circumlocution. It's just as ungainly and odd looking in Latin. In a word, we can encapsule the argument that post-Classical Latin literature is less artificial and therefore more appealing to moderns than Roman Latin is. Even though the post-Classical authors were writing in a learned language that was no longer really natural, they at least took their language as they found it. They were not constantly sawing and straining to fit their words onto the Procrustean bed of Greek models. At least for the writers who spoke Romance dialects, the situation is similar to modern French. That language also continues to observe long dead grammatical proprieties in written form. From the fall of the Western Empire to the age of Alcuin, there was no "Latin language". There was only grammatica, the artificial form your language took when you wrote it down. Written English, also, is a dead classical language, with an even more complicated relationship to its Middle English orthography than French has. Standard French has always been based on the speech of a single location, so the changes between writing and speaking are partly regular. Not so with English. |
| Monday, March 24th, 2008 | |
| 10:28 am | A thought for Easter We must concede that the story of Jesus' birth, divinity, and resurrection is going to seem a pretty unlikely story to non-believers. There ultimately is no argument that can compel any nonbeliever to accept that an ancient account of miracles is worthy of belief. Still, humans naturally tend to believe in God. The best atheistic screed I've troubled myself to read, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, claims that religions arise as a result of the confluence of various innate biological directives in humans. This is an argument that cuts both ways. Dennett observes that we attribute personality, motive, and agency to such things as the weather. English grammar requires a dummy subject ("It's raining" - What's raining?) even in statements about the weather. We interpret a couple of punctuation marks as a human face. :) The interesting thing about Dennett's argument is that it cuts both ways. It could also be that human beings were so arranged by a god for that god's purposes. There is no way to resolve this question with scientific inquiry. If Dennett's argument is true, then strong atheism is one of the obnoxious virtues. It would need constant cultural reinforcement to persevere with. Even the officially atheist regimes have historically tended to revert spontaneously to personality cults, totemism, shrines, and apocalyptic beliefs. Atheism is a hard diet to stick to. Given that religion seems to be inevitable, the question that really ought to be addressed is not, whether God exists? - if there isn't one we will continue to act as if there were - but rather, what kind of God is there? And it's on this question that Christianity emerges as the front runner: it's relatively easy to argue that the God of grace is more likable than the God of Islam or the gods of Hinduism or Shinto or European paganism. Current Mood:  frustratedCurrent Music: Alex Harvey: Roman Wall Blues |
| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 | |
| 3:59 pm | Praise the Lord. . . . . . . for Sen. Charles Grassley. |