Author Archives: M D

the-opportune-polemicist-in-my-email-inbox

Leave a reply

I have somewhat loosely followed a translator in recent years who actually helped me on one occasion find an ancient quote. Anyway, from time to time he has complained of ‘Christian persecution’ in England and I assume by extension, the world at large. He also seems to have some issue with homosexuals as well which appears to have something to do with his religious beliefs. I think he may believe that homosexuals are great examples of ‘Christian persecution’. In any case, the majority of his work is not along this polemic but rather translating ancient texts. Recently, I read one of his posts here which I could not resist adding my own contrary two-cents to…

Roger,

After reading your post I think it is very close to, “This shall not have been a polemic!”. I would even go so far as to suggest it could be an apology in wolf’s clothing. First, I admire your work and dedication to scholarly pursuits. I understand the lack of time for such indulgences in whatever your post wasn’t. In any case, I must say that as an ‘other side of the pond’ observer, I do not see this Christian persecution that you rail about. It is hard for me to believe that the originators of the Magna Carta would imprison folks because of their religious beliefs. I think you may be over the top on these claims. On one hand, if you did convey the whole story in your slightly more than emotive quips on the arrest, I think most rational folks, whether Christian or not, would agree it was a travesty of justice. On the other hand, some of this alleged ‘persecution’ may actually result from a kind of natural law, reaping what you sow.

I cannot believe any magistrate would uphold such a shabby arrest as apparently he did not. Justice is not perfect every time. There are reasons why justice is required and not some kind of natural law which needs no socially sanctioned enforcers. Injustice occurs regularly not just by criminals but also by sanctioned enforcers and by regular ‘ol mean-well folks. I am not surprised at all when sanctioned authorities commit injustice. I am aggravated when they appear to get away with it carte blanche. I hope democracy can ultimately address such atrocities but I am not even sure about that. In any case Roger, it does seem as if this Christian persecution thing is a bit of a stretch. I can tell you get a lot of emotional mileage out of it but I think most folks are not convinced by such claims. Of course, I know that you write that off as more of what you claim, Christian persecution. It comes across as an unfalsifiable belief if you know what I mean. On this side of the pond there are panhandlers and/or street philosophy peddlers regardless of theological persuasion which do get arrested for harassment and aggressive behavior so ‘forced free speech’ is not a right that is typically defended here.

I think you ‘doth protest too much’. I am not a Christian but I have no need to persecute Christians. ‘Persecution’ seems to me to imply a kind of on-going plot, a concerted endeavor. As you suggest, who has time for such shenanigans. Certainly, there may be some folks Christian or not which engage in such pathologies but I would not think this takes place in the majority of the sociological bell-shaped curve. However, paranoia does seem prevalent these days as it affords a certain kind of passive response to the ‘devils’ of existence. It seems to me that paranoia elevates ones false sense of uniqueness and importance as keepers of the Truth which requires social critique and upheaval. It may be fun for some but actual persecution requires way too much time and effort for most. Folks are creatures of necessity not ideology. My take is that we may have disagreements which some, more or less, would like to sanction socially, politically and legally but personally, I prefer the philosophical path of polemos, not in the sense of overt war but in the sense of strife and conflict, which gets worked out cathartically rather than violently. I see no problem with challenging philosophical or theological positions. I found my many years of undergraduate and graduate work intensely challenged my belief systems and forced me to change my ideas many times over the years. I think if the Greeks had simply been ‘polite’ the Occident would be a very different place today. Additionally, I think if one were God and would weigh historical, religious persecution in the balance, Christianity, at least as self-acclaimed, would not find itself weightless.

Why would you complain and emote some sort of sacrosanct indignation over Christian persecution anyway? Didn’t Jesus tell you that is what you signed up for as a Christian. Did you see him rail against the unbelievers? Isn’t he the one that said, turn the other check; give a stranger your coat and walk with him if he asks; lay down your life as he did for the sinful world, the enemies of the cross. It seems to me that if Jesus had indignation it was for the Pharisees and scribes of his day and even more for the money changers in the temple.

If there is a God, the world was created with a huge amount of sow what you reap in it. If Christians are persecuted it may not be heathen indignation but it may be that they are sowing what they have reaped. As Kierkegaard tells us if everyone is a Christian no one is a Christian. Doesn’t the Revelator tell us of an apostate Church, false messianic claims and ask if there would be faith on earth? Could it be that what you deem aggressive resistance to Christianity could rather be ‘chickens coming home to roost’ for Christians? Here across the pond, we have no lack of Christians which are brash and have none of the famed English politeness in such matters. We are regularly accosted by faith warriors both at shopping malls and in our politics. We have those that would legislate their morality in the name of ‘religious freedom’. There seems to be no end to what ‘religious freedom’ means over here. Of course, not any religion but the Christian religion is what most clearly rises to the top in these jurisprudent befunkles. Did Christ try to establish a kingdom on earth? Didn’t he say to the contrary and those that defended an earthly kingdom misunderstood him? Isn’t the Christian kingdom not of this world. Isn’t the mystic vision of Christianity to have the Holy Spirit reveal the pettiness of this sinful world in light of the glories of Heaven? Epiphany allows Christian suffering without whining of persecution, without hostility and even more so – laying down one’s life for the persecutor, dying for the sins of others. What happened to that Christ?

As a natural law, it may be that aggression requires aggression, enmity requires enmity, persecution requires persecution. Who would break this cycle? I think from ancient texts we may surmise that, for one, Jesus would not answer hatred with hatred but love. Did he strike out on the cross or pardon criminals? Even Socrates asked another to pay his debt with his dying words. Jesus and his disciples went to prison multiple times. Do you see any writings from those folks complaining of the ‘injustice’ or the persecution? They accepted it as par for the course and ministered to their fellow prisoners. They healed the sick, championed the poor, comforted the poor in spirit. I do not detect modern animosity and religious fervor in their approach to the world. They were long suffering. I think the thin skin approach to one’s faith and theology betrays a kind of insecurity in the coherence of one’s beliefs. If someone tries to convince you that you are wrong make them reason, explicate and clarify while you attempt to do the same; the worst case is you both walk away thinking more clearly, the best case is both may learn something.

 

Two-faced Libertarianism

Leave a reply

Rand Paul was on “Meet the Press” this morning. I understand that politician-speak is always fashioned for public manipulation at the cost of consistency and non-contradiction but Rand Paul has always struck me as contradictory to the point of absurdity. His rhetoric is fundamentally Republican with a few twists which is fashioned to give him the “working-man” appeal. Republicans understand the need to appeal to grass roots folks as if they are working in the common man’s best interest. This is not to suggest the contrary, that Democrats do not do this in their own way. Neither is this to be reductionary as if all Republicans fall under this rubric. However, for Paul, this need for facade is fueled by the nagging associations of Republicans with the economically elite. In Paul’s case he has openly acknowledged, as his father did, his philosophical mentor Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand was the queen of elitism and very proud of it. These folks are what I call chest beating elitists. It is ironic that this elitism has taken the modern form of a Jeffersonian styled libertarianism. Jefferson advocated individual rights for citizens and local government as opposed to federalism. Ayn Rand elitism is not elitism of the “working-man” but requires a political and economic power structure to secure the elite from the ignorant masses. Thomas Jefferson would have nothing to do with such nobilities. This contradiction has persisted from the federalism of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams who was also a federalist for part of his political life (until joining his father’s nemesis’ party, the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson). John Quincy Adams is credited with the early beginnings of the modern Republican Party. The split of Jefferson’s party is also credited with the early beginnings of the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson.

Today on “Meet the Press” Paul suggested that the “war on women” was being perpetrated by the Democratic Party not the Republican Party. He defended his point by reminding us of Bill Clinton’s illicit affair with Monaca Lewinski. He thinks this was clearly a case of the Democratic Party’s disdain for women. Of course, we all know Paul’s anti-abortion stance. One question that falls out of Paul’s libertarian confusion is, don’t libertarians defend the right for consenting, legally emancipated adults to have the sexual partner of their choice? Paul seemed to think that Bill Clinton’s ‘war on women’ was shown by ‘taking advantage’ of Monaca Lewinski. Wasn’t Monaca Lewinski an adult and legally entitled to make her own choice about a sexual partner? Wouldn’t a true libertarian defend Monaca Lewinski’s right, the right of the individual, to choose a sexual partner and not try to turn it into a moral universal such as a ‘war on women’? Wouldn’t a libertarian side on abortion choice rather than religious authoritarianism? This contrary play of universals versus individualism has always been the problem of libertarianism.

Elitism is not some kind of absolute individualism. Elitism has always sided with consolidation of its interests by power structures. It must shield and protect itself from the ignorant masses economically, militarily and politically with power, with what Jefferson would have thought as federalism. For Jefferson his problem with federalism was fundamentally with mercantilism, the concentration of elitist power in monarchies. How could libertarianism sanction any form of elitism? Well, the only way would be to make the common-man the true ‘elitist’. In this case, the true elitists would rise from the unprotected masses as the social, Darwinian adaptation of the fittest. The truly liberated elitist needs no protections other than their own individual ability to overcome, to say of their past “I willed it thus”. Sadly, this metaphysic of the exceptional individual has not historically been the case for elitism. For the most part, elitists as monarchs have always existed and persisted not from their own individual genius but from progeny, from birth, from entrenched power structures. The rhetoric that Paul espouses is the illusion of the ‘true’ elitist. It sides with the common man to protect the uncommon man. It calls the common-man the source of elite accomplishment while ensuring that the accomplished elites reap the benefit of the common-man’s vote. The modern garbs of libertarianism cloak an insidious and devious intention, the right of the individual to preserve what is “good for him”, the elite that he could be but statistically never will be. Underneath this cloak, Paul slips in anti-abortion, religious moral authority, elitist big business, ‘free market’ protectionism all of which when push comes to shove, push the individual aside to protect a very anti-libertarian agenda, the tyranny of the few over the many.

My position has always been that the individual thrives when the elites are perpetually at war without clear victors. When government and big business check each other against abuse, the common-man has the best chance for falling through the unconsolidated cracks in embedded power structures. If big business is given carte blanches privilege by the laissez-faire cloak of the ‘free market’ the common-man does not win over time except in the rhetoric of crafty politicians. Likewise, when government becomes a monarchy, a tyranny, the individual loses. This is why Plato tells us in his Republic that the philosopher king is the best form of government. However, what he did not tell us is that if the best form of government is defined by what he termed ‘liberalism’ which benefits the most people instead of the least, each person needs to be a philosopher king. If the common-man cannot see through the rhetoric of a Rand Paul we are all in trouble and history will once again repeat itself in rhetorical amnesia.

Oh, one more thing, if we want to cite Paul’s historical ‘war on women’ by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, perhaps we should also cite the very real war on Iraq and Afghanistan that Paul’s Republican, neocon buddies started in the Bush administration. I would think body bags would count more than illicit affairs in the real world. In the manipulative, rhetorical world of Paul, the preservation of the elite will always trump reality.

Here’s a thought…

Leave a reply

What if the universe thinks?

This may sound quite mad but,

what if thoughts and intelligence are not simply invented by us and trapped in our heads as a by-product of the culmination of evolution’s Homo sapiens but thoughts required the universe to be.

What if we did not invent thoughts but thoughts invented us by necessity?

Analogously, as frequencies (logical, ordered thoughts) and radiation noise (chaotic, random thoughts), thoughts as light is ‘transmitted’ from source to sink.

Perhaps, we do not have a clue as to what the ‘medium’ of thoughts could be just as we recently discovered dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe and we do not have a clue as to what they are.

Perhaps, ‘gray matter’ is a receptor, a sink for a universe of transmitted, sourced, thoughts.

Is the universe the ‘mind of God’?

If so, we are trying to transmit and look for transmitted signals from aliens with radio waves?1 Wouldn’t this be quite comical? Higher intelligence, lower intelligence permeates the universe and here we are trying to send and receive smoke signals.

If thoughts are ‘real’ why do we have to think we invented them? Could they have been around from the beginning, the arche, or even before the beginning? Could they have required the universe to be?

Well, if you believe the ancient Greeks the arche, the origin, is chaos, the gap of indeterminate and determinate. The logos, pitifully transmitted as ‘word’, is a gathering, an ordering, of thoughts, determinate, determining, conceiving, ‘circumspecting’, which is bounded by disorder, chaos, the indeterminate, the apeiron. Logos is the form, the forming, which thinks. Humans are the animal that speaks, that has the forms of thought which culminates in speaking, communicating, transmitting ideas.

Or, if you believe Christianity, “In the beginning was the word.”2, the logos. The logos is the mind of God. The universe is the actual ‘gray matter’ of God. Jesus was the perfect ‘receptor’ of the thoughts of God. We are receptors too and can ‘heed’ the word of God.

Need I say for Hegel there is the Concept, the Begriff, the Idea.

We can receive thoughts and transmit them with speech but also in other ways. Ladies seem to have a keen receptor for picking up certain erogenous ideas from men. We can sense when someone is dangerous or, in this case, mad.

Even more, when cave men threw spears they received the idea of the ‘laws of motion’. True, their reception was bit crude and more refined reception was given by Newton but the ideas were there. Even animals can receive these precepts of their environment and respond accordingly. The physics, phusis, of the macro-universe is ordered and cohere while the bad boys of the quantum-universe dis-order, disrupt, fill all origins with noise.

From the beginning of ‘consciousness’ we perceived the lived stretch of time Heidegger discusses.3 When we are happy ‘time flies’. When we are bored time slows to an unbearable pace. Physically, Einstein more eloquently thought a time-space continuum, a ‘law’ of nature where space and time are two sides of the same coin so to speak. But we felt it, lived it, long before it found ‘scientific’ words.

As thought receptors, we can distort and truncate thoughts. We are capable of Error as Kierkegaard thought. We might call this ignorance or crude or bizarre or dangerous. We may historically fence off a canonical, approved domain, of logos we call sanity and expel insanity to the nether regions as Foucault may have suggested, symbiotically related. Are these de-ranged thoughts dangerous in themselves or simply the defect or ‘frequency limiting’, filtering, of the receptor? I suppose this could give credence to those that ‘hear voices’ or believe they had transmitters implanted in their heads; perhaps, these defective receivers cannot ‘own’ the thoughts they receive.

Could it be that we are not locked up in an existential aloneness but all our lives receiving and transmitting a small portion of an infinite universe of thoughts. We cling to some ideas as ‘us’ or ‘I’. We attach to some thoughts as mine-ness. We own them but perhaps they own us. Perhaps they require the universe to be to actuate them, to flesh them out, to give voice to them in ever more profound ways. What would the universe be without them? How would a universe even get perceived, understood, known, observed without an observer, a receptor and transmitter, source and sink of universal ‘math’, its order, its language, its Forms.

What of the idea of infinity? We truncate it, filter it, of necessity but it always exceeds our truncations as Descartes perceived. Infinity is the perception of the spectrum, the frequencies, of thoughts from crude to profound, highly ordered to chaotic. The background noise of the universe is noise in the receiver, the inability to ever make thought concrete even though it concretizes us, nature, phusis (physics). It is the meta-phusis, metaphysics, which allows being to be. Its absolute indeterminacy determines what ‘is’.

And here we are going around trying to talk or listen to aliens with radio waves. We live in sea of thought and we transmit radio waves to aliens like smoke signals or shadows cast on a cave wall, all the while thinking the shadows are the reality of the sun. This is quite comical in the preceding light. Perhaps what we are really looking for is others as unintelligent as ourselves. The universe is intelligent and the only ignorance lies in something we forget or neglect. Could it be that the universe looks upon us as ‘proof’ that there is unintelligent life in the universe?

 

_________________

1 SETI

2 1 John 1:1

3 A Brief Introduction to Being and Time

An Excel app to spell out scales, play them and analyze them for other compatible scales (Updated 1/7/14)

Leave a reply

This is a macro based Excel spreadsheet that I wrote to allow me to enter the chords for a song into the spreadsheet, analyze the chords to find all the scales the could be played over the chords and draw out the scale notes on guitar fret boards with 24 frets for each scale. It was important that I be able to choose the scales drawn on the guitar fret boards. I also wanted to be able to “play” the fret boards in the order of the chord changes in the song by right clicking a mouse (see note a bottom of post for a better solution) with my toe (since my hands were busy playing the guitar). This is the main function of this spreadsheet. There are other functions that fall out of these objectives. I will detail all the functions below.

Note: Midi port capabilities have been added to these macros. Please read the section on “Midi Ports” and the legal disclaimer at the end of this post.

Spelling Out Scales

The spreadsheet spells out scales and analyzes them. It is written in Excel 2007 so it should work for anything beyond that. One reason I wrote it is because I got tired of doing it manually for a bunch of odd jazz scales in various keys.

The “Description” and “Notes” columns are for whatever text you want. Please use only one space between each word in the description.

The “Root” column is for the scale root (either upper or lower case). Sharps (#) are not allowed for the “Root” cell, only flats (“b”) are allowed for roots. If you want a root with sharps, just enter the equivalent flat key or non-flat key. The scale root can easily be changed once the scale has been defined. You can define the scale by putting an “X” (or any character) in the appropriate “Relative Intervals” columns. If you leave the “Root” cell blank the scale will be disabled without have to take all the data out. It can easily be re-enabled by putting a valid root back in the cell. Also, the analyze routine will not take time to analyze the scale if it is disabled. If all the scales are enabled it can take some time to analyze. Over 5,000 scales can be defined in the spreadsheet. If songs have redundant chords the scales do not have to be re-analyzed to save time in the analysis.

You can play the notes in the scales as well in the spreadsheet by selecting the cell in the row where the scale is located that you want to hear and clicking on the “Play” button. You can only play scales which are enabled. You can also change the patch and duration of the notes played.

The spelled out scales are shown in flats and sharps in the “Flats Scale” and “Sharps Scale” columns. You can copy them and paste them into other apps.

You can sort the scale columns A through O with the normal Excel sorting routines starting at row 18. However, the best method for sorting is explained later using addition backup and master sheets. Sorting can be used for any sort criteria you want. As an example, the sort could be used for separating scales into genres and modalities. This can be done by changing the “Description” field to something like “Jazz Bebop Dorian”. The rows can have redundant scales and can be sorted into genres like jazz, rock, classical, etc. and further divided into modalities. The analysis results could also be sorted by selecting the columns DW through DY starting at row 18 with whatever sort criteria you want. However, the best method for sorting the song analysis results is explained later using additional backup and master sheets. A macro has also been included to provide “Custom Sorting” discussed a little later.

Single Scale Analysis

Analysis has been added to analyze a target scale or chord and find all subsets of scales which have the same notes as the target. The algorithm goes through all keys and all the scales which are in the spreadsheet and enabled. It finds any other scales which have the same notes or a subset of the same notes. This will allow you to find other scales which will work for lead riffs.

Additionally, there are cases when complete scales are not spelled out for song chords. For example, a dominate G7 chord could be spelled as G,B,D,F,G. In this case, an incomplete spelling of the scale in row 16 scales would not show most of the completely spelled out scales in the results since the completely spelled out scales are not subsets of the incomplete chord spelling. In the 12/23/13 revision, the analysis has been modified to show possible scales which could work for this case. These possible scales are show with a leading asterisk (*) in the description field of the song analysis results. The asterisk indicates that the chord, the incompletely spelled out scale, is a subset of a more completely spelled out scale from columns A through O. However, these scales may or may not work for your song depending on the additional notes that were not completely spelled out in the chord and the mood of the song.

To start the analysis, bring up the control panel by clicking on the “Show Control Panel” blue button. The “Show Control Panel” can be moved around and resized by clicking, holding down the left mouse button on the diagonal bars in the lower right part of the panel and moving the mouse. The scroll bars can also be used to move the display around within the panel.

The light green text box under the “Target Scale” label in the “Analyze Chord” panel should be pasted with the master scale (or chord) to be analyzed. To paste from the “Sharps Scale” or “Flats Scale” column into the light green text box, first copy (shortcut keys are ctrl-ins) the scale you want to analyze from the “Flats Scale” or “Sharps Scale” column. To paste into this text box use the mouse to select all the previous contents of the text box and use the shortcut keys shift-ins or type in the scale you want to analyze. Any other time you are pasting to cells in “Sheet1” use the “Paste-Paste Values” paste on the “Home” tab. Important note: Always use the “Paste Values” paste for any paste into “Sheet1” of the spreadsheet to avoid pasting formatting information into “Sheet 1”. When you press the red “Start” button you will see all the scales currently in the spreadsheet go through all possible keys to find subsets of scales which have the same notes as the target scale. The red “Start” button will change to a green “Stop” button while the analysis is running. If you want to stop the analysis before it finishes simply press the green “Stop” button. The button will turn red and display “Stop” again. You can also navigate around the spreadsheet while the analysis is running but perhaps a little more slowly. All the “Start” buttons work in this fashion. The analysis will preserve your initial scales when it is done.

Analyze Song

The “Analyze Song” panel will take chord values you provide in the order which they occur in the song and do a scale analysis on each chord in the song. All scales which are enabled and found starting from the key of “C” to “B” will be displayed on the analysis results shown below.

The song results start from column EL and go all the way out to column OL (you will probably never need the full range). Song result are allowed up to 60 scales which you will also probably never need.

To enter a song you must put the chords starting in the order encountered in the song in row 16 starting at column EL. You should put the chord symbol on row 17 below the scale that describes it. Row 15 will be described later in the “Custom Sort” section. Row 14 (“EL14”) is for the title of the song. This is useful as the macro will put the title of the currently loaded song in “Play Mode” with the title “Control Panel” so you can always see what song is currently loaded. If the title just states “Control Panel” no song is loaded into “Play Mode”. The meaning of the colored cells and the first 20 bold line in the column EL song results will be discussed in the “Draw Frets” section. However, just to note, you can modify the colors in the cells at column EL to change the colors of the scales drawn on the fret boards.

After you enter the song chords as described you can click on the “Start” button in the “Analyze Song” panel to start the song analysis. The button works the same as described in the “Start” button in the “Analyze Chords” panel.

If the “All” checkbox is checked the whole song will be analyzed from the starting chord to the last chord. Note that if you start an analysis of the entire song any previous song results are deleted immediately so make sure that is what you want to do before you press start.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not delete “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” or “Sheet3”. They are needed by the macros.

Additional sheets, “Recife Frets”, “Recife Scales”, “Blues1 Frets”, “Blues1 Scales” and “Scales By Genre”, have been added as examples of saved data on backup sheets. These types of sheets can be edited, added and deleted to save previous songs or anything you want from “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” or “Sheet3”. Editing of scales or song data should be done on these additional sheets. Any type of editing is allowed on these additional sheets and will not mess up anything on “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” or “Sheet3”. After you edit them you can do a paste by values into scales or song data in appropriate cells in “Sheet1”. The fret diagrams on the additional sheets should not really be pasted into “Sheet2”. The “Draw Frets” routine should be run to generate the diagrams and re-load the “Play Mode” chords. However, these diagrams can be saved on additional sheets for print outs or future reference. The “Scales By Genre” sheet show backups and examples of different ways to organize your scales. This will be discussed more later in the custom sorting section.

If a chord has the same scales found as another chord (for example all natural chords in the song key) the analysis will just use the previous results to save time. All the found scales will be ordered in the same way from the key of “C” to “B” after the analysis is complete. If “All” is unchecked you can analyze an individual chord in a column but you must select a cell anywhere in the appropriate column that you want to individually analyze before you press analyze.

Custom Sort


Row 15 in the song section of the spreadsheet is used to sort the song analysis results by the number of the note in the scale in row 16. This number is not the interval, it is the number of the note shown in row 16. If the number is not a real number for a note shown in row 16, the sort will be skipped. This is useful if you want to see the song analysis results in the order of a certain note in the scale shown on row 16. Additionally, this will also be useful in the “Draw Frets” discussion later.

If the “All” checkbox is checked, the custom sort will go through the whole song. If a note value is place in column 15, the note will be used as the starting point for sorting out the song analysis results. Any note can be utilized in this field even if it is not in the scale. If the “All” checkbox is not checked you must select an individual cell the in song column that you want to sort. The effect of the custom sort is shown below:

Naturally, you can also sort the song results scale using the normal data sort routine in Excel. Just make sure you start the sort on row 18 or preferably, sort the song analysis data on a backup or master sheet, as previously discussed, and paste the values into “Sheet1”.

The 12/23/13 revision has enhanced the custom sorting ability to utilize genre sorting. With this revision you can do nested sorting. The nested sorted is done by genre first then, sub-sorted by starting note (or note number) OR by starting note (or note number) then, sub-sorted by genre. The former is probably more useful when using scales by genre. The format of the cell in row 15 of the song analysis section of the spreadsheet is “genre,<note or number>” or “<note or number>,genre” with no spaces. For example, if the description in column A of the defining scales has the genre “Blues” at the beginning of the description (no space before the genre name and one space after the genre name in the description) you could specify that the sort be done first with the genre “Blues” and then by note number using this parameter in row 15: “Blues,1”. The sheet below shows the unsorted sheet after song analysis is run with the parameters set in row 15 and the next sheet shows the results of the sort.

Draw Frets

The fret boards are shown in “Sheet2”. The “Draw Frets” section is used for the drawing the fret boards. The fret boards are drawn in order from the start of the song to the end of the song. However, if chords have the same song analysis results in the same order, the fret boards are identical and are combined into one fret board with all the chord names for the fret board shown on the first line.


Notes for the scales are shown above the perspective string. The first scale notes in the first song results column underneath the chord symbols on “Sheet1” is drawn first just above the perspective string. The second scale notes in the second song results column underneath the chord symbols on “Sheet1” is drawn second just above the perspective string and so on. Up to 20 scales can be drawn depending on the number of scale you selected in the “Number of Scales” selector in the “Draw Frets” panel. On “Sheet1” the first 20 scales in the song analysis have bold borders to indicate the 20 scale limit on the fret boards. You can also select the row height in the “Scale Row Height” selector (up to 20).

If you use Windows standard colors in column EL (the first column for song chords), the colors for each scale row start out light for the root and increasingly get darker as the scale note goes up until the root is hit again and gets lighter. This helps you discern the scale step on the fret board. The second scale, the pentatonic scale, starts out white and get darker as the notes go up until it gets white again at the root as shown below:

 

Because we did a custom sort on the first few chords of the first fret board shown, a unique fret board is drawn for this chord.

If a fret board has the same scales in the same order in the song analysis results on “Sheet1”, the fret boards with their notes are the same so the chord names are all combined in the header of the fret board as shown below:

 

If you want to change the colors in column EL you need to “Unprotect Sheet” “Sheet1” on the “Review” tab. Select the cell on “Sheet1” column EL that you want to change the color of and go to the “Home” tab. You will see a spilt paint bucket icon. Click this icon to select the background color you want. When you are done, select the “Review” tab and “Protect Sheet” again. You can click on “OK” on the next dialog without changing any of the values. The protection is really to keep you from making accidental changes to cells that should not be changed so it is in your interest to make sure the sheet is protected.

Play Mode

Play mode is used for displaying the chords as you play along with them in the song.

The chords in the drop down box are in the order of the song as shown below:

You can “fast forward” or “rewind” to other parts of the song using the drop down box. The other control lets you step through the chords forward or backward by clicking on the direction arrows. Since you will not have a free hand while you are playing, you can right click the mouse button with your toe to go one chord forward in the display. Make sure the mouse cursor in somewhere in the “Sheet2” cell area for this to work properly. Also, click on the cell in the first row ad column before you start after rebuilding the fret board.

Midi Ports

Midi capability has been added to these macros. It is important that, if you plan to use this, you understand what it can do and the issues associated with Excel and Midi BEFORE you use the software. Personally, I love this new feature. The midi out port allows you to send a midi controller command (CC:4 – foot pedal) out whatever midi out port you select. When you click the right mouse button in “Play Mode” or press the foot pedal the CC command will get sent. This allows you to record the chord transitions in whatever midi sequencer you like. Whenever you record the chord changes in your sequencer it is important that you record these commands on a clean track without other midi data. Make sure that no other midi information is sent out on the midi port the CC:4 commands get sent to. It is also important that you disable midi thru in your sequencer on the port you are recording the commands on. These chord changes will then become part of your song or practice chords. Please note that if you right click on a cell “Sheet2”, you can cycle through all the chord changes, including the first one, loaded in “Play Mode”. If you start the record on the last chord in your chord sequence and right click at the start of the record, you will send the first chord at the beginning of the record sequence. This also works with the foot pedal. This is useful when you start recording midi data to your sequencer. Also, you can edit the time of the chord changes in your sequencer if you need to.

The midi in port will accept the commands when you play the sequence on your sequencer and track the chord changes with the changes in your song or chord exercises. I have found the foot pedal works well for shorter chord sequences but longer chord sequences seem to work better with the midi in port. Also, the midi in port allows access to anywhere in the song. It tracks with the sequencer where ever you are in the sequence which makes it a nice feature. Additionally, the midi in and midi out ports cannot be opened simultaneously. This is done intentionally to prevent midi thru problems.

A Few Other Notes

If you accidentally mess up “Sheets1” through “Sheets3” you can bring up a copy of the original workbook and copy your saved sheets to new sheets in the original workbook. Most of the important cells in “Sheets1” through “Sheets3” are protected and you cannot change them anyway.

If you run a “Analyze Song” or “Custom Sort” you will need to redraw the fret boards before you can use them again so the changes will get incorporated properly.

“Sheet3” has no use for the user so don’t mess with it. It is protected so you can’t change it anyway.

If the scale spelled out for the chord in a song on row 16 has sharps the fret board will show the notes in sharps otherwise the notes will be shown as flats.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Always use the Paste Values paste for any paste into “Sheet1” of the spreadsheet to avoid pasting formatting information into “Sheet 1”.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not delete “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” or “Sheet3” (although I don’t you can anyway since they are protected).

If you are going to paste song data in “Sheet1” from another backup sheet, you will have to run the “Draw Frets” macro again. There will be no indication that you need to run it if you had a previous song already loaded. There is no way to for the macro to know that you pasted another song in the sheet. The previous song will still be loaded.

If you are pasting song results or scale data into “Sheet1” from a backup or additional sheet make sure you delete values from any previous results in “Sheet1” so you do not have mixed data between the new data and the previous results.

If you paste into a cell from a source outside Excel, make sure you use Paste-Paste Special-Values from the Home tab to keep formatting information from getting pasted.

Do all your editing on additional sheets and use the Home tab, Paste Values feature to paste the data from your additional master sheets. You can use all the sorting and editing features in Excel in these additional sheets without messing up anything on the main macro based sheets.

One note about sorting in Excel, make sure you uncheck the “My data has headers” checkbox on the sort menu so all the data will get sorted correctly.

Remember, the right click for play mode assumes that the mouse cursor is over a cell on “Sheet2”.

Use no more than one space in the description field to separate words in the description (i.e., “This is an example”.

Adding the ability to interact with the spreadsheet while and analysis is running also allows other tasks on your PC to run so I recommend turning off your network connection and disabling things like background virus scans from running while running the macros. I also do this for all my recording software applications.

 

Here are the downloads:

The Spreadsheets – Rev. 1

Here is the easy way to incorporate the workbook into Excel if you computer is being nice to you today:
1) Click on the link above
2) Click on open
4) Once the workbook opens in Excel you will have to save it with a different name so you can get write access to it.

Here is how you incorporate the workbook into Excel if your computer does not like you today:
1) Right click on the link and click on “Save target as…”
2) Save the file to a known location. As a general rule virus protection programs refuse to let you use your computer in any meaningful way so you may have to deal with them at this point.
3) Bring up Excel and load the workbook from wherever you saved it

If you plan to use the midi feature you will need to extract the Excel Add-In by clicking on the link below:

ExcelAddIn – Rev. 1.0.0.0

Here is the easy way to incorporate the add-in into Excel if you computer is being nice to you today:
1) Click on the link above
2) Click through all the “Run”, “Run”, “Yes”, “Are you really Sure?”, “Really?”, “What gives you the right?…you think you own this computer or what?, “FORGET IT”, blah, blah, blah…
3) When unzip comes up click on “unzip”
4) After you run though a few more redundant questions from Excel, hopefully the add-in will get installed.
5) You can check to see if the add-in is installed in Excel by opening Excel, clicking the Office button, Excel Options and Add-In button.
6) Oh, if you have Norton you will get a pop up box at some point asking for your attention. If you ignore it Norton may just decide to delete the file at a later time just for the hell of it.

Here is how you incorporate the add-in into Excel if your computer does not like you today:
1) Right click on the link and click on “Save target as…”
2) Save the file to a known location. As a general rule virus protection programs refuse to let you use your computer in any meaningful way so you may have to deal with them at this point.
3) Extract the files to a known location on your hard drive.
4) Close the extractor.
5) Double click on the “ScaleAnalysisMidiPortAddin” Windows Batch File.
6) At this point Excel will ask you if you want to install the add-in. Proceed with the install and the midi port drivers will get installed as an add-in to Excel.
7) You can check to see if the add-in is installed in Excel by opening Excel, clicking the Office button, Excel Options and Add-In button.

One more thing, if you try to re-install the same add-in, Excel will tell you that everything is up to date. If you want to uninstall the add-in, you can go to the control panel, add/remove programs and uninstall “ExcelAddIn1”.

Note: If you get a message complaining about security and Excel macros you need to click on the Office button in the top left, Excel Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Macro Settings, Check “Enable All Macros”, exit the application and reopen the spreadsheet…don’t you sleep better at night knowing the Microsoft is looking after you (@#$#)?

Note: After trying the right mouse button on a mouse I found the mouse moves around too much. To solve this I took an old USB mouse apart and attached a regular foot pedal to the right mouse button switch with a little soldering work. The foot pedal works great. I also found that gamers use foot pedals for these buttons so I ordered a $10 USB gamer foot pedal at Amazon that I think will work. this pedal worked great but it needs to be correctly setup with the little CD which comes with it to only send a right mouse click and nothing else when the pedal is clicked. The foot pedal also keeps the mouse cursor in one place so it remains over “Sheet2” without moving around. Here is the setup menu after I modified it:

Make sure it is not sending a right mouse click and a “b” which it seemed to want to do at first.

P.S. – Here is a great website for guitar players. It is free and provides lots of graphic information concerning scales on the guitar, chords, etc.

http://www.all-guitar-chords.com/guitar_scales.php

Revision History:

12/15/13

Added song analysis, custom sorting and control panel

12/23/13

Added incomplete chord spelling in the song analysis as indicated with an asterisk.

Added genre sorting to the custom sorting section

Added a few more scales

Added examples of additional sheets

Fixed an aborted song analysis to restore the original roots for the column A through O scales

12/27/13

A minor change to “Play Mode” to go back to the beginning after the last chord. This enables looping without having to do any manual manipulations to go back to the start.

12/28/13

Fixed a couple minor bugs

12/29/13

Added some more color to the fret board to make frets more easily discernible

1/5/2014

Added midi port capability

Also, fixed the control panel resize diagonals so they track with scroll and resize.

1/7/2014: The Spreadsheets – Rev. 1, ExcelAddIn – Rev. 1.0.0.0

Added the name of the loaded song to the control panel title taken from cell “EL14”

Do not download the software unless you agree to this…

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ON AN AS IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES THAT THE SUBJECT SOFTWARE IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGING. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER ASSUMES NO RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE. SHOULD THE SOFTWARE PROVE DEFECTIVE IN ANY RESPECT, THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER ASSUMES NO COST OR LIABILITY FOR ANYSERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. THIS DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY CONSTITUTES AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THIS LICENSE. NO USE OF ANY SUBJECT SOFTWARE IS AUTHORIZED HEREUNDER EXCEPT UNDER THIS DISCLAIMER.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AND UNDER NO LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER TORT (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, NEGLIGENCE OR STRICT LIABILITY), CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, SHALL THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY CHARACTER WITH RESPECT TO THE SOFTWARE INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF GOODWILL, WORK STOPPAGE, LOSS OF DATA, COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, OR ANY AND ALL OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES, EVEN IF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER SHALL HAVE BEEN INFORMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY SHALL NOT APPLY TO LIABILITY RESULTING FROM THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER ‘s NEGLIGENCE TO THE EXTENT APPLICABLE LAW PROHIBITS SUCH LIMITATION. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THAT EXCLUSION AND LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

A few thoughts from re-reading Heidegger’s Parmenides course in 1942-43…

Leave a reply

Hegel’s being and nothingness dialectic is taken up (aufhebung) into becoming. Hegel notes that being and nothingness are not really opposites as much as nothingness is the immediacy of abstract being. In this sense the dialectic here is not as much a play of absolute differences as universal and particular but a play of ‘sameness’ which nevertheless gets taken up, transformed, synthesized by becoming. In any case, the notion of being as abstract immediacy is first thought as nothing, as abstract, as NOT becoming. Hasn’t the existentialist taught us that being IS becoming? …nothing more or less. If I remember Hegel correctly the dialectic cannot go backwards, i.e., from synthesis to thesis and antithesis, becoming to being and nothingness. Isn’t there a progressive directional arrow of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic? If we take Nietzsche’s maxim seriously that,

But no such agent exists; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by the imagination – the doing is everything. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 13]

then aren’t we drawn to the conclusion that Hegel’s dialectic of being and nothingness is merely a verbal play? If we think of being and nothingness, abstract immediacy, then we must have already thought of being as not becoming, not yet lifted up to existence. Isn’t there already at work in Hegel’s thought a dichotomy, a binary opposition or at least a separation between being and becoming intrinsic from a prior and un-thought assumption? Have we thought of being as an absolute abstraction in order to ‘found’ existence and becoming? Has Hegel really revealed something profound or has he simply lapsed into the Latin, metaphysical belief that the mind does the body, being does becoming?

And, doesn’t this assumption have a progressive direction? Is there some kind of ‘creation ex-nihilo’ at work in Hegel’s cosmogony or idea-gony? Becoming rises up from being and nothingness. Existence is surmounted from being and nothingness. An ‘I’ is concretized, existential-ized as becoming, perhaps metaphorically as rising up from a kind of human vegetative state, from the emptiness of abstract immediacy. At play here is an ancient strife, polemos, a battle epitomized in the Roman misconception of Greek thinking, the thinking of truth, veritas, as oppositional from falsity. Heidegger points out the indo-European ‘ver’ as command, as rule, as higher imperium. I wonder if there is also a tale to be told here from the Roman dissimulated notion of Greek arche; origin, as rule rather than Hesiod’s notion of arche as yawning gap, differentiation not yet determined.

Truth then is taken as oppositional to false, fallere in Latin and from indo-European ‘to fall’, fallen-ness. To fall in Christianity is to not heed the command of the Lord. Here we have the beginning and most original Form of truth and falsity as absolutely oppositional. Hegel may be the most perfect expression; teleology of the Latinized absolute-ized reduction of truth to correctness, to truth as binary oppositions. Could Nietzsche have this in mind when he writes of the binary opposition of master and slave:

The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible throughout human history, read: “Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome.” No battle has ever been more momentous than this one. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 16]

Could this be the metaphysical canonization of slavery, of rule and imperium, we find in Constantinople Rome? Could Heidegger have this in mind when he writes of truth in his lecture on Parmenides? The excess of aletheia, unconcealed-ness, that Heidegger brings out from ancient Greece in contradistinction to the modern conception of truth is not thought from the binary opposition of conceal and un-conceal, semblance and truth, false and real? The rule, the order, the command determines origin and makes being possible without becoming or prior to becoming in some Idea-ological determination. If the order tells us that being and nothingness come before becoming, make becoming possible as the resolution of creation ex nihilo then the determination that being and becoming are differential, differentiated, draws its breath from the metaphysics of Rome. If these distinctions are merely verbal, merely historical repetitions of rutted patterns of habitual thought which oppositional-ize, deduced from artificial origins of being and nothingness that cannot stand in existence, in becoming, aren’t we really just reifying in auto-affection a beginning rule and order, a mathematics which cannot think excess to itself.

Heidegger thinks the excess of truth forgotten in Latin as aletheia. Nietzsche thinks it as the body doing the mind, becoming doing Being. Levinas think excess as the face of the other. Is there violence in ordaining that the rule reduce these terms to oppositions and transformations, that order oblivi-ate, forget its forgetting, make order the conquest of chaos, gap, differentiation without determination and not even be able to be able to escape its absolute subjectivism?

 

An Email to Paul Krugman

Leave a reply

 

Dr. Krugman,

I have been an author for a number of years at a blog called “Critical Thinker Applied”. Steve Horwitz of the Austrian School has occasionally provided a guest essay and commented on various essays. I was a bit taken back when he responded to a rather provocative op-ed piece I wrote called “Smart” is the new dumb. While I am not an economist, I have done some research and posted articles on some of the issues I have with Austrian Economics. Of course, Steve did not like my article which concerned my idea that the government is more like a large business conglomerate than some different kind of large, homogenous, monolithic beast. I compared the electorate to shareholders or board members who could fire politicians (management) for doing a bad job. In particular, Steve wanted to claim that the government could not retain knowledge as well as private sector business and could not be as efficient as private sector business. My idea is not so black and white. I pointed out that there are parts of government like the GAO that can be just as efficient as business and retain knowledge. I also pointed out that business can fail to retain knowledge and become inefficient at times. His rebuttal was that studies proved voting has “built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes”. In my response I asked him,

“It appears as if you question the whole ideal of democracy as a self-correcting process, albeit bumpy and messy but a progressive form of self governance. If voting is irretrievably flawed with “built-in bias, under your systemic analysis wouldn’t that indict democracy in general? Isn’t voting the cornerstone of democracy? Are we to suppose that the unbridled governance of the market is sufficient to replace the flawed governance of democracy?”

I am perplexed by his seemingly somewhat ambivalent and arbitrary designations of government and the private sector. I am sure he must be aware that even shareholders and board members vote. If voting is fatally flawed when it comes to government, how is it that this flaw does not follow into the private sector?

Best Regards,

Steve Horwitz and’Free Market’Fundamentalism

Leave a reply

Critical Thinking Applied is no more. Jeff, the guy that was running the site, doesn’t have time for it anymore but my posts will continue on this site.

 

It is amazing to me that listening to Republicans rail about the Obama-Care web site, they have so much more consternation about it than they ever did about the two wars their cohorts started in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed and maimed thousands of our young people and tens of thousands of civilians. Even the neocons in the administration that started the Iraq war admitted it was a “mistake” and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Both of those wars were tragic “mistakes” and created more terrorists than they ever killed. The silence of the right at that time is now replaced with bitter screeching about Obama-Care. You would think Obama-Care was poised to kill many more than those two wars with all their high pitched commotion.

 

Personally, I am sick and tired of hearing these government haters that call themselves “patriots”. I guess I can understand now how terrorists come to think of themselves as saviors and righteous. This malady is really best understood as a psychological pathology which ravages rationality and makes topics such as ‘healthcare’ worse than any war ever could be.

 

Before Critical Thinking shut down I wrote an article titled “Smart is the new dumb“. It was very interesting that Steve Horwitz, a leading conservative academic apologist for Austrian Economics, made a comment about this article. Steve had posted an article on the Critical Thinking site before. I wrote a series of articles which addressed his article and Austrian Economics:

 

Shadow Universals

Austrian Logic

RE: “Restrictive regulation is positively correlated with corruption”

Prelude to Understanding

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and the Problem of Suffering

 

Steve never responded to these articles but had his devotee Jeff respond. When Steve responded to my piece I was a bit taken back that rather than try deal rationally with the issues I brought out in previous articles he would rather respond in the emotive way detailed below. I have no problem with emotive responses but I would think it would be more valuable for an academic to respond to substantial criticism rationally.

 

In any case, my opinion about Austrian Economics after reading and studying their most famous advocates including Steve is that they are Economic Darwinists with a slight difference in contemporaneous spokespeople from their historical advocates. Many of the neo-Austrians nowadays are fundamentalists Christians. Steve just wrote a series of articles on the rationality of his Christian faith. These folks cater to the new right, the ‘libertarian’ to anarchist right with roots in fundamentalist Christianity. The Austrians in the United States are very outspoken about their dogma that, in effect, government is the root of all evil. Government keeps capitalism from being capitalism in their opinion. Government is the cause not only of the 2008 recession but also the Great Depression. Regulation is not the same as monopolistic tendencies in the ‘free market’. Somehow because regulation is done by the government it makes it infinitely worse than anything a ‘free market’ monopoly could achieve. Large corporations which buy up competitors, kill smaller competitors with cheaper production costs from mass purchasing, effectively regulate the market with ‘approved partners’, ‘approved hardware/software’ as is the case for Microsoft, are exempt from artificially deforming the ‘free market’ but government cannot be absolved of its ‘free market’ sins. When these Ayn Rand’ers beat their ‘free market’ elitist chests over the conquests of economic Darwinism they also decry the source of all market booms and busts, the government. The market would not create such hyperbolic deformities in its own terms but only when government interferes with the market’s Darwinian ethos, ethics, morality of sorts.

 

In view of this, I think the irrationality of these fundamentalist Christian Darwinists can probably not be understood as a legitimate academic pursuit as much as a psychological pathology. In my response to Steve’s comment I address the “monolith”, the “obelisk”, which conveys a kind of ‘magical’ wisdom for these pathologies. In this case, “government and not-government” which I shortened to “G and not-G” functions as government which is both a diabolic and monstrous evil and simultaneously a chaotic, bureaucratic albatross and not-government which functions as a holy order of freedom and simultaneously as a Darwinian, heroic defeat of weakness and inefficiency. It is as if God has decreed that the meek shall not inherit the earth but be banished from the earth. The beatitudes have found the ‘original intent’ in the ‘free market’. The ‘free market’ provides goods and services cheaper from a highly simplified notion of ‘competition’. It winnows out the chaff from the wheat. Instead of ‘those who will not work shall not eat’ we have ‘those who cannot win shall not eat’ and by the way, Jesus loves you.

 

Comments below:

 

  • Steve Horwitz

    October 25, 2013 at 12:20 pm· Reply

    Wow. This is what is called “critical thinking” and “reasoned discourse?” You guys sure this post was supposed to go on this site?


    It may be hard for some to handle this but the private and public sector are no different in fundamental ways. They can both be inadequate, ineffective, competent, provide an important service to the consumer. The can both put Shinola on shit. It is up to the employees and shareholders to either make the organization better or preside over their own ruin.

    This is the worst sort of uncritical thinking about markets and politics. The comparison is NOT between what individual corporations/firms and individual government departments (or gov’t as a whole) do, but the systems within which they operate.

    The argument for the superiority of markets is not that corporations are “better” or by themselves less likely to be bad in all of these ways. It’s that they operate in an institutional environment that provides them with knowledge and incentives to both KNOW when they’ve made errors and give them guidance and incentives to correct them in the right way. This is what market prices/profits/losses do and there is no comparably powerful analogue in politics. Voting doesn’t do the trick as numerous scholars have shown the ways in which that process has built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes.

    I don’t give a gosh dilly darn about how wise/good corporate leaders and government employees are, nor about how they try to spin their mistakes etc.. What I care about are the epistemological and incentive properties of the institutions within which they operate, and on that score the theory and evidence favors markets.

    Rather than treating those of us who think markets are better as ignoramouses (do you really think the tone of this piece enhances civil discourse?) why don’t you do what critical thinkers are supposed to do and read the BEST arguments on the other side, not the strawmen you so clumsily knock down here?

    • October 26, 2013 at 12:29 pm· Reply

       

      Wow, too. I didn’t know anyone was reading this blog. It has been quite some time since I have seen any comments at all. I do not really write for others. I write these days more as a personal diary as I have found few that are really willing to hang with a detailed and prolonged argument come what may. Most of the posts here are simply copied from my personal blog. I am elated that you actually took the time to respond. I was not aware that there were any requirements for the ‘regulation’ of this site; the free market place of ideas if you will. If I were to classify this piece I would think of it more as a provocative op-ed. I guess in that sense it worked. It really came out of my frustration with the Yahoo email engine, the current propaganda about technology and Obama-Care and the highly simplistic ways these topics get tossed around. I was not trying to write a ‘critical thinking’ piece nor do I think that is a requirement for everything that gets posted here. I am not the only one that has posted these types of articles here. I have seen thinly veiled anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti-liberal, anti-religious, pro-gay, civil morality lessons posts here by the other authors. I do not think or advocate that these kinds of topics should not be posted here. In many cases, they certainly are not reading and dissecting the “other side” nor do I think they necessarily should. I can comment and disagree if I choose or say nothing at all. Unlike academia I have no career to make, position to take until death do us part, economic incentive to publish or impress. As far as I am concerned all is fair here but always subject to scrutiny, objection and argument.

       

      I certainly love to engage in detailed and critical argument as the vast majority of my posts have been concerned with studies from reports by the GAO, CBO, OBM, FCIC, AEI, Congressional reports, legislative bills, Supreme Court decisions, Pew and Gallop polls, Simpson-Bowles, the Ryan Plan, historical surveys (i.e., Adam Smith, Carl Marx, etc.) and the detailed and highly referenced and footnoted series on philosophy. I believe I footnote and reference more than anyone else on this site. I have worked with statistical correlations as yet, unpublished and the problems of causality. The references below this post barely scratch the surface of the more ‘critical thinking’ posts I have published here. I also have read and dealt with articles by yourself, Jonathan Catalan, Mises, Rothbard, Rand and other publications on the Mises site. I have read much more than I have ever published from that site. I have read and commented on critiques both pro and con of empirical evidence related to microeconomics and the business cycle, regulation, inflation, boom/bust, capitalization and the Fed . The only person that ever really took the time to respond on this blog was Jeff. I really appreciate him taking the time to comment even if we disagree. I seriously doubt that you have ever read many of my posts here even the ones concerning yourself so I am a bit amazed that this post elicited a response from you.

       

      I disagree with Jeff on his notions of civility. I have no ‘ought-to’s or moral compulsions about civil argument. I do not attack individuals personally with profanity because I think that is an admonition of defeat in an argument not from some moral compulsion. As a blogger for many years I have regularly been attacked personally. I actually like it when that happens because I use it to illustrate the failure of an argument. In general, I have no problem attacking ideologies, philosophies, dogmas, etc. as they are not people but positions which can be dissected, subjected to empirical evidence, critiqued for logical inconsistencies and parodied. Provocation is one tool among others to elicit comments as you have demonstrated and possibly spur further, more critical examinations. Certainly, professors are not strangers to these tactics. I see the market place of ideas as an unfettered, type of ‘social contract’ which replaces war and violence with a cathartic sport and linguistic sparring and most important offers me the possibility of learning something, being persuaded to change my position, research and articulate issues more clearly. I would think you would not be unfamiliar with these notions.

       

      I understand your lack of concern with anecdotal comments. I enjoy theoria and praxis. Naturally, “systems” can and endlessly have been characterized and constrained to fit theoria so ‘critical thinking’ would be remiss without a healthy skepticism in this regard. I, apparently unlike some of the purported microeconomic theorists, put some stock in empirical studies and statistics. I also sympathize with Mises’ concern with underlying ideologies which has been discussed in terms of essentialism and with his distrust of positivism. However, when you argue from ‘the whole’, the somewhat editorialized “systems”, you indict and implicate the particular. Therefore, the particular is relevant and, depending on the degree to which you universalize your systemic dynamics, hold to your unique characterizations of ‘the whole’, particular divergent cases may indicate a systemic crisis with your organizational analysis, your theoria. Anecdotal evidence may be an indication of systemic inconsistencies but should not be construed as apodictive proof under any circumstances. I find theroia informs praxis and vice versa. Therefore, with regard to this,

       

      “The argument for the superiority of markets is not that corporations are “better” or by themselves less likely to be bad in all of these ways. It’s that they operate in an institutional environment that provides them with knowledge and incentives to both KNOW when they’ve made errors and give them guidance and incentives to correct them in the right way. This is what market prices/profits/losses do and there is no comparably powerful analogue in politics. Voting doesn’t do the trick as numerous scholars have shown the ways in which that process has built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes.”

       

      I have a few comments. Your systemic assumptions here if I understand you correctly are:

       

      Private, by this I mean non-government, institutions are systemically built to retain knowledge and incentives. Is the logical contrary true that government is systemically inferior to the task of retaining knowledge and providing incentive? I assume this is implied by your reasoning.

       

      It appears as if you question the whole ideal of democracy as a self-correcting process, albeit bumpy and messy but a progressive form of self governance. If voting is irretrievably flawed with “built-in bias, under your systemic analysis wouldn’t that indict democracy in general? Isn’t voting the cornerstone of democracy? Are we to suppose that the unbridled governance of the market is sufficient to replace the flawed governance of democracy?

       

      The market is “self-correcting”. Is this in opposition to democracy’s fate fatale?

       

      Part of the problem in this undertaking has much in common with problems in Hegel. Your systemic analysis has run aground by virtue of its implied and assumed universality. The unicity which characterizes the superiority of the ‘free-market’ over the rabble of a democracy is highly over generalized. I would love to see the studies you alluded to as I am sure they and their opposing scholarly rebuttals do not paint such a clear and unobstructed path as you insinuate. In particular, you along with Ted Cruz seem to not take into account the ‘conglomerate’ organization of the Federal Government ; indeed, indeed, the possibility of any large and diversified (heterogeneous) systemic governmental organization. Do you think the GAO is micro managed from a ubiquitous hierarchy? Be careful, my wife retired as an auditor from the GAO and she loves to digest uninformed generalizations. Do you think that Federal employees are de-incentivized by a looming, homogenous bureaucracy? And would you have us believe that this does not occur in large corporations? Are all Federal agencies rendered systemically inadequate by the phallic obelisk, the evolutionary monolith, of your homogenized systemic analysis? Isn’t there some over simplification at work in such conveniences? I am not imputing a “better” or worse, a value judgment, on your analysis. I merely make the claim that the systemic underpinnings you are so eager to attribute to government and not-government (i.e., free market), henceforth G and not-G, may not be taken up (aufhebung) by what I see as the somewhat arbitrary boundaries of G and not-G, public and private, but alternatively and more appropriately by organization size, complexity, and coherency.

       

      It might be informative to take your statistical correlations and plug in dependent variables with regard to these organizational dynamics to see what you get. It seems somewhat intuitive that size (and the quality of size) matter in this regard. If you are looking at efficiency and knowledge retention you will probably find that sheer size, obstacles throw up by complexity and the degree to which management holds or does not hold multi-varied goals, dynamics, personal and collective goals together has much more to do with your outcomes than G or not-G. This is where you lose credibility in my opinion. You apparently cannot see the ways in which G and not-G share more organization dynamics in common than mere reduction to nouns. These dynamics are verbs not nouns. A conglomerate like GE can be run efficiently and with knowledge retention by making itself more heterogeneous, localized and departmentally self-contained. The government can and has done this as well. If you think the government is organized like over-hyped politicians would have you believe you really know nothing about how the Federal Government works. It is highly intuitive to think that to the degree that the G or not-G becomes a huge, vertically non-integrated, homogenous monolith, an obelisk to chaos is to the same degree that inefficiency and learning system feedback or loopback is inhibited AND that the difference between the nouns G and not-G is irrelevant and indistinguishable except only by virtue of your ideological underpinnings. Rather, system organizational dynamics do not come from the macro but from the micro as I assume you have some sympathy. Depending on how they are run G and not-G, massive organizations, can do well with your determining criteria or fail. The praxis, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Some things they do well and others not so well. An oracular pronouncement based on ideological persuasion does not address systems and organizations as you suppose. I beg to differ, there is no decidable difference between G and not-G based on their formal noun derived and ideological infusions but on the successes and failures of size, complexity, and coherency. The ‘decidability’ of a dynamic, a systemic organization, a verb must itself be founded on a verb not on a self-evident, apriori, dogma that rests on a name, an arbitrary designation, a merely verbal bias (originating from subtle essentialisms as Mises might inform us) as G and not-G.

    • The Free Market: Capitalism and Socialism – Part 1

    Leave a reply

    Adam Smith, an Enlightenment thinker, thought of humans as fundamentally self-interested as contrasted to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes thought that selfishness worked as a kind of glue for society. His idea was that people are selfish; fundamentally concerned only with themselves. This meant that each person wanted to thrive based on their personal wants and needs without regard to ideals like the greater good or the plight of others. However, as selfish people, they want security at any cost. In order to obtain security, people subject themselves to the state, to laws. While individuals would freely rape, murder and plunder without concerns of conscience they do not because they do not want to be on the receiving end of their brutish desires. The free subjugation of themselves to the state is called ‘social contract’ theory.

    Adam Smith lived hundreds of years after Hobbes. He was also a social contract theorist. He was concerned with how self-interested individuals create commerce. In “The Wealth of Nations”, Smith writes:

    “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”[1]

    He thought that when self-interested individuals compete, the process of competition resulted in the most optimum allocation of resources because competition resulted in the lowest average cost of goods or services. In this way, he thought that self-interest served the greater good. He thought that any time the government or monopolies intervened in this process it prevented the process from working as it should and kept costs artificially higher thus interrupting the normative operation of a free market. It is important to note that Adam Smith’s ideals of the free market only work on the basis of competing individuals not market monopolizing corporations or governments. Market monopolies interfere with competition and defy the ideal of a free market.

    “The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest that can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion indeed, but for any considerable time together. The one is…the highest which can be squeezed out of the buyers…The other is the lowest which the sellers can commonly afford to take…. The monopoly price is most often sustained by “the exclusive privileges of corporations (65)”[2]

    “Smith uses the terms “self-interest” and “private interests” always in opposite ways. For former, his most famous statements are “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest (20),” and, “by directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention (351)”. Concerning “private interests,” Smith is not so sanguine; these private interests constitute the “spirit of monopoly (371)” which Smith so much detests. It should be clear by now, from what has been said before, that Smith is well aware of the dangers of avarice and especially so since the interests of capitalists diverge, in Smith’s view, so much from the interests of the general public.”[3]

    Capitalism (a term he never uses), as Adam Smith thought, is depended on private property and private ownership. The self-interested individual had complete legal and sole rights to their property. Without private property there would be no motivation for individuals to compete and increase their property ownership, their wealth.

    Socialism believes that individual interests are served better when they cooperate with each other and not compete. Socialism believes in social ownership. In effect, this means workers own production (also called the means of production). Production is not owned privately but by a group. There are many forms of socialism. Some forms of socialism believe that the workers in a factory own the factory, but everything else in the economy is ‘free market’ and private property. There is no government ownership is this type of socialism. Some forms of socialism simply pay a social dividend based on factory profitability. Some forms of socialism nationalize factories but still maintain private ownership. Social democrats use a progressive tax system and government regulation within a private market economy. There are also anarchist and libertarian forms of socialism. Socialists tend to believe that when the individual is elevated above the group, normal human interaction and group identities tend to get ignored. Language[4] is a perfect example of how humans are fundamentally collective. People do not have ‘private languages’. Communication is only possible by sharing a language that we individually did not make up. People are not hermits. We form governments, churches and social communities.

    “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the laborer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the license to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labor either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part.

    The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labor which they can, each of them, purchase or command. Labor measures the value not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labor, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit.”[5] -Adam Smith

    It is important to note that a ‘pure’ socialism or capitalism has never existed on any large scale. Every world historical economy has always been a mixture. For example, consider the notion of rent in capitalism.

    “For the purposes of economics, Smith divides society into three economic classes: the landlords, the laborers, and the merchants and manufacturers (448), or those who live by rent, those who live by wages, and those who live by profit (217). Now the interests of the first two classes are tied to the prosperity of the nation; economic expansion raises the value of land and increases the demand for labor and hence its wages. But exactly the opposite is the case with the third class, those who live by profit:

    But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two (219).

    Thus the interests of the third class run contrary to the interests of the other two; expansion actually raises the cost of labor and rent and increases competition, thereby lowering profits, so much so that the ruination of a country is actually in the best interests of the third class”[6]

    It is interesting to note here that economic expansion “raises the value of land” but it is uncertain how long the values of land can go higher and how exactly the profits increase unless the property owner is the sole owner, i.e., already paid for and not obtained by a loan. It would seem that profit is “high in poor countries”. Adam Smith takes this an indicator of “ruination of a country”.

    A property owner allows a tenant to live in their property for a fee. The renter does not own the property and if the renter quits paying rent they are not allowed to live in the house. Likewise, a mortgage is ‘ownership’ on paper but the bank allows a mortgagee to live in the house as long as the mortgage is paid. In both cases, ownership is not sole or absolute – it is contingent on paying a periodic fee. So, the landlord or the bank cooperates with the individual in the interest of capitalizing on the financial arrangement. It should also be noted that the bank and the landlord are likely to be indebted themselves to the third class, “those who live by profit”; the financiers, that Adam Smith writes of above.

    We can see that the renter or the mortgagee is not a property owner in Adam Smith’s notion of property ownership. However, the aspiration of the renter or mortgagee is for property ownership. Since the aspiration of sole ownership is not reality, a group arrangement is made that allows an individual to have shelter until their aspirations can be obtained. However, it is certainly true that most individuals today will never own their house outright. Therefore, in reality they will live their whole lives working and cooperating in group economic, arrangements.

    In finance, leverage is the ability of an investor to increase their ‘paper’ holdings based on loans. Again, a group economic arrangement allows investors to obtain securities that they would normally not be able to afford. As such, the investor is obligated to a group, cooperative arrangement to leverage their holdings. The question of fees and profit is actually an ancient issue. The Bible explicitly forbids interest or profit on loans (Exodus 22:25–27, Leviticus 25:36–37 and Deuteronomy 23:20–21). These passages state that interest is exploitative. In this sense, those that base their faith on these books would be in perfect agreement with the writings of Karl Marx (at least on this specific topic) and Adam Smith. Exploitation with higher and higher fees for loans on rental and mortgaged property are examples of how the wealthy class, the real property owners, has increased their wealth at the expense of those that are not wealthy. This exploitation has been going on from the beginning. Even Adam Smith recognized the exploitation of labor. This excerpt is from an essay on The Wealth of Nations:

    “However, in the negotiation of wages, the worker is at a distinct disadvantage. In the first place, the law prevented him from joining with his follows to bargain (71, 151). Further, the law always favors the masters over the workers (151). Workers are prevented from joining in unions to raise wages, but the masters are not forbidden to unite to lower them; indeed, the law encourages them to do so. This legal inequality particularly angered Smith, who noted that, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices (137).” But when the workers attempt to meet, it “generally end[s] in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders (71).” The inequality is so great that:

    Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters (151).”[7] –Adam Smith

    Socialism also recognizes the tendency for exploitation of the worker and tries to address it.

    In both socialism and capitalism dues must be paid to benefit. For Christianity[8], capitalism and socialism[9] a main tenant is “He who does not work shall not eat”. Paying your dues is not an option in socialism or in capitalism. Fees are required to participate in the group. The main difference is that in capitalism, according to the ‘theory’ of Adam Smith, individualism as self-interest reigns supreme. The ideal is that the individual worker benefits with private property ownership not the financier. In socialism, the individual worker benefits as well but socialists want to formally recognize ownership of production in a group context – the laborer not the financier. Depending on the type of socialism, the group could mean anything from share holders in a factory to nationalism of a factory. In theory, the individual should benefit in both systems. However, socialism wants to take precautions to ensure that the group of laborers benefit and capitalism viz. Adam Smith acknowledges that in some cases the financiers will benefit at the cost of the laborers. Both systems distribute wealth in one way or another. The fundamental problem that Marx wanted to address with socialism was how the wealthy, the financiers, ended up with all the real private property ownership while the workers, in effect, ended up as indentured slaves barely able to pay their bills. Additionally, in both systems classes are set up in practice.

    [1] Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations, [WN I.ii.2)

    [2] The Forgotten Agrarian: Re-Reading Adam Smith, John C. Médaille, http://www.medaille.com/newadamsmith.htm, parenthetical numbers refer to section numbers in the cited Adam Smith work

    [3] ibid

    [4] Alas, you too young, free-market libertines who rail against the socialists in your rabid individualism – you too are a product of ‘group-think’ – it is called language – you just don’t know your indebtedness yet…

    [5] Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations, [WN I.vi.7-8: p 67]

    [6] The Forgotten Agrarian: Re-Reading Adam Smith, John C. Médaille

    [7] ibid

    [8] II Thessalonians 3:10

    [9] In accordance with Lenin’s understanding of the socialist state, article twelve of the 1936 Soviet Constitution states:

    In the USSR work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

    In Lenin’s writing, this was not so much directed at lazy or unproductive workers, but rather the bourgeoisie. (Marxist theory defines the bourgeoisie as the group of those who buy the labor-power of workers and engage it in the process of production, deriving profits from the surplus value thus expropriated. Once communism was realized, that is, after the abolition of property and the law of value, no-one would live off the labor of others.)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_shall_he_eat