I may be lliterate, but at least she admits I'm logical.
CB
^^^
Logical Illiterates Strike Again
A year or so ago I had the great misfortune to correspond with an irascible
fellow who could not resist making ill-informed comments about my Essays, all
the while refusing to read them.
I refused to continue to correspond with him on that basis, and, it seems, he
has been sulking ever since. Last year I had occasion to slap some materialist
sense into him (here), but I fear that this incorrigible Idealist is beyond
even my help. Despite several attempts to inoculate him from his own folly, Mr
B has once again demonstrated that he is immune to the influence of modern
logic, preferring his own brand of sub-Hegelian make-believe. Commenting on an
argument of mine, he had this to say:
CB: The sentence 'John is a man' means John is both the same and different
from Joe, Jack, Rosa, Charles... It is precisely the 'is' of predication that
is a unity and struggle of opposites. The 'is' of identity 'He is John.' --
that is not a tautology.
CB: This should be 'that is a tautology'. [Quotation marks changed to conform
to the conventions adopted here.]
This odd piece of reasoning was exposed for what it is here, and here.
Despite this, Mr B hopes to neutralise my arguments by referring merely to his
own not inconsiderable authority in this field -- that is, the field usually
occupied by Popes and assorted dictators whose word is law. And in matters
logical, that should be enough for us. It certainly is for Mr B.
He now deigns to comment on the musings of my colleague Babeuf; here is an
example of truly innovative historical materialism:
CB: Another fundamental activity was the raising of children. I'm thinking
language/culture emerged between parents and children.
It is reasonably clear that Mr B has shot from the hip again -- or rather shot
from the holster and into his foot --, for if the above were the case, not only
would parents and children confront each other like Pentecostal ecstatics,
mouthing incomprehensible noises at one another, no two families would share
the same idiolect. Communication between families would thus be impossible. In
that case, 'culture', as Mr B sees it, would soon begin to resemble that
cacophony which constantly sounds in his head.
Now, in Essay Twelve Part One, I asserted that most Marxists give lip-service
to the idea that language is a social phenomenon, but fail to think through the
implications of that fact, and talk and write as if language were a private
affair. Mr B has shown once again that when it comes to getting things wrong,
he is keen to elbow his way to the front of the queue. How language can be
social, but remain a family affair is perhaps another one of the
'contradictions' that still compromises his thought processes:
Before I had even heard of dialectics -- living in the a mental (sic) world of
strict formal logic -- I started to 'run into' lots of contradictions and
paradoxes. My own road to dialectics was a posteriori, not a priori.
Mr B here confuses matters biographical with matters logical; unless --, of
course, he thinks paradoxes are a posteriori. But, even if he were right, this
otherwise commendable public confession of his own confused thought should not
be read as mere humility. On the contrary, the road to Hermetic-enlightenment
-- a path which all true dialecticians have to pass along in order to qualify
as adepts (and the reasons for this are exposed here) -- elevates them way
above the rest of us mortals. This means that if ever they regain power
somewhere they can screw-up once more in a truly almighty and awe-inspiring
manner. After all, they have a suitably screwy theory to help them on their way.
But what is this? It is none other than our old friend Mr D, who volunteers a
riposte so devastating I hesitate to post it here for fear it might affect the
reader's sanity:
This is just stupid, even more stupid than the Trotskyist recitations of
dialectics.
Mr D, someone who is not known for his ability to string a clear argument
together -- but a well-respected expert at drawing attention to that fact --,
probably does not know that the material about which he is commenting has to be
compressed into a three minute slot, and has to be kept to a level that makes
it comprehensible to mere workers. And here he can be forgiven, for over the
years, at his site, he has developed an enviable skill at repelling such lowly
types, and to the extent that he has probably forgotten their limitations. One
of which is that they find the mystical ideas he spouts incomprehensible. It's
a good job then that we have substitutionists of his calibre to do their
thinking for them.
Now, we have already seen that Mr D takes exception to anyone who cannot
compress a PhD thesis into a sentence or two --, a skill he taunts the rest of
us with, since, as the sentence above reveals, he can squeeze several
