David Custis Kimball - blog

History, Science

It occurs to me that even with the end of say slavery, the brutality does not end. It may be diminished and it is not appeased, therefore it is a step ahead. Today, brutality continues, even with no market for the captured victims. Darfur, Somalia, Tutsies, Ivory Coast, Mideast. Some might argue, it is even more brutal now, with video of Hamas using children as shields against attack, and News Media ignoring it, diplomates excusing it and the USA and EU funding it.

Forget for the moment the theatrics and for a start read Hegel’s Philosophy of History, published from a series of lectures after his death in 1831. The Introduction, p96 in my Dover edition, ‘Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as that may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing - an object of no value.’

Too bad, even as Karl Marx admired Hegel, we forget it was Hegel the teacher and so should not throw the baby out with the bath water. I think of Karl as a kind of antithesis to Hegel’s theist perspective, and therefore all the more important to read Hegel. A small note: some who have studied Marx, economics and history have concluded the USA in all its social welfare, provides more ‘Marxist’ ideals than Marx ever hoped for in his writing. It was the union successes that brought workers up from the depths and allowed many of the more violent ‘Marxist’ methods to fall away (beginning in the British industrialization .. followed by others, I’m told.) Now that unions want open ballots … no privacy … it is more the totalitarian means of Mutter Russkie, me thinks. Let’s not force unions upon everyone, or they become the Stalin, Lenin, Hitler who with absolute rule, were absolutely corrupt.

Lest I forget, the example and the source of piquing my interest in Nob. Obl. was the following from the url given above: (I have taken the liberty of correcting a few of Marcel’s typos.)

‘The noblesse oblige mindest of the average Israeli towards Islam is tragic indeed and only outdone by her subservience to a decadent, fading corrupt empire who now reveals himself to be a big bully ready with large stick to get Israel to fall in line as the cattle cars arrive.
Would the average Israeli place such high respect on Nazism ?
Israel roundly ignores the evil nature of Islam and offers up undeserved cultural respect for it either out of fear or in the hope that if you believe a lie long enough Islam will be what you wrongly assume it to be.
This is why an otherwise astute people got swindled into the peace scam on the White House lawn in 1993 and have continued to descend into this deep pit ‘covenant with death’ with no way out.
If after 16 years of Palestinian peace partners celebrating the murder of Israeli children, mothers and any Jew for that matter you are not yet able to stand up and say no to the latest peace hustler, community organizer from the corrupt shitty of Chicago then cry for the misery that you have brought upon yourselves by standing for nothing and falling for this covenant with death…..because death is what you have signed on the dotted line for.’
Posted by Marcel Cousineau | April 7, 2009 12:52 AM

The limit would appear to be at that level where survival is the central question. You are being hunted, and it is very likely that if you give away anything, it will be sharpened and thrown back at you. We are out of the State of Noblesse on human terms, and into a unique Noblesse of the one far greater; some say of g-d. As a theist, I’ll bite.

My dad and I were working on the 2nd book, where my theory included levels of consciousness, the 1st being Existential. We are born into a world where this suddenly exists. Prepartum we are totally entralled in a womb of our own, probably looks pink.

Postpartum we have to eat.. ie. find food. Well luckily early on, that’s what breasts are for, and there’s even a spare (assuming single birth). But we must get there….or in many cases not allowed to get there and a plastic fake thing is stuck in our mouth with some sweet makes-me-sick-and-fat-and-crap-alot stuff that gets me bloated and vomiting. Dad referred to this as ‘garbage’, especially to the Meade Johnson reps. and others who would occasionally embarrass themselves to visit his pediatric office and try to make a sale. He knew better; he was commanding officer of Dachau from April, 1945 thru August, when there was no food to give; carloads of coal for heat were the only calories at the beginning… and then he noticed how healthy so many infants looked, when mothers were sick, and so many more just stacked up in piles, gently heaving up and down as if breathing… but no, the joke was just their last gas.

The point is we risk our lives to eat, to find food. And many will still defend feeding ‘garbage’ to infants. If that is all there is, then it’s a cruel world and we grow up knowing that. On top of that, if we are taught at an early age that some society of persons are causing our misery and a scapegoat is projected as the object of hate, rather than the lazy, stupid, undermotivated and dependent personalities that are just accustomed to feeding off the kindness of people appeasing this hatred (welfare to a society of haters of those who appease) then we are caught in a cyclonic eventspace without positive result.

A Street Car Named Desire, Tennessee Williams offers the intoxicated female’s argument ‘I depend on the kindness of strangers’, as if that is a defense; it’s more of an invitation to perhaps that higher authority where desperation leads … letting Noblesse find itself in entanglement, matter waves of chilled helium perhaps.

As in Peter Grimes, by Ben Brittain, my fav. opera ‘He who hates will destroy’. Feeding hate does no good. Recognizing hate and being able to defeat it, either with kindness or starvation begins the level of Noblesse. Defeating hate with kindness is really tricky and it may be impossible, without the great sacrifice of existential proportions. Therein lies the rub… the limit. Jesus found it and many demand that perspective. Moses was kept from the promised land for his existential anger (I think). Chamberlain almost lost England with his alliance with hate. Obama may feign alliances with Iran, sponsor of terror and hate, and Turkey, lesser so, and Cuba… what is a cigar really going to do? And then when they betray him, like now the Chinese companies supplying Iran with weapon materials, he can turn on the existential survival mode. Obligations vanish and it is survival of the fittest.

So too with his pressing on Israel to give more… to risk survival more … until when?

Thanks to Caroline Glick and Marcel to keep us focused on these difficult times.

I often think that college, being placed in a situation where survival is based on accumulation of a set of facts, or pleasing fact-ualty in a mental institution, even as exhaulted as MIT. Where is the consideration for the optimal environment, the spare feeding device (sorry mom) or the situations where all can excell. But is that the goal? Is that the perception? The con? It’s about the Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

The goal is to work it out; to find the comfort zone; to find it supported, and ignore or if necessary defeat those who would destroy it.