I always like to find an interesting voice. Plumbing layer upon layer of cyberspace I am always amazed at how many sane, sensible, articulate voices out there. (Which makes it all the more amazing that George W. Bush was the President, a reality I still have not accepted even as I recognize that it is now historical fact).
The internet is freaking me out lately. Majorly freaking me out, to use an 80's term. It's nothing but writing on the wall, on walls that might never be seen by anyone. What exactly do we think we're doing here? Are we going to change the world by writing on the wall?
True, only now that we have the internet do we have real-time wall writing made accessible to everyone. But has the internet changed our civic life at the core?
What if what's really happening is that with every minute, hour, day, week, month, year that we fix our eyes on screens and our hands on keyboards, rather than elsewhere, we are getting more and more accustomed to doing nothing but typing to address our concerns? It's a three-dimensional world. Are we hypnotized by the idea that what we write here makes a difference?
These are the questions I ask myself lately, especially after whole days go by and my mind spends so many hours in a space that has no physical relationship to any reality that I know. It's the dark mind-space where all our thoughts go as we communicate here. But it is a different place than the three dimensions in which I live and breathe and move and walk and ....
OK, the Pres. is talking, and I'm going to listen. But first a found blog..
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Fetish of the Health Care Product
To: Truthout
Re: Health Care Should be driven by Mission / Phillip Casper MD,
___describing the corporatization-for-profit of health care in the U.S.
Although Dr. Casper falls into the prevailing habit of describing phenomena in their moral aspect, he is not romanticising anything. At bottom, he is simply describing the effects of what Marx called the Fetish of the Commodity -- i.e., the way in which the capitalist exchange system perpetuates itself by becoming a mental fetish.
Not only do people (including Obama) believe a whole bunch of ridiculous mantras -- such as the "magic of the market place" and the like -- they actually see the world as a matrix of for- profit exchanges and they actually believe that this perception emanates from an unalterable objective reality. Last but not least they believe that this system -- the object of their beholding -- is capable of producing goodness and joy.
The Catholic theologian Von Balthasar went deeper and attributed our moral dysfunctionality to the ruthless reductionism of Cartesian thought, which his mentor, Pope Benedict has written produces pathologies of thought which end up being both unscientific and immoral.
Alas the American mind (such as it is) is incapable of grasping anything larger than a pea. It thinks it can "fix" health care "within the system" without revolutionizing the system of which the broken health care "product" is a manifestation. This atomization of thought produces little more than political heteronomy in which everyone chases willy-nilly after his or her object of desire and personal-validation issue without grasping or dealing with the whole.
By the time the country figures anything out it will be far too late. The US has become a colossal, obnoxious, boring failure. The sooner it self-destructs (which it is doing) the better for all concerned.
from this guy's blog
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