Politics vs Art

[ish mailian]

Rich,

Selling short or bets in favor of disaster are not a recent invention.
That  finance, including shorting and credit default swaps and the
like,  is more important today than it was in 1930 is obviously true,
but that people and firms could only recently bet on a default event
or failure and then cause it, or at least, push the odds in their
favor, even if this meant the death and misery of millions, well,
this isn't the case. There were, for example, firms who made huge
profits when ships failed to deliver goods, even human workers, to
market because pirates or mutiny or an act of god prevented safe
passage. Shorting is nothing new under the sun.

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 4:20 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hyper-technically, the Auschwitz complex --  almost 50 camps in all and
>> hybrid,as you say -- was originally  a concentration camp (Auschwitz I) for
>> Polish political prisoners, added the Auschwitz II-Birkenau cluster as
>> prison then extermination camp for Jews and Gypsies, then added Auschwitz
>> III-Monowitz as slave labor camp for IG Farben's synthtic-rubber factory..
>> which is why Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a skilled chemist, survived at
>> Monowitz rather than dying at Birkenau. Mixed priorities...
>
> __________
> thanks, Monte. I realize we are speaking of such unspeakable things in terms
> of word usage and definitions but to follow your point I agree that the
> approach to genocide was never consistent, very much contradictory, yet for
> all that still operating at the pinnacle of soul-crushing brutality.
>
>>
>> Why not follow up on your sense that P's "systems...markets" message
>> "can't really digest the insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology"? Why
>> not question yout implicit premise that systems and markets are by their
>> nature sane and rational? Recall my earlier point on Blackett's "you can't
>> run a war on gusts of emotion": that  the German V-weapon campaign and the
>> US-UK city-bombing campaign *were not rational uses of economic and military
>> resources,* no matter how much technology and organization went into them.
>> They were supposed to be answers to "how do we win the war?", but in fact
>> were answers to "how do we HURT THE ENEMY?" They were highly organized,
>> rationally implemented gusts of emotion. Likewise, all those trains taking
>> Jews to the death camps could have more profitably been supplying the
>> Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front -- except that the felt threat from the Jews
>> was beyond or beneath rationality, deeper and darker than that from the Red
>> Army.
>
>
> I'm not trying to be coy or flippant but markets and systems do have their
> own sense of logic. at the time no economic system made sense by the
> dispatch of useful resources, even for evil purposes. how would that benefit
> Them? Of course, today with short-selling and essentially making money off
> things going to shit, yes now folks can make a bundle as things of concern
> go down the shitter.
> I'm still of two minds when it comes to Allied bombing--how do we win the
> war and hurting the enemy do sort've go hand in hand. and as we know, its
> flesh and blood folks doing the planning so i'm not sure how anyone can
> avoid such gusts of emotion. Like my feeling about Hersh and the killing of
> Bin Laden, considering where the bombs were being dropped--on Nazi Germany,
> well its hard for me not to say they had it coming. but its not for me to
> say
> ------------
> 'Rather than saying Pynchon *couldn't* deal with the Holocaust directly
> because he'd chosen an approach based on the primacy of rational systems,
> markets, cost/benefit calculations, etc... consider the possibility that
> he's questioning how rational they really are. The peculiar horror of the
> Holocaust, after all, was not mass murder -- Rwanda or Cambodia or the
> partition of India will do for that -- but the *juxtaposition* of mass
> murder with an "advanced" European nation's highly organized, systematic
> implementation. You propose that people using technology and rationality to
> do insane things poses a problem for Pynchon in GR; I think it's at the
> heart of the book.'
>
> me: working people to death, exploiting them for all their worth makes
> rational sense economically--in that sense its not insane. of course, its
> immoral wrong inhumane, etc etc. To those benefiting from such a system,
> 'Them', it's cool. What doesnt make sense for Them is hauling thousands of
> people across Europe to be immediately put to death. The War is a
> continuation of markets, nothing more. Many made bundles working for or
> being a Nazi but the core of the movement, and for a good portion of people,
> to the endgame in 1945, it was an ideological state of mind that went beyond
> the continuation of markets. That is what I think Pynchon, purposefully or
> not, sidesteps.
>>
>>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l