Politics vs Art

[rich]

I wasnt aware of that but considering the nature of the insurance business
who would be surprised. Essentially that what all this risk management
business is about. I term I love is leverage in the financial sense--you
have it you're fucked, but if you don't have it you're still fucked.

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 4:32 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >>
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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