Politics vs Art

[Keith Davis]

Rationality isn't rational either, since it's based on duality, the concept of either this or that.

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> On May 6, 2016, at 6:32 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The behavioral finance school, you all know the famous Nobel recipient
> from Yale, Robert J. Shiller, is not the first to challenge the
> efficiency of markets. P's satire mixes and mashes the priests with
> the scientists and statisticians, linguists and economists and
> artists...with the cooks, nuts, cranks, poor crippled bureaucrats and
> charismatic maniacs, etc... challenging rational market theories,
> sure, and all other theories, including the west's theory of western
> rationality, exposing the rationalization of Pavlovian politics, as
> described in Pynchon's slick critique of the madness that ensued
> post-9-11 once bombs were dropping in our neighbors. That Orwell had
> the balls to call his war government fascists...well....Pynchon hasn't
> got such balls, not in prose anyways, but GR is not about the
> holocaust because its about US, us USA people mostly, though it
> clearly pulls on our Puritan and European roots, it's about Amerika.
> 
> The Housing Market Still Isn’t Rational
> 
> Economic View
> 
> By ROBERT J. SHILLER JULY 24, 2015
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/upshot/the-housing-market-still-isnt-rational.html
> 
>> 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...
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> Remember how Prof.-Dr, Jamf prizes the bold, lion-like ionic bond *seizing*
>> electrons over the wimpy sharing of the covalent bond (Viking 577)? Remember
>> "a conspiracy of human beings and techniques" crying like a vampire "I need
>> my night's blood, my funding, my funding, ahh"(521)?
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>>> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:42 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> one of the major misconceptions about the Holocaust and mass murder is
>>> that most people think only of Auschwitz which technically was not a death
>>> camp say like Treblinka was. Dora was not a death camp either--they were
>>> work camps in essence, horrible in any case. still broadly speaking we can
>>> include such camps as part of the Holocaust if our definitions expand on a
>>> broader definition of extermination in its myriad forms (gas, labor, rape,
>>> etc). So, yes Pynchon does address that in Dora.
>>> 
>>> The missing bit from GR which I think Pynchon cant adequately utilize
>>> directly w/r/t to the Holocaust is that there was no logical reason for such
>>> mass murder from an economic point of view beyond appropriating space. If
>>> you build up your message as Pynchon does about Them and systems and
>>> repressions and markets and link them all up, it cant really digest the
>>> insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology which underpinned much of its
>>> actions in the East.
>>> 
>>> i guess what I'm saying is hybrid camps like Auschwitz or outright labor
>>> camps like Dora where there was an economic benefit for Germany or perceived
>>> to be (many projects were failures) are easier to explain than outright
>>> death mills like Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. maybe that's one reason for
>>> Pynchon's 'aloofness' on the subject
>>> 
>>> just my two cents
>>> 
>>> rich
>>> 
>>>> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:32 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> But WHERE does GR "depict the Holocaust?"
>>>> 
>>>> David Morris
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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