GI, GO, Garbage in, Garbage out

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

GI, GO… which stands for Garbage in, Garbage out…
and the first time I heard this was around 1977, 78,
in a collage class on computers… the basic theory is that
if you put garbage into a computer, you will get garbage out of
a computer… pretty basic… but you can expand this theory
into every aspect of our lives… and it is not only relevant today,
but very explanatory of today’s events…

It becomes the story of information and its impact on us…
but there needs to be a bit of history within this story to make
sense…how did people before the ‘‘Modern age’’ get information…
recall the history of technology… before 1900, there wasn’t tv,
or radio, or computers… you had movies, but they were very
primitive, as movie making was only 10 years old or so by
1900… so, how did people get information?
two means, newspapers and books… Newspapers first began
around 1600 and books even earlier… so both had long
histories before 1900…and both industries were male
dominated… which means information was from a white
male perspective… or as some have called it in the 20th
century, ‘‘dead white guys’’… now books have two aspects to
them, fiction and nonfiction…now for the most part, women
read the fictional books and men read the nonfictional part…
Now this is a generalization, but is roughly accurate…

But what is the value of fictional books? I believe that books
are really role playing… take Anna Karenina for example,
in reading this book, one takes the role of Anna, and we see
from her example, what possibilities might happen when she
commits adultery with Count Vronsky… she is ostracized from
society and for him, nothing happens…she finally commits
suicide… as her only possible course of action… her life
becomes, for us anyway, what might happen if a women
commits adultery… and that is the value of fiction…
it shows us possibilities that exists within certain actions without
ourselves actually doing said actions… we role play within
Anna life… but I admit, as a man, I cannot fully role play
Anna life… there is a second, more interesting concept here,
Anna Karenina was written by a man, who role plays being a woman,
I’ve always wondered what Anna Karenina would look like if
it was rewritten by a woman… a man’s truth is different than
a woman’s truth…

Fiction acts as a source of possibilities for us… what if we
were to act, do or be someone or something else… what might
be the consequences of our actions… we can role play without
any consequences of our own… that is the true value of fiction…
we can see, have information about what possibilities exists if
we were to commit adultery for example or commit murder…
we could role play those possibilities through literature, through
fiction… that is information… now is this information ‘‘garbage’’
not at all…an examination of our possibilities in existence is
never ‘‘garbage’’…in fact, I would argue that this ‘‘examination’’
is fundamental to our very existence…

What is possible for me to reach/become in my lifetime?
As Nietzsche said, we are on a road of becoming…
going from animal to becoming human… are we human yet?
I would, as Nietzsche argued, that answer is no… we are still
tied into our animal nature/side…I have heard it stated that
human beings haven’t changed since the stone age… but
that is because we are too engaged in that animal side, instead
of moving down the road of becoming human…
we have been fed the lies of being human is about
the acquisition of the trinkets of existence… that existence
is about gaining wealth, power, fame, titles, material possessions…
that is part of the garbage in that creates the garbage out…
Those trinkets of existence are nothing more than temporary
or ‘‘ad hoc’’ values… money doesn’t last long and neither
does titles or material goods or fame… I ask you, do
you remember or know who ‘‘Tiny Tim’’ was? I rest my case…

That is part of the ‘‘garbage in, garbage out’’ of modern day
existence…the garbage of what is, has value in our lives…
Now one might say, Kropotkin, you are wrong… great,
tell us what is/has value in our lives? and those answers
will include the copout of ‘‘everyone decides for themselves’’
Which isn’t an answer but a copout… it saves one from
actually thinking about an answer… you don’t have to
commit to anything by saying ‘‘everyone can decide for
themselves’’ it is in essence, a garbage answer because
it comes from garbage in which is a failure to actually
take the question seriously…

we are fed information garbage all the time, but how are we able to
distinguish or ‘‘separate the wheat from the chaff?’’

therein lies my next post…

Kropotkin

2

GI, GO… a concept whose time has come…

let us take our modern day America, the left vs the right,
and what is one of the accusations the right makes
against the left, the left are ‘‘liberal elites’’ meaning
urban, east coast-west coast… New York or LA/Hollywood…
which is suggesting that the two coast are not engaged with
or understanding of the ‘‘real’’ America… all of which are pretty
solid buzz words meaning nothing… one of the fracture points
of this division is education…it is a fact that the more educated
one is, the more likely, that one is going to be liberal…
In other words, the educated person has more likely
read Anna Karenina or any one of the ‘‘dead white guys’’ classics…
I will be willing to bet that the average MAGA person has never
read Anna Karenina or Faust or even Shakespeare…
that they, MAGA, are not connected to the foundation of
Western civilization, which is the heart of America…
Both the Declaration of Independence and the American
Constitution were written with Enlightenment values…
The founding fathers were all about the Enlightenment and
its values…Benjamin Franklin was highly thought of in
Europe because he was considered a valued member of
the Enlightenment spirit in Europe…
But as IQ45 has made it clear, that the values of the
Enlightenment are not wanted, nor needed in America…
and he is supported by the conservative/MAGA crowd…
It is my contention that the right wing/MAGA crowd
are the ones who are not in the spirit of the American
ideal…for the values of the Enlightenment include
education, toleration, improvement/ striving for being
better, science, rationality, facts, thinking for oneself…
every single value rejected by conservatives/MAGA…
One of the essential points of the Enlightenment is
that tradition is not always the path forward and even
that has been rejected by the MAGA/conservatives…
Look at what the MAGA crowd has called for, a rejection
of education, a rejection of science, and even a rejection
of tradition…tradition would call for a following of the
Constitution and the Declaration and the MAGA crowd
has called for the null and void of both… for they have
attack almost every single amendment of the constitution
with the prominent exception of the second amendment…
criticize IQ45 and one is threatened with sanctions including jail…
please be my guest and publicly say IQ45 is an idiot,
and the MAGA crowd will attack you with threats…
that is the first amendment… IQ45 has threatened to remove
‘‘Birthright citizenship’’ which is enshrined in the 14 amendment,
he has attacked and violated the Due process Cause of both
the 5th, 6th and 14 amendments… jailing and deporting
Birthright citizens without due process…using the ICE as his
own private police force…basically, the Nazi’s SS…

But where is the Garbage IN, Garbage out part of this?
It comes from the very lack of the basic understanding
of the American Constitution and its principle and where
those principles come from… it comes from being uneducated…
and the vast majority of MAGA, conservatives are uneducated…
and being uneducated in the values and beliefs of
Western civilization… which are enshrined within
the literature of Western civilization… even with rejecting
the basic values of the bible… the new religious path in
America is called ''Rugged/Muscular Christianity"
which begins with a rejection of the words of Jesus…
Christianity, which is about being Masculine, and not
about Love, in being active and even aggressive, which
is clearly not in the bible… a Muscular Christian rejects
the saying listed in Mathew 5:39:

‘‘But I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whosoever
shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
also’’

A Muscular Christian would even advocate that the
‘‘true’’ Christian would strike first before allowing being
hit… a rather astonishing rejection of Jesus…
and his advocation of nonviolence… the new path allows,
even advocates violence to ‘‘protect’’ oneself… this rejection
of tradition, of a tradition that has lasted 2000 years brings
us to realize that the conservatives/MAGA have soundly
rejected the past, traditions that has lasted for centuries…
and why?

Because they are uneducated in what it means to be an American,
or even a Christian and I might even suggest that they are uneducated
in what it means to be human…because they haven’t or won’t read
the literature that brings us to what it means to be human…
for example, one of the great pieces of literature is Faust,
written by Goethe…Faust is directly tied into the bible…
In fact, I would suggest that without knowledge of the bible,
Faust doesn’t even make sense… and who among the MAGA
crowd has read Faust? I would venture none… certainly
the village idiot has never read it… and yet, you can’t make
sense of the modern era without knowing Faust…it very clearly
prophesizes the rest of the 19 and 20th century… (the book
was finished in 1832 shortly before Goethe’s death)

So, what exactly does being uneducated mean in this context?
it means a failure of knowing the sources or principles of
our modern world… not knowing the literature that helped
create our modern world… recall that books were the basis
of information since 1500 and were the source of information
up till 1900… 400 years of information that the modern world
was built upon… and if you don’t or can’t read that,
you can’t understand the information that built the modern
world… granted books like Dante’s Inferno was published
in 1321, but didn’t reach the masses until mass market books
came into being around 1500… you can’t understand the basis
of the modern world without knowing the information that they
used to base their understanding of the world…
you need some sort of tradition to understand our modern
world… or said another way, our modern world didn’t just
magically appear without any sort of precedent before it…
it, the modern world grew out of the old way of knowing, of
information… and without that information,
one is uniformed about the sources and principles
of the modern world… which is the exact description
of the modern day MAGA/conservative… they are
uneducated because they are uniformed, uneducated
about the literature that has informed and created the modern world…

let us pause and think about that…

and in my next post I shall continue…

Kropotkin

3

If as I have suggested, the conservative/MAGA crowd
has rejected tradition, then what exactly do they want?
Who the fuck knows, because they certainly don’t have
an idea… which comes from their being uneducated,
ignorant… for example, they, conservatives/MAGA has
rejected the Enlightenment, toleration for others for example,
and has rejected the constitution and the Declaration
of Independence which flow from the Enlightenment,
and they have rejected the words of Jesus and the bible,
so, what traditions, exactly, are they following?
They are anti-education, anti-science, anti-human,
anti-‘‘WOKE’’… They are certainly against a whole lot,
but what exactly do they stand for? A return to traditions that
they have already rejected…I’m not sure how that works…

Well, look at their policies, they hate minorities, blacks,
liberals, WOKE, science, education, tolerance, immigrants
especially nonwhite immigrants, the constitution, progress,
equality, democracy, homosexuals, community/cooperation,
(the lone wolf, rugged individualism is their mantra)
anything LGBTQ… basically anything different from themselves…
cross-dressing, women, the Enlightenment, Institutions like
the IRS and the Department of Education… the FBI, all of
which they have demanded to dismantle… Justice is
a belief which only applies to others, not to them…
to apply justice to a conservative is ‘‘unamerican’’
(notice how they cheered the escape from Justice by IQ45…
who is still a convicted felon with 34 counts of committing a crime,
but he is above the law, as white people ought to be… to allow
anyone to escape Justice regardless of title, wealth, privilege,
fame or power is to proclaim the end of the judicial system in
America… which is quite ok with the conservative/MAGA crowd)

I am sure I am missing plenty of hatred that the conservative/
MAGA crowd has, but I only have so many hours in a day to
record this…

So, if the MAGA crowd has rejected so many things, like
traditions and institutions and ideas like Justice, what exactly
do they believe in? what do they actually fight for?

They hate taxes, which is the basis of every single civilization
ever created, then they hate America… as the strength of
America lies in its both institutions and its infrastructure…
both of which demands taxes to maintain… what the right/
MAGA crowd seems to want is Hobbes ‘‘State of Nature’’ in
which the strong and wealthy overcome everyone else…
power lies in the hands of those who can take it… it is
a struggle of everyone against everyone else… laws of
the jungle…and tell me, what animals has created a state
or society that can rival what Humans have done?
None, because the laws of the jungle prevents any sort
of civilization or state from being…so to add to more hatred
of the right, roads, schools, sewer plants, hospitals,
bridges, airports, anything that cost them their precious
tax money… money over civilization… that is what they value…
the right/MAGA has said over and over again, they want money
over the lives of other people… and they have proven this again
and again, with their attacks on Social Security and Medicare,
WIC programs, any sort of ‘‘entitlements’’ to anybody who needs it…
but tax breaks which are another sort of entitlement program
is quite acceptable, because it is sent to those who ‘‘deserve it’’
those white, wealthy people…in the coming tax break to the wealthy,
people like Musk will make billions of dollars, given the way Tesla
is collapsing, he may need it…and for us, the average citizen,
after the last IQ45 tax cut, we had our taxes increase by a lot…
it didn’t help us in any way, shape or form… and for most Americans
it won’t help… because like last time, the tax cuts are designed
to benefit the wealthy, not the middle class like myself, nor the poor…
billions and millions to the already wealthy and to the rest, nada,
or very little…that is the entire point of this witch hunt for governmental
fraud, it is the pretense for a massive tax cut for the wealthy…
and that will be the final straw that will send the American
economy into a depression…

more on the way, is that a threat or a promise?

Kropotkin

4

and as far as the modern attempt to reject
''dead white guys"… we must ask why?

We have two Bloom’s who were defenders of the
traditional ‘‘Western Canon’’
that is the heart of the ‘‘dead white guys’’ writings…
We have Allan Bloom, and we have Harold Bloom…

Harold Bloom, HB, considered Shakespeare as the heart of the
‘‘Western canon’’ and Allan Bloom, AB, who considered
that moral relativism was the cause of the ‘‘Closing of the
American Mind’’ Each of these guys from different viewpoints,
but they pointed toward the same thing…the decline of
the Western mind as being caused by the forces of society/
and universities…

For HB, the question was how we no longer take the
‘‘dead white guys’’ seriously… and thus weaken our
basic and fundamental values in the Western canon…
The strength of Western values, according to HB, is
the basic fundamental values delivered to us by the
‘‘dead white guys’’… that our entire Western culture
is based on the ‘‘dead white guys’’ Plato and the bible,
all the way to Shakespeare… and the values they
provided us… Not the fleeting, relativistic of the modern
state/society, but in real, permanent values that
are the base of our Western society…

AB went to the same argument but on slightly different grounds,
he argued it was the rise of relativism brought about the
decline and fall of the values that have shaped America…

But both men failed to take into account the changing
nature of both the state and society… the traditional
values of god, kings, and state…
a state where Darwin kicked out the old school idea
of the superiority of some over the mass of people…
to name one such traditional idea/values…
the idea of evolution removes the idea of the superiority
of some, kings and church and god, into a much
more equalitarian state/society…
an idea still being fought in America today…
that there is an hierarchy of both values and people in
the world is still held to be dear within the conservative
culture… that some people are naturally born being superior
is an unquestioned value of conservatives… and the highest
value lies within the bible and god…which is the very
medieval idea that those the closes to god, are superior
to those who are far away from god… an idea that
has been rejected by the conservatives themselves,
with their adoption of Muscular Christianity…
in which they hold that Jesus was far too passive about
his values and actions… the far right has rejected a
great deal of Jesus sayings and beliefs, among them
the ""Parable of the good Samaritan’’ and the passivity
of the turning of one’s cheek… the holding of
values like those of capitalism, in which the goal is
the gaining of wealth and power is the true lode star
of conservative belief today…pretty much a total
rejection of Jesus’s entire ministry… personally, I
find out that my rejection of the trinkets of existence,
is far more in line with the thoughts of Jesus than
the current values and beliefs of the conservative/far right…
and I am an admitted Atheist… that the true path of
human beings lie in our character and the concern
with our souls… Thus, in line with both Socrates and
Jesus…

but let us return to our modern world… what does the
modern kid, who lives in say, Oakland CA, have to do
with the values of HB or AB? Values of the ‘‘dead white guys’’
which includes the bible… In my life, as a minority kid,
what can the words of the ‘‘dead white guys’’ mean to me?
What part of Shakespeare can be applied to my own life?
Does the play Hamlet, for example, can that be applied to
my own life as a modern black living in Oakland?
I don’t see how… the only Shakespearian play that
might be relevant to a black kid in Oakland is ‘‘Romeo
and Juliet’’ and even that ends in a massive amount of
violence… Practically everyone dies in that play at the
end… for my money, not much of a role model play for us…
and Hamlet, not much of a role model play either…
Hamlet responds to his dilemma with thoughts of suicide…
It makes sense in the play but makes no sense in the real world…
Frankly, the plays of Shakespeare make no sense in the modern
world… How can we adapt those plays as ''role model plays,
given how they work out? And this is true of most literature
written since 1500… how is the actions presented to us, in
say ‘‘Tom Jones’’ relevant to us today? or in the work of
Cervates ‘‘Don Quixote’’… A great piece of literature
to be sure, and quite an interesting read, but it has
little relevance to our own modern world… except as
a very general point of attacking windmills…

Today, the vast literature that has driven the values of the
modern world, has little relevance to our modern lives…
as a black kid from Oakland, what does have relevance
to my life in terms of the media? I would say, Hip hop, RAP/crap
has relevance because it refers to what is happening right now,
just down the street from me… I see that every day, I don’t
see ‘‘Hamlet’’ or ‘‘Don Quixote’’ being played out in my
neighborhood… the modern literature that drives
the values of our modern society and state, from Plato
to Shakespeare, don’t have relevance in my world,
even as a senior citizen today…

If our environment has changed, then our values/beliefs must
change to reflect those changes… and it is on that basis,
that the modern kid from Oakland rejects the literature of the
past…

The second accusation comes from AB, which is that
relativism has destroyed our values and culture…
but once again, we must change and adapt our
beliefs and values to match what we see in our own
modern world/environment… one word might
be relativism, but another word is adaptation…
we must adapt to new changes in the world,
from science, technology, work, politics by
changing our values and beliefs to adapt to
the ever changing world… just as we have
changed and adapted our values of childhood, into
values and beliefs that fit in our place in the world…

I cannot, cannot hold the values and beliefs of being a
child as an adult… I am 66, and my values and beliefs
must reflect that… to hold to a child’s value/beliefs
at 66 is beyond idiotic… the changing of one’s values
and beliefs is a change that occurs our entire life…
and we must accept that… so, why should we, must I
hold to the values and beliefs of those ''dead white guys"
when they don’t have/hold any relevance in my life today?

and this brings us back to the Nietzschean idea of a ‘‘reexamination
of values’’ that his refers to… what values/beliefs are relevant
to my life today? Why should I hold to the values and beliefs
of the bible, when it has no relevance to my life today?
What ‘‘dead white guy’’ should I value? the modern answer
is the ‘‘dead white guy’’ that speaks to you… and that is,
by its very nature, relativism…

and who around here understand what I am saying?
from the lack of response, no one… and that is fine…
I am just another ‘‘white guy’’ just not dead… yet…

Kropotkin