b.b. (on sanctions)

Dear friends, said the nerd, let me speak out for once on sanctions: I still don't believe in sanctions. Because the hand that causes pain by sanctions can never be accepted by those people whom you need in order to really overcome the regime: the very strong characters will never just "skip" their national pride. They DO need support from the West. And they need it as real partners. Their strength of opposition is depending on their economic and civil strength. But the more you press an entire state by sanctions, the more the regime you want to fight will concentrate the remnants of national wealth in its own hands, the weaker will the opposition be. If only the martyrs will still oppose their regime, then the outcome is, what we know already: a regime of martyrs. That is no good, friends, it is no good at all.

a.a.

If I were part of the rough folks or the strategic heads of the Syrian opposition, if I'd see that the conflict does not seem to end with a victory of either side, if I'd see that the government does not stop its attacks against the opposition and does not make any diplomatic effort, if I'd see that the Western world does nothing to help either side - I might feel tempted to say: why not provoke the neighbors who have Western affiliation so that they must needs react? The sad-eyed nerd, who didn't need to say that she just imagined how it would be, if, left her guests from the EinSatzLeitung with this, and didn't say a word to evaluate the forces fighting in that country.

z. context matters

Context matters, said a friend, and gave an example: yesterday, some swiss fake-company sent me a test -form of attractive simplicity. The "IQ-elite" was so very interested in analyzing my personality. They posed some questions, and you could choose between two sentences or four pictures (I'd rather be cool/ I tend to act warmheartedly, a picture showing different settings of evening occupation or holiday, where I'd always have prefered to be able to say, one evening reading, the other evening dining with friends, yet another evening dancing, and so on, but you had to choose one). Given, that they wanted to check your job-qualification, you would certainly sign the pictures and sentences in a way that could qualify you for a senior position in any job (the coolness, the mountains, the book etc.). Given, that they wanted to find out about your love-life and honor you with a nice partner, you would sign exactly the other pictures in order to be most attractive there (the dancing, the warmhearted way etc.). Given that they wanted to check your qualities as a performer in arts, you would sign in again another way (you would like to be in the shoes of Madonna rather than in those of Obama etc.). But how come that you expect them to reward you for anything, said the nerd, with a frown.

y.

Stupidity rules.

x.

Just a barking cat it was, said the nerd.

w.

What struck me most in your paper, said the nerd, is the easiness with which you seem to are doing away with the entire notion of autonomy, how do they call your business, is it Wir-alle-Werbung?

v.

A draft:

"In Vindication of 'Satan's Methodology, or: How to Deal withe the Notion of the Real in Psychology"

When Gershom Scholem read Hermann Cohen, he got very angry. He was sure that

Cohen’s move to found the humanities on normativity alone was either a whim or

the methodology of Satan. To simply admit that nothing is more real than our

yearning for reality, seemed unbearable to him. And certainly the vast majority of

scholars, philosophers and psychoanalysts and psychologists, would rather follow

Scholem’s exclamation than dive deeper into Cohen’s idea. To bother too much

about the reality of the real, is either being described as the symptom of a serious

mental illness or a theorem in the very complex building of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

But what if the ethically founded epoché concerning our knowledge about the reality

of the psychic movements of the other is not a loss in reality but rather a gain? What

if abstaining from an ontology of the mind is indeed a more secure and rational way

of dealing with the intersubjectivity of psychic events than any ontology of the mind

could ppossibly be?

It is these questions that make me want to vindicate Cohen’s revolutionary

approach as a very promising way of coping with the conceptional limits to anything

the brain can achieve by reflexion on itself and the brains of his fellowmen. Classical

Kantianism seemed to reduce the faculties which could be conquered by sound

reasoning to an almost unbearable degree in the eyes of Kant’s believing

contemporaries. Yet, in the end, it opened a wide space for new types of

knowledge. Couldn’t it be that Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism, that seems so much to

humiliate and restrict the spheres of knowledge about ourselves, will in the end

widen the space in which knowledge concerning our minds can move?