pk Online

I had five domains, several blogs, thousands of essays and other text files, thousands of images on line. The fed destroyed all that, all but destroyed me.

I can't afford to repost, so I've been recreating some classic pk modules at blogs.

Here's what I'm going to do now: get all my files into a blog, sorting by blog specialty.
Then, reorder, as logically as I can, so visitors can browse by Knatz.com type categories: Teaching / or Personal /

I'm going to stop explaining all this every time I mount a new post.
Then I'm going to my five destroyed domains back up, restoring the original logic, improving on the original logic.

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pk@Knatz.com

Research: in a Terrarium

The assignment is to assess German involvement in the holocaust:
The anthropologist will want license to dig up the earth all over eastern Europe in search of bodies to examine.
The journalist will go to the libraries in major cities, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, to see what records the Nazis and their clients kept of Nazi atrocities. How funny is it how little such a journalist will find?
The investigative journalist will know how inappropriate the former behavior is, but if he values his perks, he'll do the same.

Existence is one question, in many guises:
will the rats understand why they're dying before they die?
Or will they die without a clue?

Or, will they learn to become truthful in time to perhaps survive?

My money is on death: and no learning.

Compulsion?

Compulsion?

Group Humility, Group Ceiling

No compulsory ritual, said Ivan Illich.

I've been seconding him as loudly as I can.

Bread and Wine

The majority do not agree with me that the state has no proper business at all; yet I still wish more agreed that the state has no business mandating school attendance.

Even if I agree that a state had the right to exist which set skill standards for the public (to vote, a citizen must demonstrate literacy, numeracy ...), it does not follow that the state has the right to dictate where one learns what, when, or under whose tutelage.

(When we go to market, does the state dictate how much meat we must buy that day? which brand? at what price?)
(When I entered school already knowing how to read, why wasn't I allowed to go home?)
(When I demonstrated via the GRE that I could read better than 99% of the university faculty,
why didn't they give me the damn doctorate and release me?
(Such degrees are little more than fraternity initiation bullying anyway!)

I've said all that – for over four decades. I've been jailed for it, censored, denied an income, my business and gifts from patrons destroyed. Today I try to add a clarification of a side point:

In opposing state compulsion, I am not opposing compulsion. I grant the mother's right to pull baby back from the fire. I grant the father's right to smack those not pulling the plow in one direction. (I say it's their obligation.) And I concede the right of a family to hire a magician to feed them ritual bread and wine: never mind whether or not I see it doing any good.

Group Humility
We are a social species. I don't object. But we've overdone the group power bit. I want us to back up on that issue, practice a little group humility.

Below a certain threshold conformity is a friend to survival; beyond it, an enemy. I see small societies as having evolutionarily positive rights that large populations forfeit. I don't want to see a billion and a half Chinese telling a billion Indians what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and compelling obedience to this or that guild of professional service experts: all Chinese of course.

I don't want a million Roman Catholics telling two thirds of a million Greek Orthodox how they must do something. Two hundred Cro-magnon telling one Cro-magnon that one must use the right hand to absturge the podex, while circling the left hand over the belly, is none of my business. The US with its media tools seeing that scholars who don't like to see napalm dropped on village girls get silenced is prescribing disaster for all.

But then the public had long lost any right to complain: sitting passive while teachers are murdered, sucking their thumb while degenerate authority mislabels everything.

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A word on distinguishing authority from degenerate authority I'll add at IonaArc.

School Teacher

Remember to distinguish between teacher and school teacher.

Without teachers civilization could not survive. Perhaps neither could the species.

But under kleptocracy, teachers get hemlock poured into their ear, get crucified ... These days, crucifixion no longer being popular among kleptocracies, teachers get the rug pulled out from under them in a variety of ways: they don't get published, they get side-railed.

Perhaps worst, they get replaced by school teachers.

School teachers get mass produced by the state. They're so ignorant they don't even realize that they're not teachers; they're robots for the school board: and the school board is never made up of scientists, philosophers, scholars ... truth tellers. It's made up of politicians and political appointees: they'll say that the earth is flat: until told to say something else.