Byrhtnoth's last words

That Byrhtnoth's words we as Danegeld yield

While yet, too fully, we possess the field

With Hearts for bellows, cold steel to fire

Minds for iron, fellows, mine but ire

Envoi-                                             Prince! Dike polupoinos means, in essence,

Heed mounts as deed lessens

Notes

Byrhtnoth's famous last words:

Hige sceal þe heardra,     heorte the cenre,
mod sceal þe mare,     þe ure mægen lytlað. (312'13)

[Thought must be the harder, heart be the keener,
mind must be the greater, while our strength lessens.]

Dike Polupoinos- 'much avenging Justice' which guards the paths of Night and Day. (Parmenides)

Lacrimosa hodie

So the Sun yet burn, let our Moon be Ash

  & thy Dies Irae turn to Daily Trash

Harder yet must our Poets try

So all Madness lust One Stupid Lie

Rawls's Aristotelian principle & Political conceptions of Justice

In his first and most famous book, Rawls sought to show that Justice as Fairness was also part of the 'Good' by appealing to the following 'Aristotelian Principle' which states that every mugger naturally wants to become a Moriarty, every con-man wants to become a Bernie Madoff, and, by the magic of Metanoia, every Prof. of Political Science wants to end his days spouting shite more obviously shite than he did at the commencement of her career- i.e. a person's good consists in wanting to do qualitatively more and more of what they are good at and actually that's a good thing coz Moriarty is more interesting than a mugger (because he teaches us something about hidden linkages in our Society) Madoff less morally interesting than  a two bit hustler(hence, better for mechanism design) and it's always good to know that Professors- who, after all, are only a superior  type of child-minder- end up with their own nappies full of shit.

The Evolutionary Stable regret minimizing multiplicative update algorithm essentially says that we should want to live in a Society where the Aristotleian principle is enabled for everybody- i.e. Aumann agreement is disabled- such that every Sherlock has a Moriarty- i.e. no randomness is distinguishable from two quite different types of pseudo randomness- and, anyway, Moriarty, as we all know, was actually a Professor.
So was Rawls- worse luck.
In 'Justice as Fairness reconsidered', Rawls restricts the scope of his idea to the sort of Political Philosophy being done in certain sorts of Liberal Democracies where, coz people haven't yet read Sen's 'Idea of Justice', 'ideal type analysis' is still cool. In other words, Rawls basically says 'guys, I got it wrong. Justice as Fairness is nothing but a textual availability cascade and the only reason not to junk it is because it happens to be the most ubiquitous junk food for thought of our time- at least if you are a pretentious little turd from a highly specific and Entitled coterie of fuckwitted assholes.'
The paradox here is that Rawls' own 'life- plan' seems to have obeyed the Aristotelian principle. His restriction of Justice-as-Fairness to Political Philosophy of a certain wholly Credentialist and in-utile type- i.e. his refusal to identify it with Evolutionary Game Theory or Mechanism Design- leaves him safe in his play-pen from the perils of thought or the patripassian pangs proper to a progenitor of the Cavalry of the Capabilities Approach which has nailed Left Liberalism to the Cross of  Steady State Stupidity.
Early Rawls can shade into mystical theodicy- it illuminates such dark sayings as 'can two walk the same road- save they are agreed?' whose dual is 'Can there be Evil in the City, and the Lord has not done it?- but later Rawls- stuff like 'overlapping consensus' & 'reasonable pluralism'- is exhausted committee room jargon long after the rending of the Veil, the day of wrath, has come and gone, and the only outcome is that all language has been unified but only to show the true Apocalypse is Disenchantment- nothing is left of the City save its futile Utopian philosophizing whose practice is punitively enforced by the impossibility of hemlock.

Meredith Townsend's influence on Jawaharlal Nehru

Nehru was just a fresh faced fourteen year in his first year at Harrow when he found Meredith Townsend's article 'Will England Retain India?' in the pages of his favorite Spank Mag.
The experience permanently scarred him and explains much about his later proclivities.

Townsend was a senior journalist who had lived in India. His essay explains that the British Empire had inspired no loyalty whatsoever in any class of native and would be swept away in a moment if it met any military setback. Worse luck for India, because
1) Brown People are all basically Ali Babas and are motivated not by self-interest but 'interestingness'-i.e the desire to live in an Arabian Nights fantasy land of despotic Sultans and sultry odalisques and everybody either getting their head chopped off or being offered a Palace with a well stocked harem, preferably all in the same day but not in that order.
2) If White people have sex with Brown people the kids will be black and Black people live in grass huts and go booga-booga and wave their spears around.
3) Brown people and White people don't like having sex with each other but the mere presence of a very few White people in India had, over the course of a century, turned the local Brown people into Black people- incapable of once again building cities like Benares- though for some reason they still do better than White people in Competitive Exams.

So there you have it. A highly respected editor, writing in 1904, demonstrates that
1) British rule in India is totally unviable
2) The British Ruling Class has shit for brains.
What's the boy Nehru's takeaway point from all this?
Whitey be stealing all our wealth! Fuck you Whitey! Kindly invent Socialism already and explain it to some clever Bengalis so India can have a Planning Commission same as the Soviets do.

Borges's Orbis Tertius vs. Dummett's Frege's

'...for Frege, several people may grasp the sense of one word or of one thought, and that just as the sense of a name denotes an object, the sense of a thought denotes a truth-value'- 

In other words,  Sense (Sinn or Acceptation) is the name Frege gives to the solution of a co-ordination problem which itself is described by the 'Reference' of the word or phrase or 'thought'- i.e. its context. If there is a canonical solution- then Sense corresponds to a 'truth value'. In other words, if you can be sure of finding the Schelling focal point without discussing it with anyone (i.e. gaming it) because there is an obvious, unique,  quick to halt algorithm you can run- then you have a proposition in a first order language of a certain type.

'What is involved in grasping a sense?'

The answer, obviously, is a zero knowledge mimetics or cheap-talk Preference Falsification. But that's not Frege’s response  which is- 'that senses are neither part of the world of spatio-temporal objects, nor do they exist inside the minds of individuals. They belong to a “third realm”, a timeless world, to which all of us have access.'

Access how? Well, d'uh, collaboratively like Borges's 'Orbis Tertius' project.  The Tlon thus collectively created is, of course, a Psychologism- which from the Evolutionary p.o.v it's useful for us to cultivate, even in hyper-mentalist, hypo-mechanist, form. In this sense, so long as one is autistic enough to reject Psychologism as Teleology, there is no ontological scandal- anymore than there is a Christological scandal in Tertullian- in Frege's, surely Game theoretic, not hyper-mentalist at all, 'third realm'.
However Dummett, Frege's greatest English language commentator,' is far from endorsing the suggestion that thoughts occupy a third realm beyond time and space. He describes this doctrine as a piece of “ontological mythology”, the term “mythology” here being used in a purely pejorative sense (Dummett, 1993a, 25). Dummett thinks that these two loose ends should be tied together. Rather than being content to describe the act of understanding as involving a mysterious connection between our minds and timeless entities known as senses, we should focus on the practice of using sentences in a language. This, in turn requires us to think about the purpose of classifying sentences as true or false, and that requires that we think about the purposes for which we use a language (Dummett, 1981a, 413). The result of this process might be to vindicate Frege’s semantics, or it might vindicate the intuitionist position. Dummett’s most influential contribution to philosophy can be understood as an attempt to resolve this unfinished business.'

In other words, here again is that paranoid and programmatic- as opposed to sane for self-sublatingly schizophrenic- 'linguistic turn' which coincided with the de-Industrialization of Higher Education and the Great Credentialist Moderation now nakedly revealed as a Ponzi scheme rendering us all asymptotically Third World.
Why? Coz everybody needing a PhD in order to understand that, like, Language speaks them- is only par for the course for discoordination game Elitism or Chauvinism but fucked for the true purpose of Higher Education-as-Paideia which is Universal and Transcendental and consists entirely of telling kids not to masturbate so much otherwise they'll go blind as opposed to just getting  more and more myopic. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.

Envoi-               Prince! Since by hic sunt leones  the State's burgeoning is naturaliter permitted
                                Ex ungue leonem,  our I & Thou, is now  to a Third Estate demitted.

What are we entitled to say about Entitlements?

All Professors are entitled to say stupid things but how can one be sure of saying the stupidest things possible at any given time while still retaining currency as a pukka pointy headed Public Intellectual?
One answer has to do with equating essentially contested, or holophrastically indeterminate, words or concepts- like Justice, or Capabilities, or Entitlements- with mathematically rigorous Sets and then looking at situations where we can good-faith agree that elements of a certain type belong in the Set in question. Our naive intuition is that, once a sufficient sequence of such elements is admitted, then some structural feature of the Set will become evident such that all our theorems can be 'relativised' w.r.t that set and a Bernays (second order) Reflection Principle obtains such that we have an assurance that the Set as a whole will exhibit the property we have painstakingly discriminated and what's more all our Knowledge is relevant to it and every correct form of Reasoning applicable to it.

If words and concepts are essentially ontologically dysphoric- i.e. not at home in this world- and thus if the Sets that describe them bear no relation to the 'Universal Set' (V)  of all that is- no objection can be raised, other than the obvious one- viz. why pay Professors to spout Schizophrenic shite when our Lunatic Asylums supply a better product for free?
Suppose words and concepts, save when used disingenuously, aren't gaping wormholes into madness, then any Set they define must be a subset of V. However, in that case, either some Set of algorithms exist, within the Universal Set, which with provable consistency partition V so as to yield the Set you are interested in- which is impossible by Godel's second incompleteness theorem- or there is no provably consistent algorithmic method of wholly distinguishing that Set within V.
As Godel put it-

I suppose, if one still wants to gain the academic respectability of Mathematics, one could still do so by invoking Fuzzy Set theory- indeed, there are some approaches to Entitlements which do so- but, while this might be sensible- and the sort of back-room drudgery Bureaucrats ought to be doing for the good of their souls- what it isn't is Sen-tentious.

Consider the following-

Wow! So Entitlements are a Set distinguished by the property of being unknown, at any moment in time, to any living being and, what's more, unknowable tout court.
Why?
Well, 'opportunities' are what Evolution has designed us to search for on an unknown, unpredictable, fitness landscape. Similarly 'rights' are co-evolved and subject to even more uncertainty including strategic uncertainty.
As for the Law- it is scarcely static and unchanging.
In the case of the Bengal Famine, which Sen studied, it wasn't the Law 'which stood between food availability and food entitlement'. On the contrary, the elected Govt of Bengal could have implemented the Bengal Famine Code- or at least acknowledged that a Famine caused by food availability deficit existed instead of pretending them evil Hindu Money-lenders were hoarding all the food.
Sen's hilarious theory is that workers in the Cities were so gluttonous and callous that they ate 5 times as much rice as previously and stood around with jutting bellies sneering at their own brothers and cousins from the countryside who had come staggering into Calcutta only to collapse and die in the streets.
Yes, there was an Entitlements type failure- it became impossible to sell or mortgage land while the Japs (aided and abetted by Subash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army) were at the door- and, no question, the Army and the Administration worsened things initially, till an Army man became Viceroy- but that wasn't the root of the problem.
The fact is, in a rain fed Agricultural economy (as opposed to a 'no escape' zone of fertility) , Entitlements create Famines.
Why?
Well, the evolutionary stable strategy- absent belief in Entitlements- is to have highly diversified food resources and also to maintain mobility. Thus if one or two or three food sources collapse, agents can still survive or walk away. Should land become scarce- head hunting is a good Zahavi type signal.
The alternative- viz. producing a surplus to support a class of fungible asset producers- depends crucially on the notion of Entitlement- legal, contractual, theological, moral or what have you.
The Law guarantees that food availability deficit will translate into food entitlement collapse. Why? It fools people into investing in, if not an otological dysphoric, then a wholly naked Ponzi scheme rather than, as Evolution dictates,  making a Career Move into Head Hunting.
Like Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal et al.

The Reflection principle & Borges's Aleph

Leibniz wrote, in section 56 of the Monadology: “Each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and is in consequence a perpetual living mirror of the universe”.

Borges's Aleph is a small spot only viewable from a certain angle when lying on the floor of a rodent infested Buenos Aires cellar. In it, everything in the Universe is simultaneously viewable. Yet, Borges comes to the conclusion that it is a false Aleph. Why?

Well, for the purposes of the higher criticism- i.e. writing tendentious shite about modish Modernist texts we haven't re-read since we were ourselves equally psilosophical College Sophomores- one approach is to argue that, by any Reflection Principle, which itself has enough structural features; or a, Tarski type, suitably dense Relation Algebra (the two not being homologous for any Semantic or Sen-tentious end!)  to fully specify the pre-image/pratibimba or Universal Set (V) for any given empirically observed Aleph, it must be the case that there is no way of distinguishing if that Aleph is merely partial or actually complete. Indeed, the probability is overwhelming that it must simply be false.

Since you and me aint edumicated, however, this road is closed to us and so we have to go back and read Borges's text coz, truth be told, tho we woz too Sophomores sho nuff, it was High School Sophomores and not in a good School District either. Indeed, far from it.

But, wait. 

Hang on a fookin hanging fart. Aint u & me red blooded Sarah Palin types? Surely, our Christian Faith- or Swahili Witch-doctor- will save us from having to actually read wot some fookin W.O.P wrote?

I mean, what would J.C do?

The answer, of course, as so often happens on this blog, turns out to involve making a distinction between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Whitman's method was cataphatic- i.e. listing sonorous shite. Borges, notoriously, was a heteroclite Whitman- his lists undermine themselves. He gives us a credible Aleph by means of a vetiginously veridical cataphasis- 'On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.'

Rabindranath Tagore said- 'Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai' (Kadambari dies only to prove she was still alive) and though he was referencing the baroque Sanskrit novel, not his beloved  sister-in-law's suicide, there is a univocity to this epigram which redeems that too hirsute and prolix Sage.

By contrast, Borges's various Kadambaris- whose V precludes Victoria Ocampo, for whom Rabi had a lech- whether called Beatrice Viterbo or Teodolino Villar, did not die merely to prove they were alive but, like the risen Christ at the end of the Gospel of John, in order to become the protagonist of such Epic Agons as, were each written down in a book, not the World- nay, not the Library of Babel!- could contain them all. 

Which is why their Alephs are false and Zahirs forgettable. 

If only because 'Borges & I' represents a Red Queen's race.

In this respect, Borges ever trembles on that threshold boldly crossed by both true Mannerists (e.g Riti kavya a la Jagganath Pundit) & proto-Marxists (as in the subaltern Shlok of Nund Reshi) videlicet; Love is a Second Creation. Its God Grief.

What of Cantor's Aleph & the too Christian Godel?

'Hao Wang records  Godel’s argument in item 8.7.14 of his Logical Journey
 Consider a property P(V, x), which involves V. If, as we believe, V is extremely large, then x must appear in an early segment of V and cannot have any relation to much later segments of V. Hence, within P(V, x), V can be replaced by some set in every context. In short, if P does not involve V, there is no problem; if it does, then closeness to each x helps to eliminate V, provided chaos does not prevail.”

This sounds a bit like the Secretary problem also known as the 1/e stopping rule. If so, we have a proof of (almost) the Trinity

“There is also a theological approach, according to which V corresponds to the whole physical world, and the closeness aspect to what lies within the monad and in between the monads. According
to the principles of rationality, sufficient reason, and preestablished harmony, the property P(V, x) of a monad x is equivalent to some intrinsic property of x, in which the world does not occur. In other
words, when we move from monads to sets, there is some set y to which x bears intrinsically the same relation as it does to V. Hence, there is a property Q(x), not involving V, which is equivalent to P(V, x). According to medieval ideas, properties containing V or the world would not be in the essence of any set or monad”.

  But those properties  would be in the Holy Ghost against whom alone sins are unpardonable.

But, what is Sin (Evil being Empty) other than its own corpus delecti?

Thus all Sin is formally identifiable as a failure to properly dispose off Sacrifice's surplus.
What is unpardonable is to ascribe e's excess over 'two-ity' to anything but V

                            Wherever two are gathered, there is the lover & the rival.

When they disperse there remains only the Zahir of their Aleph.
And that is always the smallest coin in circulation amongst us.
So, drink up, & spend that penny already.