economy

What is interesting about economics is economy, or relationships of exchange where every gain is also a loss. What's disappointing about economics is that it doesn't deal enough with annihilation, where there's pure loss, or where the one thing exits the relationship. Aren't suicide bombers totally irrelevant to economics?

This is one of the interesting ideas in the history of science to me, that there is not pure scientific progress involving increasingly accurate representations and understandings of the natural world. Instead, scientific progress necessarily involves some sort of loss of knowledge as well. Thanks Thomas Kuhn.

Isn't the same thing true about changes in belief? That there is no pure progress of understanding, but each change is a gain as well as a loss. Isn't the idea that scientific research is pure gain just as ridiculous as the idea that change in religious belief is pure loss? Or, to put this another way, aren't scientists who ignore scientific history just as ignorant as believers who only pay attention to religious origins and have no concept of changes in belief?

history

The best thing that could happen for historians of our present is a massive catastrophe that wipes out massive chunks of the internet and digital history. Otherwise good luck.

Police Report, circa 1891

In 1891 Bolton Rogers was appointed as chief of police in Seattle. In his report for the year, he includes this peculiar note to explain why he hadn't collected nearly as many fines as his predecessor: it was "the custom prior to my advent to collect fines once a month from all gambling houses and houses of prostitution, and in that way make the Police Department what was called "self-supporting," in other words turning the department into legal blackmailers, fining law breakers for breaking the law, and at the same time taking the fine as a license to allow them to continue to break the law."

Isn't this exactly what Michel Foucault was talking about in Discipline and Punish when he wrote that "the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency" (280)?

Rogers story is an interesting one. The mayor removed him from office just a few months after he wrote that report, because they didnt get along. Rogers bounced around for a while, started a private detective agency, was reappointed as chief of police, ran some gambling dens, then died of brain fever.