Leaving (Planet) Urth Cafe

I assemble particularities, with no reason or rhyme. The story of the Californian hijabis asked to leave a cafe caught my attention. The shape of things to come if strumpet comes to power? It appears-at least from a distance-that everything there has to be settled by recourse to the law or the gun, as befits a gnostic age. A game of celebrities and stars and random trash. You only add to it, perhaps, by taking note of it.

A red cord, tightly wound but hanging loose on a clothes line, nearly bleached by the light; a crow in the shade, looking upwards, open-mouthed, as if gasping or waiting for something to fall from the tree that very moment; a small and delicate brown leaf, like a sparrow, pressed up against the base of the third step of a flight of stairs. Outside the masjid, a tractor being driven slightly crazily in ever-wider circles, almost as if it had a mind of its own, trying to get beyond its own circumference, flinging up thick puffs of brown dust into the air as it passes the bewildered students. 

What kind of observations are these?

In the old days economists were somewhat practical people, having some connection to the real world. Since the late seventies they've increasingly become armchair theorists, not so much as speculating on the world from a distance but, rather, setting up theories in the private laboratories of their mind. Not a science in any recognizable sense of the word; more like mathematics, since they've been more concerned about formal elegance, internal consistency, regularity, deduction etc. and not overly worried about how their theories "correspond" to reality. Economics as logic, as a set of consistent internal relations. At most, not an "explanation" of a reality but a description of it. 

In fact, why bother with human agents at all! Any system or machine could produce such consistent "behaviour". Under such a mechanical notion of rationality what scope is there for experience, introspection or judgement? Even goals such as maximizing utility are seen as redundant. What purpose does "utility" serve since it's just a vacuous concept. At best it's just a formal representation of underlying preferences. But why even stick with preferences, why not just look at behaviour (the pseudo-scientific pretence that we have reintroduced empiricism or observation back into the equation). And why maximization? One could, after all, consistently minimize. 

Now, would it be so surprising that human beings, swooning before the machine, would eventually hold the machine up as their idol? 

~

Taking Notes: