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Video Archives – Peter Beinart Presents 'The Crisis of Zionism' (2012)
Thursday, April 26th, 2012: A book presentation on The Crisis of Zionism
Participants: Peter Beinart, an American journalist who writes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as on issues of Jewish identity more generally. He is the author of The Crisis of Zionism.
Peter Beinart spoke at Bard in April 2012. His talk, "The Crisis of Zionism," was a kind of brief manifesto of his take on what liberal Zionism, his politics of choice, should mean. As a liberal Zionist, Beinart believes in the fundamental compatibility of Jewishness and democracy—the two founding principles of the State of Israel. Regarding the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he personally believes that the creation of a separate Palestinian state and Israel's embrace of Zionist discourse that facilitates greater dialogue and cooperation can help create a way forward. Not surprisingly, this position has invited criticism from multiple directions.
Death and the Public Realm
**This article was originally published on May 13, 2013**
"There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity."
--Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The Laboratory as Anti-Environment
"Seen from the perspective of the "real" world, the laboratory is the anticipation of a changed environment."
-Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
I find this quote intriguing in that its reference to environments and environmental change speak to the fact that Arendt's philosophy was essentially an ecological one, indeed one that is profoundly media ecological. The quote appears in a section of The Life of the Mind entitled "Science and Common Sense," in which Arendt argues that the practice of science is quite distinct from thinking as a philosophical activity.
As she explains:
Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is a role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.
Here Arendt invokes a variation on Gödel's incompleteness theorem in mathematics, noting that science cannot justify itself on scientific grounds, but rather must somehow depend on something outside of and beyond itself. Perhaps more to the point, science, especially as associated with empiricism, cannot be divorced from concrete reality, and does not function only in the abstract realm of ideas that Plato insisted was the only true reality.
The transformation of truth into mere verity results primarily from the fact that the scientist remains bound to the common sense by which we find our bearings in a world of appearances. Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
It is certainly the case that scientific truth is always contingent, tentative, open to refutation, as Karl Popper explained. Scientific truth is never absolute, never anything more than a map of some other territory, a map that needs to be continually tested and reviewed, updated and revised, as Alfred Korzybski explained by way of establishing his discipline of general semantics. Even the so-called laws of nature and physics need not be considered immutable, but may be subject to change and evolution, as Lee Smolin argues in his insightful book, Time Reborn.
Scientists are engaged in the process of abstracting, insofar as they take the data gained by empirical investigation and make generalizations in the form of theories and hypotheses, but this process of induction cannot be divorced from concrete reality, from the world of appearances. Science may be used to test, challenge, and displace common sense, but it operates on the same level, as a distilled form of common sense, rather than something qualitatively different, a status Arendt reserves for the special activity of thinking associated with philosophy.
Arendt goes on to argue that both common sense and scientific speculation lack "the safeguards inherent in sheer thinking, namely thinking's critical capacity." This includes the capacity for moral judgment, which became horrifically evident by the ways in which Nazi Germany used science to justify its genocidal policies and actions. Auschwitz did not represent a retrieval of tribal violence, but one of the ultimate expressions of the scientific enterprise in action. And the same might be said of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, holding aside whatever might be said to justify the use of the atomic bomb to bring the Second World War to a speedy conclusion. In remaining close to the human lifeworld, science abandons the very capacity that makes us human, that makes human life and human consciousness unique.
The story of modern science is in fact a story of shifting alliances. Science begins as a branch of philosophy, as natural philosophy. Indeed, philosophy itself is generally understood to begin with the pre-Socratics sometimes referred to as Ionian physicists, i.e., Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, who first posited the concept of elements and atoms. Both science and philosophy therefore coalesce during the first century that followed the introduction of the Greek alphabet and the emergence of a literate culture in the ancient Greek colonies in Asia Minor.
And just as ancient science is alphabetic in its origins, modern science begins with typography, as the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein explains in her exhaustive study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in Early Modern Europe. Simply by making the writings of natural philosophers easily available through the distribution of printed books, scholars were able to compare and contrast what different philosophers had to say about the natural world, and uncover their differences of opinion and contradictions. And this in turn spurned them on to find out for themselves which of various competing explanations are correct, where the truth lies, so that more reading led to even more empirical research, which in turn would have to be published, that is made public, via printing, for the purposes of testing and confirmation. And publication encouraged the formation of a scientific republic of letters, a typographically mediated virtual community.
Eisenstein notes that during the first century following Gutenberg, printed books gave Copernicus access to centuries of recorded observations of the movements of celestial objects, access not easily available to his predecessors. What is remarkable to consider is that the telescope was not invented in his lifetime, that the Polish astronomer arrived at his heliocentric view based only on what could be observed by the naked eye, by gazing up at the heavens, and down at the printed page. The typographic revolution that began in the 15th century was the necessary technological precondition for the Copernican revolution of the 16th century. The telescope as a tool to extend vision beyond its natural capabilities had not yet been invented, and was not required, although soon after its introduction Galileo was able to confirm the theory that Copernicus had put forth a century earlier.
In the restricted literate culture of medieval Europe, the idea took hold that there are two books to be studied in an effort to discern the divine will, and mind: the book of scripture and the book of nature. Both books were seen as sources of knowledge that can be unlocked by a process of reading and interpretation. It was grammar, the ancient study of language, which became one third of the trivium, the foundational curriculum of the medieval university, that became the basis of modern science, and not dialectic or logic, that is, pure thinking, which is the source of the philosophic tradition, as Marshall McLuhan noted in The Classical Trivium. The medieval schoolmen of course placed scripture in the primary position, whereas modern science situates truth in the book of nature alone.
The publication of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in 1620 first formalized the separation of science from philosophy within print culture, but the divorce was finalized during the 19th century, coinciding with the industrial revolution, as researchers became known as scientists rather than natural philosophers. In place of the alliance with philosophy, science came to be associated with technology; before this time, technology, and engineering, often referred to as mechanics, represented entirely different lines of inquiry, utterly practical, often intuitive rather than systematic. Mechanics was part of the world of work rather than that of action, to use the terms Arendt introduced in The Human Condition, which is to say that it was seen as the work of the hand rather than the mind. By the end of 19th century, scientific discovery emerged as the main the source of major technological breakthroughs, rather than innovation springing fully formed from the tinkering of inventors, and it became necessary to distinguish between applied science and theoretical science, the latter nonetheless still tied to the world of appearances.
Today, the acronym STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, has become a major buzzword in education, a major emphasis in particular for higher education, and a major concern in regards to economic competitiveness. We might well take note of how recent this combination of fields and disciplines really is, insofar as mathematics represents pure logic and highly abstract forms of thought, and science once was a purely philosophical enterprise, both aspects of the life of the mind. Technology and engineering, on the other hand, for most of our history took the form of arts and crafts, part of the world of appearances.
The convergence of science and technology also had much to do with scientists' increasing reliance on scientific instruments for their investigations, a trend increasingly prevalent following the introduction of both the telescope and the microscope in the early 17th century, a trend even more apparent from the 19th century on. The laboratory is in fact another such instrument, a technology whose function is to provide precisely controlled conditions, beyond its role as a facility for the storage and use of other scientific instruments. Scientific instruments are media that extend our senses and allow us to see the world in new ways, therefore altering our experience of our environment, while the discoveries they lead to provide us with the means of altering our environments physically. And the laboratory is an instrument that provides us with a total environment, enclosed, controlled, isolated from the world to become in effect the world. It is a micro-environment where experimental changes can be made that anticipate changes that can be made to the macro-environment we regularly inhabit.
The split between science and philosophy can also be characterized as a division between the eye and the ear. Modern science, as intimately bound up in typography, is associated with visualism, the idea that seeing is believing, that truth is based on vision, that knowledge can be displayed visually as an organized set of facts, rather than the product of ongoing dialogue, and debate. McLuhan noted the importance of the fixed point of view as a by-product of training the eye to read, and Walter Ong studied the paradigm-shift in education attributed to Peter Ramus, who introduced pedagogical methods we would today associated with textbooks, outlining, and the visual display of information. Philosophy has not been immune to this influence, but retains a connection to the oral-aural mode through the method of Socratic dialogue, and by way of an understanding of the history of ideas as an ongoing conversation. Arendt, in The Human Condition, explained action, the realm of words, as a social phenomenon, one based on dialogic exchanges of ideas and opinions, not a solitary matter of looking things up. And thinking, which she elevates above the scientific enterprise in The Life of the Mind, is mostly a matter of an inner dialogue, or monologue if you prefer, of hearing oneself think, of silent speech, and not of a mental form of writing out words or imaginary reading. We talk things out, to others and/or to ourselves.
Science, on the other hand, is all about visible representations, as words, numbers, illustrations, tables, graphs, charts, diagrams, etc. And it is the investigation of visible phenomena, or otherwise of phenomena that can be rendered visible through scientific instruments. Acoustic phenomena can only be dealt with scientifically by being turned into a visual measurement, either of numbers or of lines going up and down to depict sound waves. The same is true for the other senses; smell, taste, and touch can only be dealt with scientifically though visual representation. Science cannot deal with any sense other than sight on its own terms, but always requires an act of translation into visual form. Thus, Arendt notes that modern science, being so intimately bound up in the world of appearances, is often concerned with making the invisible visible:
That modern science, always hunting for manifestations of the invisible—atoms, molecules, particles, cells, genes—should have added to the world a spectacular, unprecedented quantity of new perceptible things is only seemingly paradoxical.
Arendt might well have noted the continuity between the modern activity of making the invisible visible as an act of translation, and the medieval alchemist's search for methods of achieving material transformation, the translation of one substance into another. She does note that the use of scientific instruments are a means of extending natural functions, paralleling McLuhan's characterization of media as extensions of body and biology:
In order to prove or disprove its hypotheses… and to discover what makes things work, it [modern science] began to imitate the working processes of nature. For that purpose it produced the countless and enormously complex implements with which to force the non-appearing to appear (if only as an instrument-reading in the laboratory), as that was the sole means the scientist had to persuade himself of its reality. Modern technology was born in the laboratory, but this was not because scientists wanted to produce appliances or change the world. No matter how far their theories leave common-sense experience and common-sense reasoning behind, they must finally come back to some form of it or lose all sense of realness in the object of their investigation.
Note here the close connection between reality, that is, our conception of reality, and what lends someone the aura of authenticity, as Walter Benjamin would put it, is dependent on the visual sense, on the phenomenon being translated into the world of appearances (the aura as opposed to the aural). It is no accident then that there is a close connection in biblical literature and the Hebrew language between the words for spirit and soul, and the words for invisible but audible phenomena such as wind and breath, breath in turn being the basis of speech (and this is not unique to Hebraic culture or vocabulary). It is at this point that Arendt resumes her commentary on the function of the controlled environment:
And this return is possible only via the man-made, artificial world of the laboratory, where that which does not appear of its own accord is forced to appear and to disclose itself. Technology, the "plumber's" work held in some contempt by the scientist, who sees practical applicability as a mere by-product of his own efforts, introduces scientific findings, made in "unparalleled insulation… from the demands of the laity and of everyday life," into the everyday world of appearances and renders them accessible to common-sense experience; but this is possible only because the scientists themselves are ultimately dependent on that experience.
We now reach the point in the text where the quote I began this essay with appears, as Arendt writes:
Seen from the perspective of the "real" world, the laboratory is the anticipation of a changed environment; and the cognitive processes using the human abilities of thinking and fabricating as means to their end are indeed the most refined modes of common-sense reasoning. The activity of knowing is no less related to our sense of reality and no less a world-building activity than the building of houses.
Again, for Arendt, science and common sense both are distinct in this way from the activity of pure thinking, which can provide a sorely needed critical function. But her insight as to the function of the laboratory as an environment in which the invisible is made visible is important in that this helps us to understand that the laboratory is, in fact, what McLuhan referred to as a counter-environment or anti-environment.
In our everyday environment, the environment itself tends to be invisible, if not literally so, then functionally insofar as whatever fades into the background tends to fall out of our perceptual awareness or is otherwise ignored. Anything that becomes part of our routine falls into this category, becoming environmental, and therefore subliminal. And this includes our media, technology, and symbol systems, insofar as they are part of our everyday world. We do pay attention to them when they are brand new and unfamiliar, but once their novelty wears off they become part of the background, unless they malfunction or breakdown. In the absence of such conditions, we need an anti-environment to provide a contrast through which we can recognize the things we take for granted in our world, to provide a place to stand from which we can observe our situation from the outside in, from a relatively objective stance. We are, in effect, sleepwalkers in our everyday environment, and entering into an anti-environment is a way to wake us up, to enhance awareness and consciousness of our surroundings. This occurs, in a haphazard way, when we return home after spending time experiencing another culture, as for a brief time much of what was once routinized about own culture suddenly seems strange and arbitrary to us. The effect wears off relatively quickly, however, although the after-effects of broadening our minds in this way can be significant.
The controlled environment of the laboratory helps to focus our attention on phenomena that are otherwise invisible to us, either because they are taken for granted, or because they require specialized instrumentation to be rendered visible. It is not just that such phenomena are brought into the world of appearances, however, but also that they are made into objects of concerted study, to be recorded, described, measured, experimented upon, etc.
McLuhan emphasized the role of art as an anti-environment. The art museum, for example, is a controlled environment, and the painting that we encounter there has the potential to make us see things we had never seen before, by which I mean not just objects depicted that are unfamiliar to us, but familiar objects depicted in unfamiliar ways. In this way, works of art are instruments that can help us to see the world in new and different ways, help us to see, to use our senses and perceive in new and different ways. McLuhan believed that artists served as a kind of distant early warning system, borrowing cold war terminology to refer to their ability to anticipate changes occurring in the present that most others are not aware of. He was fond of the Ezra Pound quote that the artist is the antenna of the race, and Kurt Vonnegut expressed a similar sentiment in describing the writer as a canary in a coal mine. We may further consider the art museum or gallery or library as a controlled environment, a laboratory of sorts, and note the parallel in the idea of art as the anticipation of a changed environment.
There are other anti-environments as well. Houses of worship function in this way, often because they are based on earlier eras and different cultures, and otherwise are constructed to remove us out of our everyday environment, and help us to see the world in a different light. They are in some way dedicated to making the invisible world of the spirit visible to us through the use of sacred symbols and objects, even for religions whose concept of God is one that is entirely outside of the world of appearances. Sanctuaries might therefore be considered laboratories used for moral, ethical, and sacred discovery, experimentation, and development, and places where changed environments are also anticipated, in the form of spiritual enlightenment and the pursuit of social justice. This also suggests that the scientific laboratory might be viewed, in a certain sense, as a sacred space, along the lines that Mircea Eliade discusses in The Sacred and the Profane.
The school and the classroom are also anti-environments, or at least ought to be, as Neil Postman argued in Teaching as a Conserving Activity. Students are sequestered away from the everyday environment, into a controlled situation where the world they live in can be studied and understood, and phenomena that are taken for granted can be brought into conscious awareness. It is indeed a place where the invisible can be made visible. In this sense, the school and the classroom are laboratories for learning, although the metaphor can be problematic when it used to imply that the school is only about the world of appearances, and all that is needed is to let students discover that world for themselves. Exploration is indeed essential, and discovery is an important component of learning. But the school is also a place where we may engage in the critical activity of pure thinking, of critical reasoning, of dialogue and disputation.
The classroom is more than a laboratory, or at least it must become more than a laboratory, or the educational enterprise will be incomplete. The school ought to be an anti-environment, not only in regard to the everyday world of appearances and common sense, but also to that special world dominated by STEM, by science, technology, engineering and math. We need the classroom to be an anti-environment for a world subject to a flood of entertainment and information, we need it to be a language-based anti-environment for a world increasingly overwhelmed by images and numbers. We need an anti-environment where words can take precedence, where reading and writing can be balanced by speech and conversation, where reason, thinking, and thinking about thinking can allow for critical evaluation of common sense and common science alike. Only then can schools be engaged in something more than just adjusting students to take their place in a changed and changing environment, integrating them within the technological system, as components of that system, as Jacques Ellul observed in The Technological Society. Only then can schools help students to change the environment itself, not just through scientific and technological innovation, but through the exercise of values other than the technological imperative of efficiency, to make things better, more human, more life-affirming.
The anti-environment that we so desperately need is what Hannah Arendt might well have called a laboratory of the mind.
-Lance Strate
The Courage of Judgment
"Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other's company even for thinking ("freedom of the pen")=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment."
-Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
This fragment from Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy is easy to overlook, as upon first glance, it seems to do little more than restate her reliance on Kant's concepts of the sensus communis and "enlarged thought" to define judgment. These lines are notes she has jotted down, expressing early sketches on the finished product of judgment as the idea that judgment is the mental operation of "placing [oneself] at the standpoint of others" to become an individual of "enlarged thought."
But upon closer examination, a puzzle emerges. In these lines, the sensus communis and the community that is presumed in this sense seems to encroach upon thinking—that faculty that Arendt insists occurs only in isolation. Thinking is the silent dialogue, the "two-in-one" that exists only when I am alone, for in appearing to others, "I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognizable." In these notes in the Lectures, however, Arendt seems to reject the very terms by which she herself establishes the category of thought, undermining the boundary between the thinking self and the community, which she herself establishes. ("You must be alone in order to think; you need company to enjoy a meal.")
One obvious solution to the puzzle is to say that the community sense arises from imagining others' standpoints, rather than from actual others who could constitute "real" company. But given how often Arendt describes the two-in-one of thinking as a "duality" by which I keep myself company, drawing the line between imagined others and actual others seems too crude to capture what Arendt means by company. We do not need others, imagined or otherwise, to have company, as one can—and should be—one's own company.
Another solution, and the one that has come to define Arendtian judgment, has been simply to ignore the solitude that thinking imposes onto judgment and to instead describe the operation of the latter as an imagined discourse that one might have with others. Here, judgment seems to introduce into the two-in-one of thinking other individuals such that it is not myself, but other people, who keep me company in thought.
But this characterization of judgment should make careful readers of Arendt uncomfortable, for in reducing the "thoughtfulness" of judgment to a dialogue with others in their specific circumstances, we not only veer dangerously close to empathy, but also lose conscience and responsibility as gifts that accompany thinking in its solitude. Without conscience telling us that we must live with ourselves, it becomes too easy to lose in the company and noise of others who we are and what we do. It becomes too easy to perform tasks that exposed in the solitude of thought; we might not be able to live with.
What then could Arendt mean when she says that we might need each other's company for thinking? I submit that the interpretive problems that I've so far identified emerge from associating the "general standpoint" of enlarged thought too much with the visiting of other standpoints at the expense of another prominent metaphorical figure in Arendt's Lectures—the figure of the Judge. As Arendt acknowledges, the "whole terminology of Kant's philosophy is shot through with legal metaphors: it is the Tribunal or Reason before which the occurrences of the world appear." It is as an impartial judge in a tribunal, not as an individual who engages or empathizes with the specific circumstances of others, that one achieves a "general standpoint." In one's position as a judge, one gives up not only one's own "factual existence," but also factual existence as such. The judge "lays down his verdict" not with the multiplicity of human life in mind, but rather with the impartiality that comes from giving up "the dokei moi, the it-seems-to-me, and the desire to seem to others; we have given up the doxa, which is both opinion and fame." The judge is not impartial because he has seen all the partial perspectives of the world, but because he is importantly isolated from any of these perspectives.
But despite this language that seems to move us away from what we usually see as Arendt's politics, Arendt chose to focus on Kantian judgment, shot through with all of its language of reason and the law, to develop a political understanding of judgment. She did so, I submit, because she saw that the courtroom also demands the openness and publicity that is the hallmark of the political. The impartiality of the judge lies in the simple fact that for the judge and the court, "justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done." And when it comes to judgment properly understood, the audience is the world itself with all of its multiplicity and plurality, which would overwhelm any individual's attempt even to begin imaginatively to apprehend, much less visit, the universe of perspectives it contains.
One must simply accept this plurality as a sheer given and a fact, acknowledging that such a world will be the tribunal in which one will be judged. To again borrow words that Arendt used in a different context, judgment is fundamentally about the willingness to "share the earth" with whoever happens to occupy it such that "member[s] of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth" with us as well and be willing to judge us. Judgment does not require that we attempt to know the specific circumstances of these others. In fact, it demands that we do not attempt to understand or know it, and instead to accept and reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are others and, more importantly, that it is in front of an unknown, cosmopolitan world that contains them that we will be seen and judged.
Eichmann lacked judgment because he refused to live in such a world, choosing instead to follow a regime whose policy it was to try to remake this world more familiar and friendly to it. And as difficult or impossible as the project of the Third Reich was to bring to fruition, carrying it out certainly did not require the bravery demanded in politics. The cowardice of the Nazis was evident in the trials of Nuremburg and Jerusalem, as well as in their reaction to resistance even during the war, when the "courage" of the soldiers "melt[ed] like butter in the sun" in the face of Danish resistance. The courage of politics, the courage of judgment demands that one be able to stand in front of and be willing to be judged by world full of strangers whose particular perspectives, standpoints, ideas, or circumstances we could not begin to appreciate.
-Jennie Han
Death and the Public Realm
"There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity."
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to remark upon the loss of the public realm, or what Jürgen Habermas called the public sphere. As indicated by the terms realm and sphere, along with related phrases such as public space and public sector, we are referring here to a kind of environment, or as Arendt puts it, "the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it" (p. 52). The private realm, the subject of a previous post of mine (The Deprivations of Privacy) is defined in relation (and opposition) to the public, but both are differentiated from the natural environment according to Arendt. Both are human artifacts, human inventions:
To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it: the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. (p. 52)
The table is an apt metaphor, as it has the connotation of civilized discourse, and a willingness to sit down for peaceful negotiation. Indeed, it is much more than a metaphor, as the table does create a shared space for individuals, a medium, if you will, around which they can communicate. But the table also keeps individuals separate from one another, establishing a buffer zone that allows for a sense of safety in the company of individuals who might otherwise be threatening. Sitting at a table restricts the possibilities of sudden movement, providing some assurance that the person seated across from you will not suddenly spring at you with sword or knife in hand, especially if both parties keep their hands visible on the table top. No wonder, then, that as the practice of sitting around a table for a meal emerges in the Middle Ages, it becomes the focal point for what Norbert Elias refers to as the civilizing process.
The table is a medium, an in-between, as Arendt puts it, and each medium in its own way serves as a means by which individuals connect and relate to one another, and also are separated and kept apart from one another. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan expressed the same idea in saying that all media, meaning all technologies and human innovations, are extensions of some aspect of individuals, but at the same time are amputations. As I have explained elsewhere, the medium that extends us into the world comes between us and the world, and in doing so becomes our world. Or as I like to put it, with apologies to McLuhan, the medium is the membrane.
The public realm then is a shared human environment, a media environment. As Arendt explains,
everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. (p. 50)
Paul Watzlawick has argued that our reality is constructed through our communication, rather than mere reflected or represented by our messages. And this means that our reality is shaped by our means of communication, our media. It is through publicity that we create the public realm. And for the public realm to exist, there must also be the possibility for some communication to take place privately, in a context where it cannot be seen and heard by everybody, where there are barriers to people's perception and their access to information, what Erving Goffman referred to as the back region.
The public realm is not a media environment we typically associate with tribal societies, where the distinction between public and private is, for the most part, non-existent. Rather, it is strongly tied to the city as a human environment (and a medium of communication in its own right). Lewis Mumford insightfully observed that cities are a type of container technology, indeed the container of containers, and what they contain includes great concentrations of population. As settlements evolved into the first urban centers in the ancient world, they gave rise to the first true crowds and mobs, and also to audiences made up of people who do not necessarily know one another, or have strong social ties to each other.
These new kinds of audiences required a new form of communication: public address. They required new kinds of physical environments: the agora, the forum, the marketplace. And they required new forms of education: the art of rhetoric.
The invention of writing is intimately bound up in all of these developments. Without reasonably well-developed systems of notation, human populations were not able to handle the complexity of large populations. In tribal societies, as population increases, groups split up in order to keep their affairs manageable. Writing, as a container for language, whose primary form is the spoken word, develops side by side with the city as container, and allows for the control and coordination of large populations and diverse activities. And writing, in allowing language to be viewed and reviewed, made it possible to refine the art of public address, to study rhetoric and instruct others in the techniques of oratory, as did the Sophists in ancient Greece. It is no accident that the introduction of the Greek alphabet was followed by the first forms of study, including rhetoric and grammar, and by the first forms of democracy.
Writing also has the peculiar effect of introducing the idea of the individual, of breaking people apart from their tribal, group identity. The ability to take one's thoughts, write them down, and observe them from the outside, made it possible to separate the knower from the known, as Eric Havelock put it, which also separated individuals from their traditions.
Written law, beginning with Hammurabi and Moses, took judicial matters out of the concrete realm of proverbs and parables, and reasoning by analogy, opened the door to the view that everyone is equal, as an individual, before the law. The fact that literacy also facilitated increasingly more abstract modes of thought also was of great importance, but the simple act of reading and writing alone, in isolation, had much to do with the genesis of individualism.
The origin of the public realm is closely tied to the medium of the written word, in highly significant but limited ways. Script gave us the civic public, rooted in rhetoric, but it was the printing revolution in early modern Europe that made the public intro a national, mass phenomenon. As McLuhan noted in his preface to The Gutenberg Galaxy,
Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment—it created the PUBLIC. Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale. What we have called "nations" in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people. (p. ii)
A reading public is quite different from a listening public, as readers are separated in time and space from one another, and this form of mediation also had the effect of making individualism a ruling ideology. And yes, Habermas did place a great deal of emphasis on people gathering in public places like coffee shops to discuss and debate the issues of the day, but they did so based on what they read in print media such as newspapers, pamphlets, and the like. Moreover, historian Elizabeth Eisenstein explained in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the printers' shops were the first places that people gathered for such intellectual exchanges, long before they gravitated to the coffee shops and taverns. The point is that the content of these discussions were based on typographic media, the mindset of the discussants was shaped by print literacy, and both were situated within the print media environment. Within such an environment, a population of individuals could gain common access to ideas and opinions through print media, which in turn could provide the basis for political action; in this way publics came into being.
Publics were formed by publicity, and publicity was achieved through publication. As much as books, pamphlets, catalogs, calendars, periodicals, and all manner of ephemera were the products of the printing press, so too, as McLuhan observed, was the reading public. Print technology gave us our first form of mass communication, characterized by wide and relatively rapid dissemination of multiple, identical copies of the same text, a democratizing process, as Walter Benjamin observed.
But printing also created a new sense of immortality, of the author's words living on through the ages, and of posterity as the ultimate judge. Elizabeth Eisenstein explains that the very multiplication of texts, however perishable any single copy might be, established what she referred to as the preservative powers of print far beyond anything previously known. This idea of immortality goes hand in hand with the rise of a new kind of historical consciousness, which also emerged out of print culture.
Eternity, by way of contrast, is situated outside of historical time, within what Mircea Eliade calls sacred time. It is a time that looks back towards the moment of creation or a golden age. Through ritual, we can step out of the profane time of everyday life, and in enacting the myth of eternal return enter the sacred time that intersects with all of history—in this sense always a part of it and yet at the same time apart from it.
Traditional cultures look backward to creation or the golden age as a time superior to the present, a time they strive to reclaim. Oral cultures are particularly associated with a cyclical understanding of time. The invention of writing makes possible first chronology, then historical narrative, and this opens the door to the idea of progress. The shift begins with the biblical narrative in ancient Israel, and the secular history writing of ancient Greece and Rome. But a complete reversal in orientation from looking to the past as the ideal towards anticipating the future as a continual process of getting better, perhaps culminating in utopia, is closely associated with the printing revolution and the modern world it gave rise to. This is, in turn, superseded by a present-centered orientation brought on by the electronic media, as I have discussed in On the Binding Biases of Time. The instantaneity and immediacy of electronic communication not only moves our focus from history and futurity to the present moment, but it translates the remembered past and the anticipated future into the present tense, the now of the computer program and digital simulation.
Arendt's insight that the loss of a concern with immortality is intimately bound up with the loss of the public realm implies a common denominator, specifically the electronic media environment that has superseded the typographic media environment. If literacy and print go hand in hand with citizenship, civics, and the public realm, what happens when these media are overshadowed by electronic technologies, from the telegraph and wireless to radio and television now to the internet and mobile technology?
We still use the word public of course, but we have seen a great blurring of the boundaries between public and private, the continuing erosion of privacy but also a loss of the expectation that dress, behavior, and communication ought to be different when we are in a public place, and that there are rules and obligations that go along with being a part of a public. And we have experienced a loss of our longstanding sense of individualism, replaced by an emphasis on personalization; a loss of citizenship based on equality, replaced by group identity based on grievance and all manner of neo-tribalism; a loss of traditional notions of character and personal integrity, replaced by various forms of identity construction via online profiles, avatars, and the like; the loss of separate public and private selves, replaced by affiliations with different lifestyles and media preferences.
As consumers, members of audiences, and participants in the online world, we live for the moment, and we do so with disastrous results, economically, ethically, and ecologically. Arendt suggests that, "under modern conditions, it is indeed so unlikely that anybody should earnestly aspire to an earthly immortality that we probably are justified in thinking it is nothing but vanity" (p. 56). Along the same lines, Daniel Boorstin in The Image argued that the hero, characterized by greatness, has been replaced by the celebrity, characterized by publicity, famous for appearing on the media rather than for any accomplishments of historical significance. Heroes were immortal. Celebrities become famous seemingly overnight, and then just as quickly fade from collective consciousness. Heroes, as Boorstin describes them, were known through print media; celebrities make up the content of our audiovisual and electronic media. These are the role models that people pattern their lives after.
Arendt explains that a public realm " cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life span of mortal men" (p. 55). And she goes on to explain,
It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of time. Through many ages before us—but now not any more—men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives. (p. 55)
Without this concern with a public realm that extends across history from the past into the future, what becomes of political action based on the common good, rather than private interests?
With the loss of any concern with immortality, have we witnessed not merely the erosion, but the irrevocable death of the public realm?
And perhaps most importantly of all, without the existence of a public, can there still exist, in something more than name only, a republic?
-Lance Strate
Remembrance and Gratitude
"We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend's presence, is concerned with the common world."
-Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 24
As the year comes to an end, in many English-speaking countries, including the U.S., Arendt's adopted country, friends and neighbors may gather to sing Auld Lang Syne, the song adapted from the verse of Scottish poet, Robert Burns and traditionally sung at the stroke of midnight, as one year fades into the next. An evocation of memory, and times long ago, it resonates also with an image of a long-lasting friendship. So, in tune with the season, I chose for commentary an image of friendship Arendt crafted in her essay on Lessing, the opening piece in Men in Dark Times. "The essence of friendship consisted in discourse…concerned with the common world."
Both memory and friendship are important themes in Arendt's writing. "We can no more master the past than we can undo it. But we can reconcile ourselves to it. The form for this is the lament, which arises out of all recollection." (Men in Dark Times, p. 21) Recollection, or remembrance, becomes, in Arendt's view, a pathway to reconcile ourselves to what has happened. Bearing the burden of the past and the responsibility past events places on us meant, for Arendt, facing up to reality, no matter what it might have been.
When Arendt wrote about bearing the burden of the past she had in mind the terrible weight that the most momentous events of the twentieth century—the emergence of totalitarianism and the catastrophe of the Holocaust—had put upon the shoulders of modern humanity. In the aftermath of these events, we face new difficulties: "the bitter realization that nothing has been promised to us, no Messianic Age, no classless society, no paradise after death." (Origins of Totalitarianism) Referring to this as humanity's "coming of age," she recognized that its first "disastrous result...is that modern man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence—to resent the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself. In this fundamental resentment he refuses to see rhyme or reason in the given world."
But remembrance does not so much dwell in the past as allow the possibility of action in the future through the cultivation of gratitude. The opposite of passivity, which is the unconscious reception of everything that happens, has happened or might happen, gratitude might be said to be the active acceptance of the chance I have been given to make some mark in the world within the endowment of time, however brief or long, I have to live in it. As Arendt wrote in Origins, "[S]uch gratitude expects nothing except, in the worlds of Faulkner--'one's own one anonymous chance to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man's enduring chronicle...in gratitude for the gift of [one's] time in it.' " And, in many ways, these words echo sentiments Arendt expressed in her doctoral dissertation: "[G]ratitude for life having been given at all is the spring of remembrance, for a life is cherished even in misery: 'Now you are miserable and still you do not want to die for no other reason but that you want to be.' What ultimately stills the fear of death is not hope or desire, but remembrance and gratitude." The kind of friendship Arendt calls "political" (because of its concern with the common world) is the model for those relationships that facilitate remembrance and cultivate gratitude.
There were, in fact, two types of friendship in Arendt's life--those that were most like her characterization of friendship in her portrait of Lessing in Men in Dark Times (quoted above), which she called "friendship among citizens," and those she called "intimate." Sometimes, but only rarely, the two types were interwoven in the same friend. Besides her relationship with her husband, Heinrich Blucher, Arendt's friendship with Mary McCarthy provides another glimpse into the practice of these two types of friendship with the same person.
Though an unlikely partnership, and one that got off to a rocky start, the improbable friendship between Hannah and Mary McCarthy found a way to begin and lasted nearly three decades, nourished by several streams of intellectual and emotional sustenance each offered the other. Littered throughout the McCarthy/Arendt correspondence are recommendations for books to read and write, places to visit, and ways to think about current issues. But the undertone of dialogue between them is one of growing intimacy and fervor, whether engaging topics worldly or personal.
When McCarthy read Men in Dark Times she thought the centrality of friendship as a theme in Men in Dark Times came through so strongly she told Arendt she thought the book to be "very maternal...mutterlich, if that is a word. You've made me think a lot about the Germans and how you/they are different from us. It's the only work of yours I would call 'German,' and this may have something to do with the role friendship plays in it, workmanly friendship, of apprentices starting out with their bundle on a pole and doing a piece of the road together." Hannah replied that she was not sure why McCarthy thought the book was 'German.' But she heartily embraced the idea of friendship that McCarthy had characterized: "And of course friendship in the sense of 'doing a piece of the road together'--as distinguished from intimacy. Thanks!"
A year after Heinrich Blücher's death, Arendt traveled with McCarthy and her husband, Jim West, to Greece, visiting many places Hannah had been with her Blücher, on an earlier trip. "I know it was painful for you to revisit so many of the places you had been with Heinrich," McCarthy wrote to Hannah after she'd returned to New York. "That has never happened to me, to repeat an experience, with different people, that I'd shared with someone now lost...I can only hope the good outweighed the disagreeable or discordant." Arendt replied indirectly to McCarthy's worries. "During the last months I have often thought of myself--free like a leaf in the wind...And all the time I also thought: Don't do anything against this, that is the way it is, let no 'autocratic will' interfere...Let me come back once more to the 'leaf in the wind.' It is of course only half true. For there is, on the other hand, the whole weight of the past (gravitas). And what Hölderlin once said in a beautiful line: 'Und vieles/Wie auf den Schultern eine/Last von Scheitern ist/Zu behalten--And much/ as on your shoulders/ a burden of logs/ is to bear and keep.'--In short: remembrance. Much, much love. Yours, Hannah."
"What ultimately stills the fear of death….is remembrance and gratitude."
-Kathleen B. Jones
Birthing New Leaders
Asked in July if Occupy Wall Street has been successful, Todd Gitlin—renowned social historian, former President of Students for a Democratic Society, and author most recently of Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street—responds:
"OWS has been successful because we are talking about it. You now see bumper stickers that say 99%. I was just in upstate NY and I saw a candidate running for office with a sign that says: The candidate of the 99%. It is now legitimate to talk about inequality and the domination of American by a plutocracy, by an oligarchy of the super wealthy. No it is not successful in the sense that it has not delivered concrete results."
As the election has heated up OWS has faded even further from consciousness. At a time when we are about to pick our next leader, the leaderless rhetoric of OWS is out of step.
That said, Gitlin is right that many of the pressing issues underlying the OWS movement have insinuated themselves into public discourse. It is unlikely that without OWS President Obama would be focusing so clearly on raising taxes on those he calls the wealthy (by which he means those who earn over $250,000 per year). Indeed, if there is one core issue that seems to demarcate President Obama and Governor Romney it is the question of their differing attitudes towards wealth and taxes.
Gitlin, who is speaking next week at the Hannah Arendt Center's conference "Does The President Matter?", is clear-headed about the movement's failures but remains optimistic about its future. Gitlin's optimism, his hope for a movement that many other see as dead, is heartening. There may also, surprisingly, be a grain of truth in his rosy scenario.
Gitlin understands that the future of OWS is not in what it has been, but in what it has not yet imagined. After a lull in the movement, OWS, he writes, may well birth "individual initiatives combined with community spirit, assisted by technical ingenuity and the ability to learn from experience," to shift the values that caused the crisis in the first place. If OWS is to bring about change, it will be because against its own anti-leadership rhetoric, it has and continues to produce new leaders.
"Leadership," Gitlin writes in Occupy Nation,
"is not abolished when movements don't designate spokespersons and leaders refuse the label, any more than prisons are abolished when they are designated as correctional facilities. In all social groups, leaders emerge. They emerge in the course of action when acts of leadership take place. Leaders prove themselves. Some are labeled leaders, some are not. Some accept the label, others reject it. Those who get the reputation for leadership get treated as leaders. It is as simple (and as complicated) as this: Leaders are persons whom others follow—admire, heed, recognize."
In imagining the fecundity of Occupy Wall Street's birthing of new leaders, Gitlin focuses on that aspect of OWS that was most surprising, new, and wonderful: Its determination to open up a space for being together, thinking, and talking in public. He quotes one OWS member as saying: "Something has been opened up, a kind of space nobody knew existed." There was, in the encampments, "a public place to go to, where attention could readily be paid, and individuals had faces and stories." Above all, Gitlin writes, the Occupiers were "creating a space where leaders and ideas could emerge."
In 1970, Hannah Arendt reflected on the Student Protests of the 1960s and said:
"This situation need not lead to a revolution. For one thing, it can end in counterrevolution, the establishment of dictatorships, and, for another, it can end in total anticlimax: it need not lead to anything. No one alive today knows anything about a coming revolution: 'the principle of Hope' (Ernst Bloch) certainly gives no sort of guarantee. At the moment one prerequisite for a coming revolution is lacking: a group of real revolutionaries."
The reason that a revolutionary moment will succeed or fail to turn into a real transformation is the presence or lack of real revolutionaries; revolutionaries, Arendt writes, are people who face the reality of the present and think deeply about meaningful responses and alternatives.
What Gitlin's account of Occupy Nation makes palpable is that amidst all the excesses and competing narratives, there are still some people who aspire to be real revolutionaries. Whether that small group will produce leaders of revolutionary potential is, of course, something we cannot know. But at a time of political paralysis amidst the political, economic, and ecological crises of our time, any movement that might give birth to new leaders is something to be welcomed.
So this weekend as we prepare for next week's conference "Does the President Matter?" pick up Todd Gitlin's Occupy Nation. You can also here him speak at Bard College on Friday, Sept. 21. And you can have him sign your book then.


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755 Capitol Ave Hartford, CT 06106
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59 reviews
Moving to or from Hartford, CT, 06106? Get FREE truck rental rate quotes at U-Haul Moving & Storage at Capitol Ave. U-Haul rental trucks are specifically engineered from the ground up to assist moving families, not freight. Our moving trucks have more safety features than other moving trucks in the industry including gentle ride suspension and high visibility mirrors to assist the driver. Whether you are moving a smaller apartment or a large four-bedroom house, U-Haul truck rentals in Hartford, CT will provide you with the moving truck rental you need to get from point A to point B. Find the perfect size moving truck to assist with your move, U-Haul is home of the $19.95 rental truck!
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Always enjoy coming to this location. Great service & professional!!!
Not a thing your fine
It was my first time renting a uhaul truck and it was easy than I thought.
Clearer access to trailers.
We live in New England and it is winter. I suggest you also check wiper blades before renting out trucks. My last experience was below average, I don't think my rental was checked correctly before renting.
The staff at this location was exceptional! I reside in New Britain and I come to Hartford for my truck rental needs. And I must say that their restroom is outstanding! this is something a women can really appreciate, it says a lot about the management at this location. I was treated with respect and that's a rare commodity in today's world!
The window wipers were in such bad condition we had to go buy a new one on our way in the middle of a snow storm. Those things should be checked prior to someone picking up a truck. Bad frost experience
Training a person when its busy is not a time for it. Rented trailer dolly and thats for 6 hours I was there 11:25 and 6 hours she came up with was 3. When I return it again they was so busy I told one person that I return it and he said I was all set. 3:30 a woman called wondering when i was going to bring it back and she wasnt pleasant and told her I return it back at 1:05. I had it way less than 6 hours and I get unpleasant attitude from the woman on the phone. I hate going to Capital Ave I like Main street in Hartford they respect you and not give you junk. 3 Time at Captol Ave and all three times not pleasant Gary
I had accidentally left my EZ Pass in the truck and when I called to see if they had it, they were quick to get back to me. Great service, and nice employees.
First the truck needed oil change, I was asked to do self check for gas and the mileage, when I returned I was told I have damaged the truck due to a big dent to the side. Despite insisting that no one ran into me they told me its my fault, later the told me they will take it off only to find out another enployee has told them the dent was already there.
it was ok
I have used this UHaul location several times, and I have always enjoyed the experience renting there. Thank you.
Checking in was frustrating. The lady who checked me in was hard to understand, and then handed me the keys to find the truck on my own. It was difficult because there was no direction to find the truck, and in the middle of winter searching for it was cold and tiring. However, when I returned the truck, the man who helped me was above average- he was very kind and a good communicator. It eased my frustration with the U-Haul place because he clearly told me what was happening, what I would be charged for, and then made sure I knew where to take the truck when finished.
It should not take 45 minutes to pick up a truck. When a customers orders 2 dozen blankets, you could make sure they're available at the time of pickup.
Keep up doing an excellent job, with your customer service. Thank you.
At this particular location Chelsea was particularly helpful, especially on pick up. She was by herself and still maintained a calm demeanor. My only qualms were the fact the van had a low right rear tire and the mikiage/fuel weren't actuate. Not by a lot but inaccurate none the less. Upon return I used the after hours box which was very convenient. The total bill was delivered promptly the following morning. There was a minor fuel discrepancy on the bill and I called to inquire. I spoke to a gentleman by the name of Julian. I was immediately meet with combativness when I expressed my concern. sincerely we were getting no where I asked the proper protocol to submit my concern with a corporate office to which he replied there was not one (mind you he was just about to tell me a number to call before his attitude escalated) and that no matter what I did it would come back to him. I was admittedly frustrated at this point and opted to end this call to research a remedy on my own. Moments later no other than Chelsea called me back personally to assist me. I appreciated the follow-up. Chelsea is very professional and an asset to the brand. What could have left a bad impression on me ended in my restored confidence in customer service as a rest of Chelsea's managerial attitude.
Speaking to your boss on Monday... not Happy at all
Everything went very well. Was helped by two very nice women working who made things very easy for me. Would definitely recommend this location to others, and will likely be back myself.
Second time I have dropped off a truck there. The employees and manager are great.
We were given the wrong time to return the truck - they over charged us. We had to go back & forth for weeks to get someone to help us - All that head ache, they offered us $50 reimbursement! & That was fight to get! I WILL NEVER USE UHAUL AGAIN!
I had to wait for the van since they had not cleaned off the snow. They did not have the van that was selected for me as being one to get cleaned. They had a different one.
Nice people
I found that the amount of gas indicated on the contract agreement was not accurate when I got in the vehicle and checked the gas gauge.
The vehicle was dirty inside and out. The gauge which recommended how many gallons of fuel I needed to add to get back to where it started was grossly inaccurate resulting in my donating almost 6 gallons of fuel.
The woman who helped me was very nice and helpful. It was a painless experience, which is all i look for in a truck rental service.
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To reserve by phone, call 1-800-GO-UHAUL (1-800-468-4285)

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Gnome Software
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Inkscape A Linux, Windows & OSX vector graphics editor (SVG format) featuring transparency, gradients, node editing, pattern fills, PNG export, and more. Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc.
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Magic Mike So ladies, the biggest testosterone filled movie of the year has hit the big screen! I went to the mid-night premier and while I was a little disappointed in the storyline of the movie, I defiantly wasn't disappointed in what was in the movie!! I really liked all of the actors in it, I was really surprised by Alex Pettyfer's performance, the only one's I really didn't like was Matthew McConaughey and Cody Horn. So who saw it, who loved it, who hated it? Would love to hear some feed back of it! Meanwhile here's some pictures from the movie!! http://i826.photobucket.com/albums/z...y/688d4c10.jpg http://www.mtv.com/movies/photos/m/m...ic_mike_12.jpg http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/magic-...-lionsgate.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-scjUoWiPmQ...gic-mike-0.jpg http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content...ic-Mike_05.jpg http://cdn01.cdn.justjared.com/wp-co...-stills-01.jpg |
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a new joint! needs some work, but I'll take your comments!
Real like the real mccoy like real butter like gooey chocolate that melts in your mouth, that's me, baby I'm the real thang! Ain't no memorex. No cheap imitations need to be applied cause this sister is the real thang. Ain't got no chemicals in my hair. Ain't got no games to play. Just wanna be a good person in this crazy world. I have no time to waste so I'm constantly on the grind. I'm real. Baby, the real mccoy. The real thing. I'm not play pretending to be a woman on a mission trying to do something good. I do my positive things every single day. Rain or snow, I'm doing the darn thing. I'm not a subtitute for a real woman and I don't play brothers to the left, cause I just want to. I come with the straight truth whether you wanna hear it or not. Emotional and all that I am. I keep it real. Even when I scrap my knees trying to fulfill my needs. Trying to duck and dive all the negativity that is constantly thrown in me. I don't try to imitate others. I'm not a toy. I don't want little boys. I just want to breath. Keep myself up to reach to the top. And ain't nothing gonna stop this sister with the lyrical flow. I just love to caress this life with positive rhymes. And enjoy the blessings that keep me on the grind. Love to see the sun shine. Love to have a beautiful man on my mind. I'm a natural girl with no pretenses. My body's not perfect. and neither am I but I stay real. Keep it real. Raw though blood sometimes seep from my flowery soul. I'm the real thang. Real like a shiny diamond. Real like a true sister not afraid of her own glow. Real like my sisters Jill Scott and India.Arie. Real like Rosa Parks. Real like the knife you cut your veggies with. You get the drift I'm saying that I'm totally authentic and ain't pretending to be, I just am the beautiful awesome delicious girl that loves her natural naps to the fullest. And I keep shining while God keeps me in the field of life working to tend to the needs of others as he reminds me I am a woman of integrity... (c) 2005 by Mocha Sistah
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text: Meta Battle Subway PokeBase - Pokemon Q&A Login Register All Activity Questions Unanswered Tags Users Ask a Question Rules Chat Who is the better one? 1 vote What is a better choise , Blissey or Shuckle? which-is-better asked Apr 29, 2013 by Nr755 Bad question. Don't mean to be rude in an way. But you don't explain in what terms. Shuckle can dish more damage bt blissey has more HP. We need to know,on wha basis you want to know who s better. Please log in or register to add a comment. Please log in or register to answer this question. 1 Answer 2 votes Best answer At first glance I would say Shuckle is the winner. Blissey takes one physical hit and dies. Blissey HP 255 ATTACK 10 DEFENSE 10 SP. ATK 75 SP. DEF 135 SPEED 55 TOTAL 540 So you can see I truly horrendous Defense but a decent special attack and brilliant SDef. And of cousre that wickedly crazy HP. Shuckle HP 20 ATTACK 10 DEFENSE 230 SP. ATK 10 SP. DEF 230 SPEED 5 TOTAL 505 So we see the boss of all bosses in Defensive stats. But with an HP base stat of 20, he won't be taking much in terms of heavy hitters. So overall Blissey turns out as winner. Even though she has an extremely low Defensive stat she has the HP and the Special Defense to stall pretty much any special attack you care to name. answered Apr 29, 2013 by MrKijani selected Apr 29, 2013 by Nr755 I would go Blissey 'cause movepool, not just stats. Imo Chansey w/ eviolite is the best. i would agree on blissey same here Please log in or register to add a comment. Related questions Which Pokemon is the better option? Which porygon is better? Which gender of Meowstic is better? EVs: Which situation is better? What is better sharp beak or flying plate ? Which is better; Exp. Share or Sub-in sub-out? Which is a better move, Crunch or Dark Pulse? Which is better: Ampharos or Rotom? Useful Meta Posts How to change your username How to add a user avatar Why was my post hidden? The points system Question etiquette Flags vs Downvotes Anime FAQ


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I hope this is in the right place so many appologies if its not.Does anyone know if its possible to get a game of cards for money in Portugal, prefferably near Lagos, but I can travel.Thanks in advanceBob
there is a casino in nearby portimao about 20 kilometers from lagos.my former boss used to go and spend all his money there instead of paying his bills.
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CNNSI Senior Correspondent Nick Charles and long-time CBS boxing announcer Gil Clancy will handle the blow-by-blow for TBS Superstations live quarterfinals boxing coverage for the 1998 Goodwill Games, it was announced today by Coordinating Producer Bob Lanning.
The boxing format for the Games includes 12 weight classes in a single elimination tournament. TBS coverage from the Theater at Madison Square Garden will be televised Monday and Tuesday, July 27 and 28, during the networks prime-time telecast window of 8:05 11:05 p.m. (EST).
Charles, who will handle play-by-play duties, has served as CNN Sports anchor and reporter at major sporting events since 1980. He has hosted numerous major fights for TVKO, Inc., the pay-per-view arm of Home Box Office, since 1995, including Riddick Bowe/Evander Holyfield III, Julio Caesar Chavez/Oscar De La Hoya in 1996 and Pernell Whitaker/De La Hoya in 1997. In addition, he hosts CNNSIs sports series, Page One With Nick Charles. Charles has co-hosted the 1986, 1990 and 1994 Goodwill Games and 1991 Pan American Games on TBS; as well as the 1992 Winter Olympicscable televisions first Olympicsand the 1994 Winter Olympics for TNT.
Clancy brings more than 30 years of fight game experience to TBS, having managed, trained and consulted several world champions, including former world heavyweight champion George Foreman and current WBC welterweight champion Oscar De La Hoya. He has served as boxing analyst for CBS Sports for 20 plus years and currently calls the action for the networks championship boxing series. He also serves as analyst-matchmaker for HBO and Madison Square Garden, in addition to calling pay-per-view boxing cablecasts. Clancy was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1985 and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1993.
TBS, the Goodwill Games host broadcaster since 1986, will televise 45 hours of cable exclusive prime time Goodwill Games competition coverage from 8:05-11:05 p.m. (ET), July 19-August 2, with an additional two hours of Opening Celebration coverage, Saturday, July 18, from 8:05-10:05 p.m. (ET).


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CJB 27 Also he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.
NIV 28 "Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice


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How to Access Washington Public Records
Washington State has several laws regarding Washington public records. The state has decided that it is in the interests of the community to make as many public records possible, unless they qualify for the following exemptions:
Most public information qualifies as a matter of public importance, because most government-held information has legitimate uses for those that are interested in finding out about individuals, businesses, and government agencies.
Finding Washington Public Records
Accessing these records is designed to be simple. The idea is that unless the record is easily accessible, it is not public enough to meet the standards of Washington State law. You can access these records in any of the following ways:
The Washington Public Records Act was specifically designed to help make finding public records easier. That is why finding these data has become a far easier process.
The Center for Health Statistics is the body that keeps all information concerning births in the state of Washington. The Major purpose of the Washington Birth Records system is to make sure that there is a record when needed for issues such as when applying for a US citizenship or for entrance into a school. Moreover with birth records are other vital information such as pregnancy history, prenatal care, birth weight and conditions of the child's health that are often utilized by lawmakers and healthcare providers in order to help them judge the service and tweak the system to provide a better service to the mother and child.In Washington, the information is gathered for both residents that have children in the state, as well as residents that gave birth out of the state. This information is usually collected from the parents, and is usually completed from information from hospitals, and birth centers from all forms that are filled by the parents from these different services.You can obtain your birth record the same day if you go to the Center for health Statistics. You must place your order before 4PM from Mondays through Fridays, except on state holidays and come with a $20 fee and appropriate identification documents.You can also opt to receive a certified copy of a birth certificate by mail, and in this case you will need to give a 3 to 4 weeks period. You will have to download and fill the mail request form, and also mail in copies of your identification document with a heck and money order to cover the $20 fee. You can opt for express delivery where you will have to add the fee depending on the provider.
Washington Death Records are obtainable through the Washington State Department of Health. For Washington death records from July of 1907 until two months before the present date you will need to go to the Center for Health Statistics, if you are trying to obtain records that have occurred in the last two months you will need to contact the County Health Department where the person has passed away. If you are trying to find records that predate July 1907 you're going to need to access the Washington State Archives, and their research office.
You may request records by walking into an office, by standard mail, phone, or by the internet. If you plan to order the Washington death records you are after through the internet you will need to keep in mind that it will require a major credit cards and will be going through a third party company. If you choose to request your death records through a walk in service you will be able to have a same day service as long as you turn in your application before 4:00 PM. If you plan to use the phone system you will need to have a credit card, and the address you want the certificate to be sent to, this service for an additional fee, does offer next day service.
When requesting Death records you will need to know the name of the deceased, as on record, so be sure you know if they went by a different name than they had on record. It can help if you know the date of death or as close to it as you can get, also if you know the spouse and date of the persons birth this will help, they will also need to know the city or county that the person died in.
The links listed below lead to government agencies that provide free online access to public record information.
For the MOST COMPREHENSIVE RESOURCE describing all access methods, restrictions, fees, and search procedures on over 28,000 government and private agencies visit the Public Record Research System (PRRS-Web). We provide the extensive details and in-depth data you will not find doing a Google search!
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