>>22784
Your phrase

>spiritual Jew

implies the opposite of

>You do know you don't have to believe in God to be Jewish

Did you even read that? You're talking about Reform Judaism. It's basically the Jewish equivalent of Unitarians or those Presby sects with lesbian ministers. Being Jewish by culture or ethnicity=/=religious Jew.

>Some don't even believe there's an afterlife:

That actually brings up the interesting question of if or why an afterlife is even necessary to spirituality, which in a sense Buddhism for instance explicitly denies (depending on the school). You're also probably confusing the really weird heretical Christian and Islamic concept of "paradise" or the afterlife just being a garden of delights for physical bodies. There is absolutely nothing more base and materialistic an idea than that.

The Judaic concept of Heaven and Hell is, afaik, best surmised as the state of closeness to or separation from God, and is a state of being, not a place. Thus every act of wickedness and selfishness further cuts you off from God and confines you to your own personal hell, kind of like the road to destruction of a junkie who starts caving to temptation after temptation until being alone, wracked by every physical psychological and emotional desire and suffering there is, cut off from humanity, persecuted and guilty of all manner of crimes. Such is more closely like the state of hell and it has little to nothing to do with creature comforts, which are explicitly of the flesh. This is something that irks me greatly of all the numerous heresies being taught when I heard of it in church even, or some Evangelical books, asking about how "big" God is, or about how old they will be in Heaven.

Like this

>According to Maimonides, the World to Come refers to a time even beyond the world of the resurrected. He believed that the resurrected will eventually die a second death, at which point the souls of the righteous will enjoy a spiritual, bodiless existence in the presence of God.

What is so ambiguous to you about this? You're firstly taking a lukewarm Reformed site from what I can gather about it, and secondly, seizing on a few things that are yes sources of great Rabbinic debate. Many Jews don't believe in an afterlife per se. Many have concluded otherwise. And some Jews simply don't believe in God at all. It isn't some hivemind, and there is no real Papal central authority in Judaism, but rather more like the most autistic debates imaginable between different Rabbis. In a certain sense, the Talmudic aspect of Judaism is more like if you had a centuries old waybackmachine archive of ernstchan.

Started reading the first pages of The most radical gesture by Sadie Plant, former member of the CCRU. It's her dissertation from 1992 and written before she even went to Warwick. Yet I expect it to reveal connections between situationist thinking/practice and that of the CCRU.

A good subsumption of postmodernism is given in there right at the start:

Of course, the situationists’ attempt to transform everyday life has been defeated, although their involvement with the upheavals of 1968 made them believe they had succeeded in helping it on its way. Neither have there been any further projects of the scale of that perpetrated by the SI and, in the present fin de millénium atmosphere of postmodernity, such all-encompassing revolutionary theories are said to be no longer possible. They bear the illegitimate arrogance of political totalitarianism, depending on unsupportable beliefs and assuming the possibility of ascertaining the way the world really is, regardless of the vicissitudes of appearance or the ambiguities of meaning. On this reading, the situationists’ attempt to construct a unified theory of capitalism merely brought them within the totality they thought they were opposing. But in spite of the radical opposition of situationist and postmodern thought, all theoretisations of postmodernity are underwritten by situationist theory and the social and cultural agitations in which it is placed. The situationist spectacle prefigures contemporary notions of hyperreality, and the world of uncertainty and superficiality described and celebrated by the postmodernists is precisely that which the situationists first subjected to passionate criticism.

This continuity is not coincidental. The philosophers most closely associated with postmodern thought, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, both emerged from the same political milieu as the situationists. Baudrillard’s work is informed by his contacts with the situationist Guy Debord, and Lyotard was involved with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the mouvement du 22 mars, probably the groups whose political ideas and activities were closest to those of the SI. Allusions to the situationists are to be found in the work of both authors, and although postmodernism turns situationist theory against itself, the traces, even the tyre-tracks of the style, vocabulary, and scope of the situationist project run across postmodernism. Poetry, pleasures, cities, and subversions are themes common to both frameworks, and in their hostility to the Left, their attacks on the complacency and complicity of established forms of radicalism, their desire to collapse distinctions between the aesthetic and the everyday, and their search for the loci of social power in relations of language, knowledge, and everyday experience, the situationists provided postmodernism with much of the ammunition for its attacks on established genres of thought and s o c i a l o rganisation. Moreover, the tactics with which postmodernism makes these attacks were already present in the situationist armoury: pastiche and deconstruction, subversive violence from within systems of social organisation or thought, playful irreverence towards respected theories, and the exposure of every hidden allusion and resonance.
Postmodernism uses all this to convey our departure from the modern period in which we experienced ourselves as autonomous subjects capable of making judgements, expressing desires, and acting upon the world. In Jean Baudrillard’s work, it suggests that modern society has become hyperreal, a world in which the spectacle defines, circumscribes, and becomes more real than reality itself. Baudrillard describes the seductive power of images which fool us into believing a reality persists beyond this hyperreality, and suggests that subjectivity is produced by a host of networks of social relations and discursive constructions so complex that it cannot be unravelled to reveal causes, directions, or meanings. There is no such thing as a social whole or a theoretical unity: the notion of society is a myth belying the essential discontinuity of social relations, and the development of theory is the totalitarian exercise of power on the world’s dynamic fragments. The individual and the world are decentred: there is no core, no soul, no God, and no economic imperative. Alienation is not a problem peculiar to capitalism, but an inevitable feature of life to which we might as well develop a positive attitude, and the search for authenticity betrays a hopeless nostalgia for a unity which never existed in the first place. We live in the midst of codes, messages, and images which produce and reproduce our lives. These may have had their origins in commodity production, but have since won their independence and usurped its role in the maintenance of social relations. All that remains is the pleasure of playing in the fragments, the disruption and resistance of the codes in which we live, the jouissance of realising that the search for meaning is endlessly deferred and has no point of arrival and, in the absence of new movements, styles, or genres, the continual reiteration of those of the past In the postmodern imagination, alienation is everywhere and is therefore nowhere; power is dispersed and so impossible to seize. We will only ever feel at home, liberated, and content if we give up looking for a world more real, a social organisation more free, and a happiness more profound than those provided for us. There is no subject of history digging capitalism’s grave, and no Elysian field on the other side of the barricade.

Considered in these terms, postmodernism is a manual for survival, and a very good one, in a capitalist world which seems immune to transformation. Building on the failure of the social revolution which has been just around every twentieth-century corner, it cultivates an attitude which enables one to cope with the continual refurbishment of buildings, opinions, cities, and fashions, and its reassurance that it is quite natural to feel lost, confused, and uncertain of the solidity of the ground beneath one’s feet is welcome news to the shaky survivor of the late twentieth century. But, full of advice about surviving in the here and now, it tells us little about the possibilities of transforming it: of metaphorically and literally leaving the twentieth century behind. And this was the intention of the situationist analysis, which was not a treatise on survival, but an indication of the possibilities of living in a world for which the imperatives of survival have long since disappeared. It was not an account of how to have as much fun as possible in this social environment— although in this respect it rivals postmodernism—but the theoretical transcription of attempts to have as much fun as possible changing it.

The Aneristic Principle is that of apparent order; the Eristic Principle is that of apparent disorder. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of pure chaos, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making.
With our concept-making apparatus called "the brain" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently.
It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T) True reality is a level deeper than is the level of concept. We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The order is in the grid. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be true. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the Aneristic Illusion. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
Disorder is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the Eristic Principle.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the Eristic Illusion. The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach. Verily! So much for all that.

>>22506
Didn't read anything about the devolution idea yet, but the problem seems to lie elsewhere. It's not about centralization of power, it's about modern globalized economy favoring concentration in a few global cities. I was reading this book that ernsts helped me pirate a few months ago (first file The New Geography of Jobs, didn't finish it), and the author is pretty pessimistic about the future. He says that in the past education dictated how much you would earn, but that we're heading to a future where education will dictate whether you can be employed at all. He shows that only a few american cities that have been investing heavily on education and attracting high education jobs are doing well, while the rest of the country suffers with increasing unemployment. He suggests some kind of welfare program to help people move to these few successful cities, which I think is a shitty idea.

When this whole globalization and services-economy thing begun, economists used Mexico and USA as examples to show that these new economic trends helped de-concentrate economic activity in the country. In the case of USA, a lot of industries moved south, which caused the disparity of GDP per capita between all states of the federation to decrease in these past decades (I remember seeing a chart in many places showing just this, but can't find it now). And in the case of Mexico, a country historically heavily centered around Mexico city, NAFTA brought a lot of industries to northern regions. But these are specific cases that can be explained away, what has been observed globally in these past decades is that concentration of economic activities and population is happening everywhere, specially concentration of high skill jobs. The most dramatic case being post-soviet Russia perhaps (second file).

I think mid sized cities such as Manchester are wealthy and big enough to finance education institutions so that they won't be left behind. It's the small former industrial cities that have nowhere to go. You might be interested in this paper
http://calls.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/psp1806.pdf

As for secessionism, I don't think it works in these cases. If it happened, in the end these regions would still be low-education low-skill-jobs regions in a globalized economy that prizes high education and high skill jobs. It wouldn't help in anything for them and maybe make things worse. Notice that even when these secessionist regions are rich in natural resources (such as Alberta in Canada these days, and Scotland when it still had a lot of oil), they threaten secesionism but it never happens.

But UK is a particular case because London is way down south, so the big-city imbalance is also a big geographic imbalance.