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Paul Rabinow dies at age 76, The Daily Californian, April 11, 2021

Paul Rabinow, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology and world-renowned anthropologist, died April 6 at the age of 76 in his Berkeley home.

Rabinow spent about 41 years at UC Berkeley between 1978 to 2019, serving as the director of anthropology for the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and as the former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.
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Rabinow is most well-known for his commentary on the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault, with whom he worked while Foucault was in Berkeley in the early 1980s.

12-4-16

To Paul Rabinow, Concerning the USA Presidential race,  I wanted to pass on my  personal interaction with the Clintons and then discuss the election of Trump (which has been compared to the BREXIT VOTE in the UK) and a movie recommendation, From Everette Hatcher of Little Rock on 12-4-16

I am currently the JUSTICE OF THE PEACE for District 2 of Saline County which is the 6th largest county in Arkansas and I just finished going through my 3rd election. I won my first election by 4 1/2% and my last two elections by double digit margins in probably the most Democratic leaning district in the whole county even though I am a Republican.

At the age of 21 in January of 1983 I moved from Memphis to Little Rock and I had never seen a politician in person. I suppose it was because Memphis is a large city and I lived in a suburb outside it. However, the first week I was in Little Rock I got to meet Governor Bill Clinton and I ran into both of  our U.S. Senators and our Congressman in downtown Little Rock when I was dropping off a deposit at Worthen Bank and attending a meeting in a small meeting room at the State House Convention Center. In fact, I ran into them again and again often at restaurants, movie theaters and ballgames around town. After a while I didn’t really take notice anymore since it was so common. My uncle explained to me that Little Rock was a capitol city and since we worked downtown we could often run into politicians.

Our plant location was on 300 Industrial Road which is right next to the Arkansas River within a few hundred feet from where the Clinton Library stands today. In 1985 we moved to another part of Little Rock.

A quick couple of stories about my personal interaction with Bill Clinton. One of the first times I spoke with him was at the 1983 ARKANSAS INDEPENDENT GROCERY WHOLESALER MEETING and he came into our meeting tardy because  he said there was a big emergency at the Capitol and that was Hillary wanted a private meeting with him. The amazing thing that day was that I noticed that he personally greeted the dozen or so elderly men that owned these grocery wholesale businesses and called them all by their first names. Since then the Krogers and large supermarkets of the world have completely run these wholesalers out of business in Arkansas.

A year later I was at a relative’s wedding and I was seated on the aisle and when the father of the bride began to escort her down the aisle I noticed that Bill Clinton was in the seat directly behind me. Being a politician he couldn’t resist shaking the father’s hand and Hillary promptly elbowed Bill and his face turned red.  I am sure she has had to elbow him a few times since 1984!!!

I am an evangelical conservative so even though I was very upset that Donald Trump was the Republican Nominee, I did hold my noise and vote for him over Hillary Clinton. However, I DIDN’T HAVE A GOOD EXPLANATION WHY CLINTON LOST UNTIL I READ THESE WORDS A FEW DAYS AGO in the DAILY MAIL:

In the waning days of the presidential campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a knock-down, drag-out fight about her effort to blame FBI Director James Comey for her slump in the polls and looming danger of defeat….[Bill Clinton] got so angry that he threw his phone off the roof of his penthouse apartment and toward the Arkansas River.’

Bill has a luxurious penthouse apartment with an outdoor garden at the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock.

During the campaign, Bill Clinton felt that he was ignored by Hillary’s top advisers when he urged them to make the economy the centerpiece of her campaign. 

He repeatedly urged them to connect with the people who had been left behind by the revolutions in technology and globalization.

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Are you buying Bill’s explanation?

I just saw the movie GREATER about the life of Brandon Burlsworth and there was a secularist farmer played by Nick Searcy that reminded me of you and when the DVD is released on 12-20-16 I would like to send you a free one.

Yesterday while in my  attic  I ran across a cassette tape labeled “April  1999” and it has the recording of my 12 year  old son calling  into a local radio show where he got to talk to Brandon Burlsworth who had just been drafted by the Indianapolis  Colts to play  in the NFL. Just a few days later Burlsworth was on his way to his Harrison, Ark., home from Fayetteville, where he received an SEC West title ring along with the rest of the 1998 Razorbacks on April 28, 1999. Every Wednesday, he returned to take his mom, Barbara, to church. The drive was supposed to take about 90 minutes.

He never made it.

The 22-year-old Burlsworth, who had been drafted by the Colts 11 days earlier after earning first-team All-America honors as a fifth-year senior, was involved in a head-on crash with a tractor-trailer about 15 miles outside Harrison and was killed. He was in the prime of his life and football career, and then he was gone.

One movie reviewer noted: 

There’s a great deal of Christian content in this film. It can perhaps best be summarized by saying that Brandon’s unwavering faith deeply informs everything he does, while his brother’s faltering faith after Brandon’s death is something he grapples with mightily.

Brandon has deep trust in God. At every step along his journey, when naysayers rise up to tell him that he’s being unrealistic, Brandon keeps moving forward in faith. Marty is more pragmatic, asking his brother things like, “You think God would give you D I [Division 1] dreams and a D III (Division III) body?” To Marty, the answer to that rhetorical, spiritual question is self-evident. Brandon, however, soldiers on, refusing to give up. “Have faith, Marty,” he says elsewhere. “This is my road.”

For his part, Marty struggles to cling to his faith in the wake of his brother’s death. That internal battle is depicted in a dramatic way through ongoing dialogue with a doubter named the Farmer. Marty’s trying to summon the courage to go into Brandon’s memorial service at Harrison High School. And the Farmer (played by Nick Searcy), depicted very nearly as a Satan-like tempter, repeatedly delivers soliloquies about the utter foolishness of faith. In one scene, the man (who’s whittling a portrait of Marty into a block of wood, almost as if he’s creating a voodoo doll) says, “Brandon did have faith. He believed if he worked hard and did everything he was supposed to do, God would make everything turn out for the best. Did everything turn out for the best, Marty?”

Elsewhere, the Farmer taunts, “There is no loving God, Marty. That’s ridiculous. There’s just a howling void. And a real man, an honest man, doesn’t get down on his knees to pray to it for his mercy. He stands up to it, and he looks it right in his face and he howls right back.”

But Marty also talks with his godly mother about how to process the randomness of Brandon’s death. She tells him that it’s only random when looked at from an earthly perspective. “If you assume this is all there is, you’d have a point, Marty. But that’s not true. This life is a drop in the ocean. One tick of eternity’s clock, and we’ll all be together again, Marty. And every trouble we had here will recede away like a dream.”

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It has been a pleasure to send you these letters in the past and I hope you take me up on this offer to see this inspirational true story about Brandon Burlsworth who was truly one of the greatest rags to richest stories in sports history. Also I would encourage you to google FRANCIS SCHAEFFER THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, cell ph 501-920-5733, P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, everettehatcher@gmail.com

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Brandon below with his brother Marty and his two nephews

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Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason with the Clintons in the White House

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Bill was on the phone at his  luxurious penthouse apartment  he keeps at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

His comments can be found on the 3rd video and the 118th clip in this series. Below the videos you will find his words.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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Quote from Paul Rabinow:

In other words I am not a believer or a theist, but I am not also a militant atheist. I think that debate leads into a range of different and diverse existential corners that I don’t want to go to and never felt the need to go to.

More lengthy quote from Paul Rabinow:

on religious belief – don’t believe in God; there are passages in Levi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’ on Buddhism which are relatively close to what I felt much more strongly as a younger person; this question is interesting because in recent years I have been working with a student who has just finished a degree in theology and is now doing a degree in anthropology; he is a practising Christian and we get along remarkably well, discussing ethics etc., but it is clear that the larger theist dimensions are radically disparate; this is an interesting anthropological dimension where ethically this seems to not cause any problem; I frequently related to people with strong but quiet religious beliefs; Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit and I had a number of other Jesuit friends; I think it is the fact that they care about the world and other people, are thoughtful, committed and concerned, and I don’t have to share other parts of their belief system while finding them worthy of friendship; I am uninterested in the Dawkins’ argument of science disproving religion, I am not a positivist, there is a big difference between this form of nineteenth century militant positivism and a Weberian position in which science does not answer ultimate questions; when science becomes a world view, a cosmology, it seems to part company with its deep critical functions; I may not be a believer or theist, but I am not a militant atheist; I also part company with people like Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor who feel that unless we have sure foundations for our ethical life that we flounder, which seems wrong; no one has ever proved the ultimate foundations of anything to everyone’s satisfaction yet ethical life and decent human relations seem to me not all that common, but not impossible either; I am not looking for ultimate stopping points, and there is some anthropological dimension to that through respect for the complexity of different commitments; cosmopolitan enlightenment sense that we have to live with difference which can be a good thing, and that intolerance –even in the name of tolerance — is not so admirable.

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Related posts:

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