eye of the storm

re krauthammer etc:we should probably think about what justice actually is. i think of it as a kind of generalized or socialized revenge. the mechanism by which revenge gets socialized is empathy. so: someone hurts someone. in an attenuated way, other people can feel the harm, and through that, the desire or necessity of striking back at the perpetrator. in other words, justice, it seems to me, is a slightlly rationalized or regularized vengeance, made possible by empathy. surely you can't contemplate a judge who has no way of entering imaginatively into the experience of a victim of violence or something? otherwise you might just as well just let a computer or something take care of this, just mechanically categorize the case and prescribe a punishment. even then, the only reason you're doing this is because you feel something for the victim. the problem with the ricci verdict, obviously, isn't empathy, but lack of empathy.

this indeed makes things like group membership potentially relevant, because the question is: what is your empathy class? the ideal is universality, of course, and we probably all do have some tendency that way. but the more elaborate the identification, the more vivid the empathy, and to the extent that various group orderings mark or create limits on similarity, they suggest limits on the scope of empathy. anyone is going to have an easier time empathizing with someone who is very much in their own situation. this is a limited argument for representation of groups on the bench, but also for melting down barriers, or engaging in a personal discipline of entering into the experience of people in other places or groups. this requires actual worlk, not a mere declaration.

now here is an astoundingly strange column by the krauthammer. the first thing he does is work hard to cultivate our empathy for ricci, which is the right way to show that injustice has been done, which it has been. i was writing the second half of the column in my head: the decision, and some of her remarks, call into question the universality of sotomayor's empathy; if she can empathize for the most part only with members of certain (historically-oppressed) groups, this affects the quality of the justice she dispenses. instead, after massively mobilizing our empathy, the hammer just condemns it as irrelevant.

david brooks says with circumspection what i've been shouting. but there is a reason i've been shouting it, and brooks might go ahead and start drawing conclusions. if american jurisprudence really rests on fictions, and not only fictions but fantasies, might there not be a bit of a problem? and it's one thing to to say that the fiction is useful, another thing to show that it is. in fact, though its results might be useful on some occasions, the whole haze of mythological claptrap is devastating. for example, the delusion of impartiality disguises massive prejudices, and one might think that if brooks were black or poor or under arrest, he might think about this sucker a wee bit differently. people whose actual motives or decision-making procedures are opaque to themselves and disguised from the public by clouds of hooha are liable to do terrible things, and the best approach is surely to know as much as possible about how one is actually making decisions, which is the only way actually to try to filter for irrational prejudice.

and let me just add a statement of my religious creed. there may be useful illusions. there may be necessary illusions. i intend to pound the living crap out of them.

a constant approach of popular science these days is to trace all sorts of behaviors, attitudes, decisions, to neurology. now the first thing i would say is that every event or expression of an attitude is connected to a neural event: that is trivial if you're any kind of materialist. but this stuff is by and large amazing crap. try this from the neurologist nicholas kristof, for instance. now the attitudinal distinctions - conservatives don't like dirty faucets, say - are sort of interesting if true. but lighting up cortexes is not interesting, and it also deploys about fifty fallacies. of course it bears not at all on the truth or the effects of beliefs or policies. it vaguely suggests that people are born liberals or conservatives, which just takes a taxonomy of political positions that has existed for two centuries at the outside and tries to make it into some biological condition of mammalian life.

everything is neuroscience these days: the neuroscience of marketing or investing or homo/hetero or...whatever. the problem is that these approaches work backwards from social categories to neurology and enshrine momentary social formations, which are essentially created by power, as inescapable bio-destinies. the entire scientificness of the thing is usually presented in a few phrases - 'medial prefrontal cortex,' say - which function essentially as authorities: they're supposed to show you that you're too ignorant to assess what's being said, to put the actual ethical/political/economic conclusions beyond the realm of disagreement, to flummox you into nodding vaguely along. if you don't, you must be a dolt. they function like phrases from the koran or something. they actually do no work except to assert a kind of prestige.

all the work is done in the initial taxonomy. if people were actually divided into two fundamental kinds - liberal and conservative, say, or boring and interesting - since lucy, then of course there would have to be some underlying biological distinction, which we might work backwards towards. but really we just enshrine whatever little political distinctions we find useful - for example to stigmatize sarah palin or something - and then say: medial prefrontal cortex.

i'd say it's getting to the point at which a military attack on north korea is less impossible to contemplate than no attack. they're practically insisting on it.

TOKYO, May 27 -- North Korea vowed Wednesday to attack South Korea if its ships are searched as part a U.S.-led effort to interdict vessels carrying missiles or weapons of mass destruction. It also declared that the truce that ended the Korean War was no longer valid.

"Those who provoke [North Korea] once will not be able to escape its unimaginable and merciless punishment," the North's official news agency said.

now surely the cia and defense intelligence have been working on nk somehow? is there any prospect of disabling all the nukes in a strike?
is it really as completely blank as it appears to be? who, internally, objects to the regime, and how? even the chinese must be going: ok maybe it's time.

this is really also a case where you could do some actual liberating from a nightmare dictatorship, though the complete mystery of what happens next would give anyone pause.

from washpost, a selection of responses to the sotomayor nomination:

"Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law evenhandedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences." _ Senate Republican leader  Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

"We must determine if Ms. Sotomayor understands that the proper role of a judge is to act as a neutral umpire of the law, calling balls and strikes fairly without regard to one's own personal preferences or political views." _  Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the Judiciary Committee's top Republican.

"She must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings and preferences." _  Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, member of the Judiciary Committee.

"The Judiciary Committee should take time to ensure that the nominee will be true to the Constitution and apply the law, not personal politics, feelings or preferences." _  Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, member of the Judiciary Committee.

well, obviously, these boys are reading the same email...from whom? what i guess i can't understand is why these slave babies have no self-respect or manifest no independent thought or initiative or powers of composition. like, i'm a united states senator, a prominent lawyer etc. do i have no idea what to say? wouldn't it be a matter of pride that when you quote me, i'm speaking something like my own words? why would i be trying to make it obvious that i cannot write a press release, or utter an actual sentence without someone's hand up my ass operating my mouth?

anyone besides me cringe when a newspaper comes up with a headline like sotomayor, trailblazer and dreamer ? it's mythology and advocacy. but is it journalism?

from the ca gay marriage ruling.

The 136-page majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, noted that it's not up to the court to determine whether the ban, known as Proposition 8, "is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals believe it should be a part of the California constitution," but rather "is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."

i just want to point out that this discourse of transcending one's own opinions and values is completely routine and central to the law. but it is just obviously absurd. who is, actually, reading the proposition or the law or the constitution or the precedents? who is responsible for the words coming out of your mouth and their actual effects? you can't just rest your whole system of government on a contradiction - can you? - my opinions aren't my opinions, my interpretations aren't my interpretations, my actions aren't my actions. or is the claim really to have literally transcended all human limitations, to have become an abstract object like the number 7 or a little god or something?

you have got to do something like this: i'm trying from an actual human perspective to read the law as plausibly as i can, speak the truth, and do justice. that has to be enough, since it's all any actual human being can claim without lurching into insanity. if that's not enough to give the law and the people practicing it enough prestige to command allegiance etc, then it has to do without.

every time during the sotomayor process some senator says something that is just obviously absurd, impossible, and contradictory along these lines, i assign you to sit on your couch and shake your head.

"before starting enbrel, your doctor should check you for tuberculosis," no doubt because, in such circumstances, he might contract it himself. on the other hand, probably it would be wiser for your doctor, before starting enbrel, to have someone else check you for tb.

worth remembering the greatest supreme court nomination ever made: georgie throwing down harriet miers, using no standard but the imperative to choose the most qualified candidate.

one thing we'd have to say about ruth padel: her work is radical not only in the realm of poetry, but in the genre of email, where she pursues a sort of automatic surrealism.

"ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily) Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well turnup...

"THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6 pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth."

as well, she is one of many innovators in the genre of postpostmodernist apology, where you're terribly sorry for being willfully misunderstood:

"I apologise for anything I have done that can be misconstrued as having been against him."

the sotomayor confirmation hearings will be a little less entertaining because joe biden won't be sitting on the judiciary committee, with his subjects without verbs, verbs without subjects, stories without shape or context, seven-minute questions without sense or structure. nevertheless, i'm sure a lot of senators will  be showing their asses, so we'll have to tune in.

texting

is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

i'd say whatever the younguns are doin - you know, readin comics, watchin tv, playin video games, listenin to...rock 'n roll, hip hop, death metal - becomes a fad as well among healthcare professionals, who are no less flighty and crisis-oriented, no more circumspect or systematic, than the average thirteen-year-old.

nothing quite matches the savage politics of poetry professors. she lasted, like, a week. but now they've had a woman, and can go back to another three centuries of men. it was a bad sign early on when padel hired karl rove as a consultant. i also dig her statement:

I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek.

words of the scandal-decimated politician.

and so the era of anti-latte terrorism begins.

oprah initially defended frey by saying that, though a million little pieces wasn't factually true, it was emotionally true. well, no, it was factually and emotionally false. but if you want to see how one would write something that is at once fiction and sincere autobiography, you could do a lot worse than sitting with rehab, taking notes.

the international country music conference was cool. where else are you going to get a complete and precise taxonomy of yodels? or hear the truth about that amazing brother duo, kierkegaard and bill monroe? i took emma to the grand old opry, where whispering bill anderson did a version of "god bless america again" which invcluded a trademark recitation, this one on 9.11. it got a standing ovation, as flags billowed on the jumbotron. em's reaction? (she studies performance art at nyu):
i don't know how to incorporate this into my reality." gonna have to, though.

wisdom from "the daisy".

for millions of females “you’re too fat” are the three most terrifying words in the English language.

well, i think we could come up with a few more horrifying than that, even for oprah and wintour and daisy. it would be a pleasure to try out some material. perhaps eminem can help with the writing and the delivery. if those are your most horrifying words, consider yourself extremely fortunate. and eat me, idjit.

well sure, eden, we can say how misogynist em is. and how homophobic. and how, generally, ill and wrong. on the other hand, you can't just read this as some kind political speech or something: elements of fiction and autobiography, horror and comedy, freud and circus, dali and dre.

my mom loved valium and lots of drugs
that's why i am like i am
cause i'm like her

my mom loved valium and lots of drugs
that's why i'm on what i'm on
cause i'm my mom

(go find you a white crayon
and color a fucking zebra)

ok how many gangsta rappers are going to come up with "i'm my mom"? it's an ultra-compacted literary form, in which the status of any particular line or assertion is completely up fdor grabs: is it truth or fiction? does he loathe or love himself for saying that? the best analogues might be...henry miller, or like i say, edgar allan poe.
on the other hand, the fantasy life that is revealed is straight up sick in its simultaneously violent and libidinous content directed at women and gay men. it might be truer than memoir, in a way, and so just straight-up scary.
and i'll say this again: the real horrors of addiction have never been more carefully expressed, more intensely translated into art. rehab makes a million little pieces or whatever your favorite jive may be look false not only because it is, actually, false, but because it's insincere in its neat shaped narrative. with em, the fiction intensifies rather than undercuts the truth at the heart.

i'll do some kind of review of relapse after i've listened through a couple of times (and actually i might not be blogging until monday or tuesday), but i'll respond briefly to j. freedom du lac, the unbelievably named washpost pop critic. he's certainly right to praise the dre production, which is, of course, loping, melodic, absorbing. he's right also to be impressed - as how could one not be? - by the verbal gymnastics. i think it's also right to have some misgivings about the persona, which remains pretty much unchanged. i'd like to see eminem mature...and i fear his maturation. he could apply the killer skills to things other than his maniacal internal dialogue that's somewhere between entertainment tonight and nightmare on elm street. of course, sometimes maturity in a pop act is just deadly, like when the delightful romonettes the donnas went from "get out of my room" and "40 boys in 40 nights" to the deadly melancholic love poetry of the american 23-year-old female. or when the beatles went from crack r&b unit to melancholic oompah band.

but eminem is not the donnas. he writes amazingly well, and could express almost anything. i'd like to see him try some things, though doing what he does with dre at the mantrols is plenty.

and my first impression is that the horror of addiction is at once explored devastatingly and also turned around into sick fatalist humor in these songs, which are like fever screams, deathbound hallucinations, like edgar allan poe, gangsta rapper and comedian. and so i'm gonna listen again and think about where this material really is. there's no doubt it still in a sick way romanticizes pills and booze etc. but there's no doubt it goes beyond that first move, and em has always oscillated between sensationalism and psychic suffering. it's getting on toward twenty years since the chronic and i think that dre probably feels a little differently about dope, even if he still smokes all the time. but these people have a professional interest in recommending drug abuse. it must, in some ways, be a terrible place to be.