cheese it, the cops!

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

Battle of what, exactly?

Certainly not of ideas, unless we're focusing on really bad ideas...in which Crusader AXE ponders the nature of treason implied by Republican antics in the House over the credit limits and uses Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter to foretell the future.

 

too much news

sometimes nothing hardle seems to happen for years on end and suddenly all hell breaks loose. reminds me of 9.11 followed by anthrax followed by dc sniper. so, boston followed by ricin followed by ? 

Clarity, madness, venality and heroism...

In which Crusader AXE uses a picture of Gina the PTSD suffering IED dog to illustrate how sadness in the face of pain and madness infects us all, confusing the better natures and sparking occasional moments of communication outside the noise media...and then fades away .

Dusty Springfield and Mitt Romney

There is no possible correlation between Dusty Springfield and Mitt Romney.  However, there may be a correlation between rock and roll criticism, guitar riffs, Dusty Springfield and the fall of the nation state. Enquiring minds should know...so we are polling readers of discernment, politesse and tase as to their points of view on which decades had the best riffs and what the status, relevance and future of the nation-state looks like. I suspect Crispian St Peters Sartwell will agree with me on chronology and its irrelevance to rock and roll while being more articulate by far on his vision for the nationstate. Me, I'm not sure...but then, as with Hamlet's hawk and hacksaw, I can at least tell the difference between Dusty who turned to women for orgasms and men for love as opposed to Mitt Romney who produced his children through Mormon cloning and uses his wife to mount his horse.  

Bitchslap a reactionary with me for the sake of your health

It's sad, but due to high student loans, exploding tuition costs, costs of text books and the rising pice of Ramen,  this is what our suffering graduate students go through in order to fund their education...well, that and sell sperm and eggs and organs and stuff...

http://madartlab.com/2012/10/02/creative-dissonance-episode-4-trampolarchery/

Now, on a vaguely related topic, I invite you to visit my last post over at Veterans Today which I mentioned here and cross posted at the Defeatists and Vets...the subject of Pussy Riot really dumbfounded some folks...who were already pretty dumb. I managed to offend the anti-semites, the anti-Bolsheviks, the pro-Russian orthodox, the anti-Solzhenitsyn capitalists and the anti-Zionists. Hurrah! A pick five...

The poor suffering Russian Church...which of course was totally subservient to the Czar, did a deal with Stalin and then continued with the bureaucratic-oligarchy of demented old men and signed on with Putin as soon as he showed up on the screen. 

So read or re-read the post but have fun with the comments. What I've found in my reading of various blogs is that a lot of them don't get a lot of comments. There are a lot of smart, informed and interesting folks who write and post over at Vets. However, the comments are far less diverse than the opinions of our readers. Crispin has had the rare success of actually attracting readers who respond and do so intelligently...you folks can be trusted to dangle few particles and not begin sentences with a preposition. In fact, some of you actually show familiarity with the subjunctive. And, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, you are not ignorant, race-baiting, anti-semites and reactionary fools. 

So, should one of the comments so move you over at Vets, please, comment back. I find that my habit of responding to comments produce more comments as well as responses. Of course, these people have nothing to do when they've patched their tin-foil hats, covered the windows to prevent the CIA black helicoptes from seeing them and Fox News has reverted to Laura Ingrahm re-runs and Vegematic-Pocket Fisherman-COMBO!!! infomercials. 

Have some fun with them. 

Early Roman Kingmakers

In which Crusader AXE tips his hat to Crispin, defender of Sarah Palin as an authentic American Voice like Aimee McPhearson or Charles Whitman, and discusses the possibility that Mitt Romney is really an Israeli disinfomration operation and the riots and murders and such are really an attempt to excite sales of Salmon Rushdie's memoirs. 

but glock is psyched

smith & wesson executives must be mortified that their ar-15 jammed. 

pause before explaining

governor hickenlooper of colorado yesterday said of holmes: 'this person...almost a creature.' i understand this impulse: we want to make something and someone like this alien, inhuman, completely incomprehensible. one thing we're doing when we express this is saying i would never do something like that, which is indeed an important thing to say to oneself and to other people. i certainly do not want to connect to someone like that, but on the other hand i do want to say that the indiscriminate rage and obsessive thinking cannot be entirely incomprehensible to people who have had a range of human experiences. i think that the first step would be to try to understand how an action like that emerges from human beings like us. consciously, pointedly rendering it incomprehensible isn't fully honest and it's not helpful in trying to understand what happened.

right now the cliche explanation is 'social isolation.' again it's amazingly non-explanatory, and just another fad. even if it's true that most people who do something like that at least feel themselves to be socially isolated, it's at least as likely that they are isolated because they're weird as that they're weird because they're isolated. it gives you the vague idea that everyone would be ok if they were just relentlessly social: well, that's your own vision of what human life should be. but this is really what happens with something like aurora: without regard to the facts, we just feed it into our machine and explain it in a way that would, if taken seriously, drive our other agendas. on the morning after the massacre, i heard some 'expert' on cnn blaming "facebook, text messaging, and iphones," portrayed as elements in social isolation. that's probably even less engaged with reality than instantly blaming marilyn manson for columbine without any information about anything. you might see if you can respond by letting the event be what it is, at least for a few moments. a plausible explanation would begin by taking the specific, bristlingly complex event seriously as something you do not yet understand. one problem is that we want a sense of control over events like that and what they suggest about events in the future, so we leap instantaneously to any explanation we have already pre-cooked. 

it's worth saying that the two impulses - 'of course we cannot make sense of someone like that at all' and 'it's facebook' - are completely opposed: the event is both inexplicable and explained instantly. these are responses of people who are called upon to talk but who just do not actually know what to say. 

wordcount

this sort of research gives research a bad name. really? you're going to derive large-scale conclusions about the culture by sheer quantitative enumeration of the words used in books? look one thing this may reflect, for example, is changing conventions of narration or in general authorship. for example, use of the first-person singular has become much more frequent in academic writing. well, that is a shift in the conventions of authorship, but i doubt it reflects anything in particular about individualism: really we were trying to avoid the passive voice. maybe a higher percentage of novels are narrated in the first person now (thank god, few are narrated by 'we'); nothing directly follows about the 'individualism' of the culture. you know, some things still require thinkers with antennae; some things can only be addressed from some point of view or semi-artistically and not by counting. 

California and beautiful voiced French buskers...singing Dylan

In which Crusader AXE is fully cognizant of both the irony and the multi-layer stereotyping and really doesn't care.  

hdt on institutions

In short, as a snow-drift is formed when there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

Thoreau, "Life Without Principle"

In which a striking resemblance is noted between HD Thoreau, Herr DOKTOR Professor Sartwell, and Chuck Prophet

 However, as I dare say you - like Jean-Paul Sartre - have noticed, people can be annoying. We need distance from, as much as we need association with, one another. Thoreau tried for both: he would walk from Walden Pond to Concord, hang out with his dear friends the Emersons and the Alcotts, and then retreat to his hovel to be fairly happily alone. Walmart is no Concord. And if Greg will pardon my saying so, he is no Emerson or Alcott, though possibly he is a better golfer than either. Then again, he is also not my dear friend... 

Crispin Sartwell  is a friend of mine. We are supposedly charter members of the Defeatists as well as my being an occasional commentator here. As you most be aware if you're reading this,  Crispy is a philosophy professor for Dickinson College, a former rock and roll critic, a retired environmental terrorist and a fairly interesting guy for a lot of reasons, including his part time job as a blackjack and three card monte dealer in an alley in back of Trump's in Atlantic City. He has kids, college looming and teaches philosophy at a private college. Cut the man some slack, OK! Selling a piece to the NY Times is a big fucking deal -- he can afford new socks, and some actual hamburger now.

This is an interesting piece for a lot of reasons. Although some of the Defeatist-Malcontent collective and carp fishing gang professed confusion at what he was saying, I think he was being  cynically lyrical. Crispin appears to be going through a phase, sort of a male menopause thing...I kind of like the idea of Walmart as our Walden, since except for pithy phrases here and there, I despise Walden...The Transcendentalists were smug, self-satisfied bourgeois Babbits who inflicted themselves on us ever since. Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau are not and never were Tinker, Evers and Chance. Or, Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The insufferable rightness of the Yankee ascendency irritates me -- concepts do have dates, citing another philosophical friend of mine, Mary Hunt.

 

However, it says a lot about the leveling experience of our current distribution of wealth. The wealthy are really wealthy and the middle-working-under classes are going shopping for Guatemalian Strawberries and Pride of Gwangzhou Blu-Ray players.

I picture Walmart- Thoreau in a Lime Green UnderArmour  T-shirt with khaki shorts and Birkenstocks with anklets...with some bacon flavored tofu and Miller beer as well as the blu-ray and socks...they'd probably be white, with colored strips at the top of the ankle. He's also got a 20 pack of toilet paper, some duct tape and a couple of HelloKitty training bras...he nicked himself shaving, and uses too much Aqua Velva. He whitens his teeth, and sells real estate. He has a Blackberry. He goes by "HD" or "Davie" and takes antidepressants.

 

Alejandro is the guy with the sunglasses...in a radio studio in Seattle. Chuck, in this case, looks kinda like Thoreau...or, Crispin. 

 

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

Just to make Crispy a little nervous in the night...

One of the loose collective that binds Crispin and me -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. 

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American 


Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

 

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here's some other garage-type stuff from my youth...For example, the Knickerbochers.  Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah...Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs...

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia...and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being "brilliant" some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey... I also think this was lip synching. Here's the   Original with Beck --and, I don't hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here's one their first lead guitarist, What's his name, Dick Crampton or something...I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah...sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group -- kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice...since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame -- she's dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way. 

Syndicate of Sound -- A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge's before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs...despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them.  She's About a Mover  was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though...\ Then, of course, there's that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn't say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym...who wouldn't like that, again?...

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

And for us to pretend to be interested in Hank Williams Junior and the sign at Rick Perry's hunting camp. Been a long time, long time, long lonely, lonely time indeed...

 

by interns

"on the shoulders of the shuttle, america will continue to dream." i guess when the nasa budget started to decline, the first layoff was its writer.

Lobbing a softball into Crispin's wheelhouse

I try not to abuse my guest blogger privileges over here. It's all Crispin's fault anyway...

The idea that punk rock, skepticism as a way of thinking about everything and science have some sort of relationship is pretty intriguing. And, of course, why didn't I think of this before... Although, the YouTube request to disable embedding makes me wonder about how pure the motives can remain. 

we take the same regulatory approach as tunisia, or we try to make it more ridiculous or simply...evil. but where are the rioters? americans have no guts. capitulation is our best thing. i can just hear your basic bureaufuck, the type you find the world over:  i'd like to help. i really would. but we have to follow the rules. i have no choice. rules are rules, etc: the high school assistant principal's approach to personal responsibility: none whatsoever. it would shock me if, for example, anyone actually took direct responsibility for having made the decision: the decision to starve the homeless, the bold opposition to extraordinary generosity. well, nobody did, but probably he was inhabiting a particular human body at the time. he's hoping that god won't be able to find him in his body to punish him eternally; he is trying hard not to exist. i wonder whether jesus had a permit when he fed the hungry with loaves and fishes. ultimately, that's probably why they strung him up. but they had no choice! rules are rules. it would be a great comfort to us if we actually had no choice, so we pretend that we don't. that is what bureaucracy is for.

well, yeah.

“American society seems to believe that self-esteem is the cure all for every social ill, from bad grades to teen pregnancies to violence,” he said. “But there has been no evidence that boosting self-esteem actually helps with these problems. We may be too focused on increasing self-esteem.”

Study co-author Crocker added, “The problem isn’t with having high self-esteem; it’s how much people are driven to boost their self-esteem. When people highly value self-esteem, they may avoid doing things such as acknowledging a wrong they did.

“Admitting you were wrong may be uncomfortable for self-esteem at the moment, but ultimately it could lead to better learning, relationships, growth, and even future self-esteem.”

plus understanding human psychology as a drama of self-esteem leads to the oprah winfrey network, a reductio ad absurdum of the entire approach. actually this is a good piece. one thing that's implicit throughout, and which i certainly see in my students etc: self-esteem is conceived exclusively in terms of approval from others, which is pitiful in a way, and of course makes your self-esteem - the most important thing in your head, the precondition for any constructive activity - something with regard to which you are at the mercy of other people from moment to moment. one cocked eyebrow and these self-esteem vampires fall into an orgy of self-loathing or furiously try every strategy for uncocking your eyebrow. the main one would be forcing you to pretend you don't believe what you just said, etc.

 

i kept blogging that nobody really supported "don't ask" but that no one would kill it, speculating that they like a closet with you in it more than they might indicate or even believe. i was pleased and surprised to find out otherwise. indeed it was rather a shock and pleasure to see actual legislation moving through congress last week.

cnn is reporting a mass shooting at a...funeral home.

i like the response to wikileaks: seriously they are now invoking the apocalypse, or multiple apocalypses.

Koh wrote that publication of the documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as military initiatives and cooperation between countries to confront problems from terrorism to pandemic disease.

obviously assange and everyone else better watch their backs. i don't pretend to evaluate the charges against assange, only of course one has to be extremely suspicious of a frame. it's a small price to pay to avoid pandemics, nuclear warfare, and the deaths of countless individuals (as well as a few pairs of conjoined twins).

it's cool that there's been a burst of privacy activism with regard to tsa screenings. you would expect me to be outraged. i saw penn gilette and ron paul, among others, squawking about it on the tube yesterday. but actually? as an actual person actually getting on a plane it doesn't bother me worse than anything else. i don't care whether these people have pictures of what i look like beneath my clothes: they can knock themselves out, and the frisking just isn't going to annoy me particularly. it's funny but privacy isn't my screeching libertarian motto, i think perhaps because i was more or less raised in a culture of confession: my high school had group therapy but no actual classes, e.g., and there's been shitload of therapy and twelve-step meetings since then, though i'm not necessarily in these modes now. my writing has at least sometimes been confessional. in my heart i almost think of privacy as a problem. so my opposition is kind of half-hearted. also i must say that if you are a member of a species that can develop and deploy the crotch bomb, you deserve to have your junk squoze.

2 of 5 drivers admit to drifting off at the wheel. a deadly epidemic. but how many drivers drift off while texting? not many, i warrant. it should be required by law.

just get clear on the obvious truth: the obama administration supports don't ask, don't tell.

you know this don't ask don't tell policy (or evil idiocy), enshrining the closet in law, has an unbelievable life of its own. nobody wants it. clinton didn't want it when he instituted it. obama promised to destroy it. the military brass doesn't even seem to want it, with some exceptions. colin powell turned against it. no court has ruled that it's groovy and constitutional, several that it is not. and yet it lives forever. uphold it on a legal technicality, why don't you, as actual people suffer a particularly galling and destructive (and useless, purposeless, pointless, vicious) form of blatant discrimination. it tells you that your own identity has to be a source of shame and secrecy and threat to yourself. it turns even you against you, makes you a homophobe oppressing yourself the homosexual. the morale argument is just the worst; if it were a good argument it would counsel a prohibition on gays in the military. but the idea that people pretending not to be gay (until lights out, i guess) increases anyone's morale is just insane and utterly dfisingenuous. so if we are all opposed to it, how does it continue? hypothesis: all these people are not nearly as opposed to it as they say they are; they are comfortable with a closet that has you in it; they would actually prefer not to see you around the way being gay; they actually do, contrary to what they say, want to erase homosexuality from their own consciousness. they oppose it as they...enforce it, don't do a damn thing about it when they easily could, reinstitute it, etc. tell you what: if you are a military dude and you actually think this policy is wrong, just do not enforce it in any way in any context. if you are a judge and think it's unconstitutional and discriminatory but...not the province of the courts? then make it the fucking province of the courts. if you're a president of the united states, rescind it immediately and unilaterally right now. don't these people have any moral sense whatsoever? they're just going to lock up people's actual lives in the infinite toils of proper procedure? i don't know: take some responsibility and do it now, you gutless tubs of goo.

if the emergence of the miners on the surface was like a new birth, then the entrance of the capsule into the hole, as captured in seconds 6-12 of the vid below, was the...conception.

 

i've heard a number of people express puzzlement over why some college kid would dabble in harassing, bullying, messing with, people that he perceives as gay. i've got a simple answer for you: one does this in order to establish one's own heterosexuality. and i think you'll see this structure in a number of cases: you pick out someone who can be interpreted as a little different, in almost any dimension. then to fuck that kid up on that ground means: i am not different; i am the same; i am the norm. now one thing i would suggest: social unity or solidarity cannot be produced except by means of such procedures. this is the sort of process by which social identities are actually constructed; it's intended for an audience of similarly desperate conformists. these are the procedures by which heterosexuality is articulated as a norm. but if you wanted to produce homosexuality as the norm, you'd have to move in the same direction: self-identification through systematic, or if necessary entirely arbitrary, exclusions. each exclusion of the other is an imaginary exclusion of a portion of the self, a lopping of differences to make oneself normative, a universal. each of us is dark. together, we are coagulated midnight: think about this when you think about your utopia of social cohesion, or when you assert that we are entirely constituted by one another, that our world is "social." all too social.

well the hysteria of the moment is bullying, not that it isn't an serious issue or a devastating reality in particular children's lives. i think you'd better first off figure out what exactly you mean. i would think that bullying involves harassment, physical or verbal abuse, intimidation, etc, directed at the victim. by that definition (well, it would need refining: it involves young people, probably, etc) the tyler clementi case is not a case of bullying. it's deeply wrong. it's homophobic. it's an entirely gratuitous violation of the sort of privacy we should all expect. but secretly recording someone and posting it on the internet is not exactly bullying. it's closer to slander or extortion.

the problem with laws that tell you how to dress is that they claim a power of some persons over others - or even, everyone else over one poor chump - that no human being(s) can possibly have; any power by which such a thing is possible is an illegitimate power.