cheese it, the cops!

i never really got this charge that obama is aloof and intellectual etc. maybe i wouldn't know, but he seems to me like he's got the common touch. there's just a bit of street, like in his whole thing tonight after biden. "if i'm not mistaken, hillary rocked the house last night." that's exactly how something like that should be phrased.

well, got to give biden his props. he went straight at it.

i'm told that tomorrow's theme at the convention is "one nation under a groove, gettin down just for the funk of it." george clinton will be keynoting, arriving on the mothership. most importantly, we got to bring the funk.

well it's hard to imagine bill doing better than he did. even kerry threw down. what a pathetic drip he was as an actual candidate, though. there was an interesting piece in the post this morning about the similarities between clinton and obama.

i wonder who worked on that speech for hillary. quite good.

hillary: "we don't need four more years of the last eight years." yes, that seems quite unlikely, or conceptually impossible. she was so grudging in june. this is quite good and, finally, graceful.

even just the relentless emphasis on class and all the locutions: "the poor," "working people," "the middle class" etc. make people a bit squeamish as their own identities, so the direct address to "the middle class" doesn't directly engage many people. and the categories are indeed problematic in a thousand ways, though perhaps for some purposes indispensable. but that one would not immediately regard one's basic identity as fixed by one's economic role or place in a hierarchy is good, and bad too, i suppose. your basic leftist, still under the influence of marxism, regards appeal to every other sort of identity - religious or nationalist, or regional, for example - as red herrings, mere rightist propaganda, a disguise for capitalist interest. but these are as real in people's experience as their class. and there's no reason why they shouldn't be.

virginia really does have an impressive set of major pols in this generation (= webb, kaine, warner).

warner's ok on the keynote. by why not jim webb? actually i think they should be a little more national security/defense/iraq war oriented. they need to keep that going. probably tomorrow night.

the dems are on and on about "average americans" whose opportunities are destroyed, don't have health care etc. they think they're talking to the huge majority of americans. but most americans don't really think of themselves this way, or want to, even when struggling. if the idea is that we're always industrious and resilient, or to whatever extent that's true, it's specifically because we regard momentary setbacks as aberrations until completely flattened. so they like more the republican rhetoric of entrepreneurs and independence.

doing woman's night at the vention, but christ, what about men? i've never felt so...neglected.

one head i've been impressed by in this convention thing is janet napolitano, gov of nm, who's onstage now. very formidable person.

shut up already with "america doesn't know who the obamas are": why are media people so insanely repetitive? they make up an issue and then see it everywhere.

and they took her off to "isn't she lovely"?! it'd be great to have little kids in the white house. actually there's a disney channel sit-com where there's a cute little (postracial!) first kid: "cory in the house." and the daughters are wonderful, really.

michelle does kick ass. but doesn't the relentless self-dramatization, the conversion of the life into this simple inspirational narrative of adversity and overcoming, feel kind of unseemly and dishonest? also really really milking the kids. plus i guess if it were me, i'd style her with a bit more negritude, a little less process in the hair, lighten up on the makeup. actually i'd like her in a swept-back afro or a head wrap, a kente-cloth halter, and armlength wooden and brass bracelets. but that's just me. lord it must be interesting styling the first lady nowadays. remember what hillary endured? but you can't say i'm the only one who thinks about it: someone's been working on michelle, hard.

a convention speech can fall dead like nothing else. like clinton in '88, or jesse jackson jr just now. when there's like no response, no rhythm, just a voice echoing through an empty hall, muttering cliches.

i'll tell you exactly what's going to suck about this convention. they think that you find a simple sentence that focus-groups well and then you just repeat it by rote: everybody, all the time. e.g. "we can't afford four more years of bush-mccain" or whatever. or "scranton, pennsylvania." you'd think one could write one's own little sentence instead.

why is msnbc just rereading obama press releases. david gregory is just reciting this claptrap: "tonight, they will peel back the layers and tell their real american story (repeat "uniquely american" etc) and show the reality at the heart of the myth" etc. disgraceful. and as though if i wanted to be introduced to the real barack obama and his real, very american story, I would turn to a convention video. update: cnn is more acceptable. course c-span

well, i will say that michelle obama, speaking tonight at the convention, would be the most kick-ass first lady ever by a ways.

biden makes sense. but i remember him at the alito confirmation hearings, with thirty mins for questioning, talking without making any sort of coherent sense for twenty of those minutes without asking a single question, one of the most embarassing, mindless acts of political preening i've ever seen. and i certainly remember this.

you know, the people who claim to detect the ever-onward progressive thrust of history will look bad in the end, i believe. the idea goes back at least to vico (it's perfectly clear in hegel, marx, american pragmatists etc), but fukuyama is about as clear a version as it gets: history = the onward march of "liberal ideals." here he argues that "democracy and capitalism have no competitors." well, there are totalitarian regimes of all sorts grooving right along all over the globe. but what kills this particular version is that the democracies themselves become ever-more totalitarian; or we might say what kills history-as-the-story-of-freedom is that the state always grows and never shrinks, even or especially in liberal democracies. so when you have the u.s. - no doubt the avatar or progressive history for these poor happy philosophers - torturing people, engaged in foreign conquest, undertaking massive total surveillance etc: is their supposed victory (itself a temporary aberration) a victory of democracy? the very conditions under which it emerges victorious constitute a destruction of the values they supposedly incarnate in the historical process. i think probably the future will always really lie with mugabe-style kleptocracy; then again, that's refreshing in its directness. history is the triumphal march of bureaucracy, at best kind of well-meaning, at worst genocidal.

couple of henry's remarks:

Crispin makes a good point that the consequences are usually worse when people violate their consciences than when they abide by them. But his conclusion, that we should ALWAYS respect their decisions to abide by their consciences, does not follow. There is no reason that we cannot decide on a case-by-case basis.

Let's keep in mind that we are discussing only the right of an employee to keep his job after refusing to perform one or more of the duties of the job. We are not discussing the right of an employee to quit his job. We should respect his right to quit for any reason; this includes the right of a soldier to refuse to fight a war that he considers immoral.

first off, resting the question on a case-by-case evaluation vitiates the entire notion of individual conscience. or: it sets up the evaluator as the arbiter of individual conscience. follow your conscience, except where we disagree. by default, it sets up the institution as the arbiter. e.g. of course we respect individual conscience, but this is the final solution we're talking about, the only hope for the future of mankind. and second, one should reduce barriers to conscientious action as much as possible: one important dimension of moral evaluation for any institution is the extent to which it can do this. requiring more or less heroic action (e.g. quitting my job, thus fucking up my family etc), forcing me to flee to canada etc: these are essentially totalitarian contexts. of course, it's a matter of degree, and if, for example, a pharmacist converted to christian science and declared she wouldn't dispense any medications, but wanted to keep her job, that wouldn't make any sense. on the other hand in a case in which we're talking about one limited function of the job, and where the person regards the matter as raising absolutely fundamental religious/moral questions, the institution should respect individual conscience. the extent to which it can is one extent to which it is relatively decent or relatively dangerous, compatible with freedom or totalitarian.

i think this is obviously right. let me put it like this. what are some of the terrible things that have happened because people refused, on grounds of conscience, to perform their institutionally-defined functions? now what are some of the  bad things that have happened because people violated their  consciences and did what the institution demanded? always opt out in such circumstances, and always respect the decisions of others to do so.

a reminder: me, surrounded by and infested with, addiction.

Addiction, I tell you, isn't an epic tale of redemption, material for your amazing memoir and appearance on Oprah. It isn't a James Dean movie, a Hemingway story, or a Jimi Hendrix/Kurt Cobain song of suffering, hyper-intense genius. It's dying by choking on your own vomit. It's common as excrement and as profound: reeking, valueless, purposeless, pointless, meaningless.
    There's no little essence of wisdom suspended in the whiskey, no sparkling geode crystals inside the rock, no signal in the smoke. There just is nothing there.

i love totalitarianism.

i might say that the abortion thing bewilders me. i think henry has to be right that there's something wrong with the question of when (human) life begins, which sounds empirical but doesn't actually seem to be. the question might be: who (or what) counts, morally, and how much? the problem for me is like this: killing a newborn baby strikes me as a monstrous crime. but it's not the moment of birth that fully accounts for this: at the moment before the baby still counts. so when does it not count? you can't fix the point but you can't not ask, exactly. of course there could be wrong things that people do with their own bodies: lying, for example, in certain circumstances. but the idea that the abortion question is *only*  about what women can do with their bodies begs the question, which is precisely whether and when we've got another human being that counts, morally. a fetus both is and is not a part of its mother's body.

my mother, both my wives (mothers of my children) etc have had abortions. they're not murderers. and i would describe myself as pro-choice. but i just want to say that the idea also gives me a touch of nausea; i am, really, morally squeamish about it. so i don't really know what questions to answer to try to develop a moral position. people's autonomy and control of their bodies and their sexuality etc is a fundamental value of mine, of course. but that's not the only value in play and all i can say is..i'm worried about this whole thing.

true obama has said he doesn't know when life begins, that that's "above his pay grade." that's a good place to start, and he can, e.g., because he's not a catholic.
but you can't just say: some people, like embezzlers, think embezzling is ok, and i'm not willing to impose my beliefs by law. no one hesitates except when there's an actual political price for doing so: hence the hypocrisy. or you can't say that unless you're an anarchist, which would then make one wonder how you can hold or aspire to hold political office.

now if you are pro-choice on the grounds that the only question is a woman's control of her own body, then i would ask you, first, to oppose all drug laws and the like, all paternalist legislation. and i would point out that that the current boilerplate - "we can all agree that we should work to reduce the number of abortions" - is incomprehensible. *why* should we, if it's just about a woman's autonomy? because in general we want to reduce elective medical procedures? so do we all agree we need to reduce the number of liposuctions or botox injections? what's the issue?

you know i hate to say it, but the pro-choice arguments of religious liberals like john kerry and barack obama are merely incoherent. i saw tim kaine on the tube the other day taking this (typical) line. 'well, you know, my religion teaches that human life is sacred and begins at conception."personally," i agree.  but i'm not willing to impose these views on women who are making hard decisions.' um. ok. so i believe it's murder, but i'm not willing to prohibit murder? or i don't operate according to my own beliefs, but according to someone else's beliefs (i.e. i believe and fail to believe it simultaneously)? or what? barack's view is that "women don't make these decisions lightly.' well, murderers often don't make their decision to kill your sorry ass lightly. does that mean murder shouldn't be against the law, or shouldn't be if it's not taken lightly? get busy trying to make the position actually consistent. like: my religion teaches that life begins at conception, but i disagree. or: my religion teaches that life is sacred, but i think life stinks. or: you know: i really don't know when life begins, despite what my religion may say, so i don't know whether it's deeply wrong to abort a fetus or not. until i'm more certain, i'm not advocating a ban. or something, anything, that makes some sort of rudimentary sense. certainly i'm not willing to swallow this  'what i believe personally has nothing to do with what i believe politically' idea or something. i believe x in my capacity as a y, and totally repudiate it in my capacity as a z. um, whatever. or: as an actual human being i believe x, but as a spectral somethingorother i disagree with myself. or: as a z i repudiate my own most deeply-held convictions. er, good luck with that, you fucking hypocrite.

see this is the same problem. we like any argument whose conclusions we support. we're happy that we've got a pro-choice pres, or whatever, so we just ignore the obvious ridiculous contradictions, all the hemming and hawing, the senseless slop. maybe that's the best we can do in the context of electoral politics. but surely people like kaine and obama (unlike kerry, perhaps) are aware of the fact that they're just spouting crap? can obama really just flatly contradict himself in the course of two sentences, or develop an inyourface incoherent position, and be completely unaware of that fact? and if he's aware of it, couldn't he do better somehow?

i realize there's a political dilemma. if i don't believe wholeheartedly everything that "my religion" teaches, then i'm sort of a kind of agnostic, and thus disqualified from the presidency. but if i do believe it, then i'm pro-life, alienating my own constituency. but maybe there's room for just a touch of honest groping or something?

well just went with son sam to see "clone wars." um, not so good. the animation had cool aspects, but the human figures looked and moved like dolls: no discernible personality. and the dialogue, as in the last few star wars movies, was just pathetic, reams of witty repartee written by droids. it gets off to a nice start along these lines: "sir! we must send all the jedis we can!" "impossible! there are only two available." maybe these folks haven't mastered english? or at any rate the various concepts connected to possibility. a billion dollars to make the movie, but we can't afford $17.49 to hire an actual writer.

how is it that apparently reasonable people, confronted with a serious moral challenge, simply and entirely lose their own moral sense? bill kristol just makes himself into an idiot, this morning.

But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil?

well, let's see: active torture programs, secret prisons, pervasive aconstitutional surveillance that choked even john ashcroft. we've engaged in the most profound violations of our own basic values in the history of our country. that is not to say, of course, that it's ok to blow people up etc.

 

the worst criticism you can make of a pundit - other than that he doesn't write well - is that he has no intellectual integrity. case in point: today's column on mccain by frank rich. because he wants obama to win, he accepts every possible criticism of mccain and rejects every criticism of obama: the test of whether he should make any given assertion is whether it pushes forward his view, not whether it's true. this is, let us say, very common, and it has the opposite of the intended effect: it discredits the columnist, and hence the assertions. if you oppose mccain, have the guts to do so only on the grounds of actual reasons. otherwise you're the merest propagandist. the most common intellectual error, found in everyone from profound philosophers to ideological hacks, is that we find arguments good basically on the grounds that we like the conclusion, not because the premises seem plausible or the argument valid. mccain on iraq, e.g.: when it became obvious that the invasion was turning into a disaster, mccain jumped ship wholesale and said we should double the troops. that was a brave, anti-party stance, and though i actually doubt mccain would have invaded iraq, he would have conducted the war far more effectively than bush and rumsfeld.