cheese it, the cops!

back in like 1999 when i first started my big website  (which i admit is amateurish and all messed up), i had a series of official slogans. some highlights:

people who live with crass spouses shouldn't roll crones

each thing is its history

stroy

i'll give you a billion dollars,
but you can never listen to music again

decorating with weasel skulls

you may say that i'm an asshole, but i'm not the only one.

dick cheney is white

impeach jesus

our family's passion is cheeseTM

liberare diem: release the day

i deserve what you have

welcoming you with open wounds

who you are isn't something you make. it's something you face.

specializing in personal injury

writing = typing

molotov cocktail hour

i can't remember your name, or forget my own

cupid's got a shotgun

hooray for negroes!

god loves even homosexuals

big diction

charmageddon

t, the terrestrial

stop pretending to like picasso

boys and girls, everthing is impossible if you only use your imagination!

no little dumbfuck will be left behind

every whim entails its own infinity

in time, the wind takes all flags

psychosomatic circus

kiss the booboo

antinomian homeboy

the cheese stands alone

a website devoted to sex with furniture

a website devoted to pederastic bestialism

no problem is so big that it can't be solved by violence

nothing is sexier than chastity

there's no such thing as serious fiction

no way

sad, bitter little man

official child pornography supplier to the 2002 olympic winter games

official website of the united states department of justice

dick army

you're not making good decisions

sex is wrong

chair is the absence of ass

talking smack to power

new outdoor fresh sports scent

pro-abortion, anti-choice

mindful destruction

eat your head

try to do whatever happens

tear/tear

your source for carnivorous lumber

my hat is old
my teeth are gold
i have a bird
i like to hold
dr. suess

you can sigh, or give me head,
but only god can make a bed.

anal jihad

serving all your concrete slab and abutment needs

i've heard some mindless moralizing or idiotic music criticism masquerading as science in my day, but the idea that hip hop has caused a reduction in reading among black folks is about as bad as it gets. right up there with country music causes suicide.or mathematical proof that the rolling stones are better than the beatles.

now this seems right to me. what ferguson doesn't really do is tell us where, given that we are taking an approach just the opposite of what he suggests, we are heading, though he does call the destination "argentina."

as i'm a 50-year-old man in the process of moving thousands of books and large bookcases from my former place of residence into a house that will hardly - or rather, just won't - hold them all, i can't help thinking that there's something to be said for replacing them with a little device. course i would mourn various aspects of the book, having spent my whole life in an environment built out of them. but, you know, what the hell.

one of the arguments i'm proudest of in against the state, and which has received little attention, is that the coercive power of existing states makes consent to them conceptually impossible. rad geek does an excellent job of tightening this argument and wielding it against some critics. i appreciate that!

mr. fun wrote: "I don't even want a goddamn leader."
to be honest, neither do i. but there is nothing illegitimate about leadership per se; it's leadership twinned with coercion that's the problem; thus the irony of bo: martin luther king with a nuclear arsenal (mlkwana). indeed, having infinite firepower, a prison system, etc at your disposal is incompatible or at least in great tension with actual leadership, as i argued in extreme virtue. your'e only someone's leader if you inspire them, and if there's a firing squad out there, then you can't tell the difference between inspiration and simulation. we will not really have leaders who are political leaders until their power no longer rests fundamentally on coercion.

i don't know if there are any fans of voltairine de cleyre out there, but i thought i'd draw your attention to this wonderful autobiographical essay, unaccountably omitted from the book edited by me and sharon presley, exquisite rebel.

bo is admirable in many respects. the idea that he was going around network to network yesterday saying (on the tax problems of all his people): it's my fault; i'll try to do better from now on; i screwed up; and so on: that is, it seems to me, exactly what you want in an actual leader.

my teacher richard rorty used to argue - with typical provocativeness - that philosophy was "merely" a literary genre: no more some sort of precise access to truth than the novel or lyric poetry. well, it is certainly, among other things a literary genre, or several: a way of writing books. one interesting feature is that it is basically polemical rather than narrative, which i think is important: the basic structure is premises-conclusion rather than, you know, set-up-climax-denouement. 

but one thing to think about along these lines: how good a philosopher you are isn't correlated to how good a prose stylist you are. philosophy has had some great stylists: perhaps plato (though i have some reservations), hume, kierkegaard, nietzsche, quine. but it has had some truly labored, infelicitous, or perversely hostile stylists: aristotle, aquinas, kant, hegel, rawls. philosophical quality, or at least reception, definitely does not correlate with the quality of the writing.

in fact - and this is as true now as ever - excellent writing, or a light touch, etc. are regarded with suspicion: there is not enough seriousness, not enough density of system, not enough jargon-driving precision to really do the conceptual work. in a way, the infelicity of aristotle's prose (a bit of a problem because the books seem to be largely lecture notes) is part of its scientific status, its dedication to truth rather than mere pleasure. and i hate to say it, but the obscurantism of a hegel or a wittgenstein or a heidegger is a mark of their profundity: extremely dense or tenebrous prose means genius, in a way. (heidegger has his amazing moments as a stylist, however.)

figures like kiekegaard are great masters in philosophy, but not quite perfectly profound. at any rate, if philosophy is a literary genre, it has its own myriad peculiarities. you certainly wouldn't say of a poet, for example, that she was a good poet but not a particularly good writer.

all the bo-administration tax problems show one thing clearly (as though we needed reminding): no one, not even "public servants" (um, we are their servants, y'all: more or less literally sharecroppers on their plantation) pay taxes voluntarily. maybe we're all in this together, patriots together in a social contract, forged one by one into beautiful unity by the american state, but everything the state actually does it does by taking stuff from people who are kicking and screaming, hiding and evading. this is actually the very center of the state's power and its obvious illegitimacy. let's say we stopped coercive taxation tomorrow. what would you have?

some super bowl halftime shows have really sucked. but hard not to be happy about the last few: mccartney, stones, boss. now these people are cliches by their mere existence. but they actually make real music with some definite punch and angle. i'm the least enthusiastic person about springsteen ever, but he's certainly bringin it.

hey it's great that an actual book in aesthetics, the art instinct, by an old acquaintance, editor, fellow-widener of the concept of art denis dutton is getting so much attention. i admit being skeptical of the basic idea, however: that since art is a universal human activity, it must have an evolutionary function (or several).from the fact that, let's say,the hot flash of menopause is universal, it doesn't follow that it's not just an arbitrary consequence of other adaptations, or even that the things it follows from are adaptive. but i have a feeling dutton knows stuff like that: notably smart dude.