cheese it, the cops!

it's always excellent when a fundamentally authoritarian regime vows to investigate itself. but then it's excellent when any regime vows to investigate itself.

well, now, on the other hand: apparently the opposition put half a million people on the streets of tehran today.

see i think this might basically be right. roughly the only voices we get out of iran are western-educated exiles. one huge problem: there is no coverage from inside except from tehran. iran is a big country. what is actually going on? we get an extremely thin, slanted slice.

just to make a general statement: i'm not going to forgive ahmadinejad's idiotic holocaust denial, expressed in the most vivid and repetitive way. or a variety of the other slop that comes out of his mouth. on the other hand i think we underappreciate the real popular power of fundamentalist islam in the islamic world generally (we also misread the taliban the same way). people are sincerely and devoutly religious: that constituency alone can bring out 25% of the vote here, much less there. there is a class conflict between what we would call a working-class population, which is also traditional and religious, and cosmopolitan, uptown, secularized, westernized privileged people. the religious politicians give off an air of poverty and incorruptibility, a quality profoundly to be desired in leaders anywhere. they have a populist, palinesque appeal, including the rattletrap: a common touch.

and the religious parties speak across tribal lines, and the artificially-drawn nation-state borders of the region. they speak to an identity that people actually do share from morocco to indonesia: they speak for the caliphate that will be. we want to believe that conflicts really have to be about nations or economics, but that's not true: the religious dimension is perfectly real. our own leaders and media don't really want to recognize that the religious motivation/identity is central.

these folks are going to have a somewhat different read on obama than we might expect. they will be provisionally more sympathetic to him than to bush. but they will quickly come to associate him with the elites in their own countries. karzai is a good example of this, and that election will also be interesting. that is, obama is a profoundly "neo-liberal" figure: technocratic, all about education, universal values and the expansion of the american economy on a worldwide basis. so there is still likely to be a pointed place for religious politics throughout the muslim world.

well, on cnn, christiane amanpour reporting, it was hard not to notice that there really were tens of thousands of people out on the streets for ahmadinejad (ma), while the crowds of protestors looked relatively modest. this could be due to a variety of factors; it's a lot easier to gather 20,000 people if the cops will cooperate. but i wouldn't simply assume the thing was fixed. people who are communicating with us are non-representative. obviously, it smells fishy. but i think we do wrong to think that ma doesn't have serious popular support.

been offblog, due to computer probs and travel (to the resort town of deptford, nj), so let me make a couple of notes.

i'd like to hear any kind of reasonable account of whether or not the iranian election was, in fact, fraudulent. the ayatollahs must be regretting their approach: having an election and also trying to control the response. probably even the patina of democracy is appearing to them excessive now. it'd be interesting to see a rebellion, but i also think it's unlikely to amount to a real threat to the regime.

one problem with blaming rush and o'reilly for the tiller and the holocaust museum murders is that it provides, obviously, an immediate and plausible argument for repressing speech. and if you think the american left wouldn't be enthusiastic about that, you don't know the american left. it is exactly as anti-enthusiastic about freedom as is the american right.

i autonomically defend sarah palin. but i can't help thinking that if letterman had said what he said about her daughter about my daughter, i'd be kind of pissed off.

if the republican party was really trying to find a leader, connect with "a younger demographic," "reinvent itself," and so on, it would be coming to ron paul, hat in hand. but let's just say that they can't do that and still represent enthusiasm for the security state and the imposition of religious values by police power. in fact, because they also need the libertarian moment right now as an answer to obama, they can't actually develop any consistent principles at all.

the lovely contessa brewer on msnbc: "have you seen a rise in these white suprematist and anti-government groups?' geez. can't be against the state without supporting murder at the holocaust museum, i suppose?

some times the onion is just hilarious:

Rockburne is preparing a 41-foot-tall mural of the night sky -- as it looked at the time of Colin Powell's birth -- to be mounted at the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica, where Powell's family is from. Her "Homage to Colin Powell" was commissioned by the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to installing works by American artists in U.S. embassies around the world.

oops wait. that's the washington post.

susan jacoby in the washpost:

One of the ways in which the anti-choice forces have succeeded is by labeling themselves “pro-life”—thereby promoting the idea that those who support keeping abortion legal and available are “anti-life.”   I think that all pro-choice politicians should stop referring to anti-abortion crusaders as “pro-life.” By accepting the language of the opposition, pro-choice Americans have already given a victory to those who harass women and doctors for exercising their right.

geez, we're not still on that, are we? you'd think that what was really at stake was euphemisms. this is a hangover from 1983, when people thought that the world was created by naming, back when we were all animists or were impressed profoundly with our supernatural incantatorial powers. how many policy disagreements have the republicans won by referring to their oponents as the "democrat" party?

anyway, for what it's worth, "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are equally empty. i usually go for pro-abortion-rights and anti, which at least makes some reference to the actual subject-matter. but we've had decades of "pro-life is misleading." or: "helpless little babies get no choice" or whatever. the idea that words are omnipotent forces in the material world, that "framing" a debate decides it etc: this artifact of primitive superstition must be expunged. have either of these sides actually gotten anywhere by insisting on their particular empty phonemes?

see the problem is that when your verbiage is obviously merely strategic, when the only question aboutr your choice of words is how it will affect your listeners/public opinion, then you have explicitly foresworn the relation of your words to truth. and then, ironically, you have not only sucked out the truth value, and repudiated your own possible status as a teller of truth, you have made your words completely unpersuasive. words can't just mean their effects on the people you're communicating with, and when they do, then they've just floated free of reality into some kind of pure syntax: they are a kind of pure form without sense or origin. we might all nod along, but there's nothing we're nodding along with.  we might feel solidarity with those who proiduce similar sounds in a similar order, but it's no more than our solidarity with fellow shoppers at the gap or something: we recognize one another as people who wear similar shirts or emit similar sounds.

unusual, but is it cruel? actually, i think we could replace the prison system with, you know, creative-writing mfa programs.

one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.

then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.

i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.

identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.

i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.

but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.

there's a lot to love about the discourse around judges. it proceeds according to endlessly-repeated mechanical catchphrases, which demonstrate, if nothing else, the compulsive rigidity with which law students are taught to replace actual ratiocination. of course, by the time they get to law school, they have already eventuated from the american system of education, for which standardization of phraseology is the ultimate truth. one of these i like is 'outside the mainstream', which is big fun. i suppose that, though a judge should decide cases without regard to their personal feelings (rather, they must employ the feelings of bowling balls, boulders, or bonobos), preferences, or, in general, their personal minds, they must be held to the standard of whatever the momentary polling might problematically sort of indicate.

one thing that's interesting about obama's selection of sotomayor is that while bo presents himself as coming after the politics of identity, sotomayor defines herself squarely within them. i don't think we're done with identity, and no child of sixties politics could simply abandon the stance. on the other hand, the whole thing does have the flavor of something...past, superseded by other ways of conceptualizing the terrain. even within the academic discourse in which it is most at home, identity politics sort of deconstructed around the complexity and plurality and ambiguity and contradiction inherent in identities. we might say that liberation movements need the moment of essentialism, wherein we codify an identity, include and exclude, define and revalue. but then there is the next moment, where you can do more than fend off and unify, or at which you can regain complexity or even individuality.

amazingly, i think this has to do in part with the ages of obama and sotomayor. they're what, eight years apart? but those are different generations of the american left: sotomayor is late-blooming sixties but obama's cohort deals with, for one thing, the failures of the previous generation, at the same time availing itself of its insights and accomplishments.

my life as a moronic caucasian man has been a continuous disaster. i've made good decisions less often than not, as is characteristic of my kind. but i have reached a rendezvous with destiny. i am resolved to become a wise latina woman with rich experiences, if that's not redundant, or even if it is. this will, i know, take discipline, surgery, software, self-delusion, starches. but then i'll be able to reach better decisions more often than not, i would hope. if i had any hope.

new frontiers in statecraft and the rule of law:

China has already positioned itself in other ways, including enacting a law in 2007 that says all reincarnations...must be approved by the government.

the extreme psychedelic stylings of kenny rogers and the first edition:



the writer was texas/nashville great mickey newbury.



and here is what my teen years looked like. seriously. when they didn't look like a mickey-newbury desert landscape of despair or whatever.


i think the line "what condition my condition is in" comes from deep in the blues lit about t.b. i gots the consumption, mama. but anyone got a reference to something older than kenny/mickey?

as i don't blog, for example, about the "long-awaited address to the muslim world" (instead laboring on spyder's rebellion) i thought we might revisit mathematics is a pagan cult and the subsequent contest.

and the winning responses
and a bunch of the others

jane says 7 is 7 plus two minus two.

another terrible, tragic event from my immediate geographical area.

i've accused the pro-abortion rights side of being disingenuous when the make abortion merely a matter of a woman's control of her own body; they take it more seriously than that would indicate, as when obama and everyone else says that we can all agree that we should reduce the number of abortions.

one might say that the anti-abortion rights folks are caught up in a similar contradiction, as pointed up by the wichita abortion doc's murder. their rhetoric is murder, taking innocent human life just for your own convenience etc. but when someone actually takes that rhetoric seriously, like the shooter in this case, the pro-life groups back off entirely.

this suggests that there is actually a middle ground underneath the heated rhetoric: that it's a morally fraught thing, but not the same as murder. and yet articulating that position in a clear way would be extremely difficult, and prescribing policies that correspond to that would also be.

slow blogging, because i'm writing furiously on a children's book about a school revolution (spyder's rebellion) and final revision of political aesthetics (cornell 2010!). but here's an oped- piece.

People Without Personhood
By Crispin Sartwell

The California Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor happened to come on the same day. And they happened to come with the same rhetoric. The majority opinion in the marriage case, authored by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, asserted - perhaps apologetically - that the role of the court "is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."
    Meanwhile, obviously speaking from more or less a common email, a number of Republican senators used words like unto these by John Cornyn on the Sotomayor nomination: "She must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings, and preferences." Indeed, Obama, in introducing Sotomayor, said much the same, before going on to describe her inspiring particular life story.
    These are the merest cliches regarding the rule of law in its great majesty. But I propose to you that you know them to be merely false. Or not merely false, but impossible and contradictory.
     What, exactly, is the procedure supposed to be for transcending your own point of view? When, for example, you read a law and decide what it means, who is doing this reading and deciding? Everyone? No one? Or is the law reading and interpreting itself? Perhaps we should eliminate the human beings from the legal system entirely.
    It's a fundamental human dilemma that we inescapably have a certain point of view, a certain subjectivity, compounded of emotions, histories, opinions, biochemical processes. Much as we might like to, we cannot escape this irremediable condition by wishing it weren't so, or by an arduous process of education in which we're saturated to other human subjectivities - professors, scholars, judges - and their products.
    It would be nice to be little gods, or abstract objects like the number seven or the concept of justice. Then we wouldn't have to suffer or age in time, or be responsible for anything that actually happens. But, um, that's not one of the options.
     Insofar as American jurisprudence rests on the fundamental principle that my opinions are nobody's opinions in particular, or that I have no actual beliefs, or that the voice coming out of my mouth is the voice of an abstract object, it rests - obviously - on a contradiction and a delusion.
     We might say that American jurisprudence of this variety is a cloud of mystification, or perhaps we should just gently point out that it is complete and obvious balderdash.
    Now there are various reasons to emit this jive. One is that it increases the prestige of the legal profession. Indeed, to the extent that people take it seriously, it increases the prestige of the legal profession well beyond belief, makes judges trans-human.
    It also relieves them of any personal responsibility for the concrete results of their decisions, since it was not the person - which, we may be sure, has things likes beliefs and emotions - that rendered the decision, but something speaking through them, a pure spirit they were trance-channeling.
    This has led to the amazing spectacle of a Supreme Court in which the opinions and rulings of a Scalia, say, are completely predictable from his emotional set-up and belief system, but in which this is disavowed at every moment, a kind of law based wholly on non-stop dishonesty.
    We're going to have to make due with this, at the very best: I try, from my actual limited human point of view, to know as much law as I can, interpret it plausibly, and to rule fairly on its application to specific circumstances. Someone who actually succeeds at doing that is as good a judge as creatures such as ourselves can possibly be.
     If inculcating respect for the law requires more than that - if it requires that the person in the robe is not a person at all but a concept or a little god - then we're just going to have to do without.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.