cheese it, the cops!

how not to write an opinion piece, cont'd:

For this past weekend saw not only the political sleight of hand that stripped millions of women’s abortion coverage from the House’s health care reform bill; it also brought the season finale of AMC’s highly popular pre-Roe-era series, which concluded with the unhappy housewife heroine Betty Draper leaving her philandering husband, Don, for the promise of marriage to another man she barely knows.

an astonishing coincidence of reactionary backlashes! to which the only real response is: so, judith, which do you think is worse?

happy day after veterans day. a couple of assertions: no one is a hero in virtue merely of belonging to a big organization, even a vast configuration dedicated to violence. if everybody in the military is a hero, then nidal hasan is a hero. if you are a hero you are a hero in virtue of actually taking heroic action, perfectly possible in the military context, but probably not all that frequent there or anywhere else. second, no one is fighting for our freedom unless they are actually doing things that actively preserve or expand our freedom. so if the conflict in iraq or afghanistan actually preserves or expands our freedom, then the people who are fighting in those conflicts are fighting for our freedom. if not, not. it's not a matter of what you or we can convince yourself or ourselves that you are doing, but what you are, actually, doing.

treating mere enlistment as an act of heroism or a defense of freedom is just disingenuous; all you're really trying to do is recruit.

our greatest nightmare is that terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps when the government of pakistan collapses into an incomprehensible heap of slag, though it might actually be difficult to tell when or whether that has occurred. i don't negotiate with terrorists! but if i couldn't stop them anyway and if they would accept hostess twinkies in exchange for some input on the target list, i'd nudge them toward the department of "education."

seems like nietzsche and hitler is a question, so let me have a crack at that too. if it gets really hairy, i will start posting quotes.

i actually love nietzsche and he got me into philosophy. but i think if you make him into some mellow democrat, you certainly have him all wrong. he loves hierarchies, and thinks they are natural. he condemns egalitarianism in all forms as resentment that hates the world. he celebrates raw power, and admires people who wield it without shame. he praises war. there are many passages where he attacks democracy, socialism, etc. he certainly toys with various general characterizations of races/nations and their characters, including "the jews." he ridicules charity and praises cruelty. he proposes that we are on the edge of the next stage in evolution, which he calls "superman." he talks about how superior and inferior people get bred. etc etc etc.

you can't tell me that all that has nothing to do with fascism. or that it's all elizabeth's doing.

now the defense rests largely on this: he's even more brutal to anti-semites (surely he has his sister's husband in mind, e.g.) than he is to the jews. there are various ironies and reversals in his statements on all these matters to which you've got to be constantly alert. nevertheless, the last thing you want to do is actually live in a nietzschean polity.

it's not that i want to see obama fail, which would be monstrous anti-patriotic racism. but i would kind of like to see the whole damn thing collapse like a house of cards, which i think is the only possibility for a slight, temporary halt in the growth of state power. admittedly, any tiny glitch in the continuous growth of the state would be a bizarre anomaly in our march to a future bright with promise, a march that is inevitable because we americans are a people who dream, indeed who basically only dream.

headline from the guardian: the public must help restore society. see that is what happens when you start conflating actual persons into abstractions of collective consciousness. perhaps, looking at it the other way round, society must help restore the public. or perhaps they are the same thing, or opposites, or not at all. the public has been a terrible drag on society. or not, or the other way round. power to the people, man. but what is society doing to help the masses?

really what i'd like to see is a civil war between the public and society, or maybe they could join forces to  square off against the body politic. only problem is, there'd be nobody there.

it's heidegger was a nazi! time again. and let me say: heidegger was a nazi. the times piece quotes carlin romano (whom i know a bit) from the chronicle of higher education, who calls Heidegger a “Black Forest babbler” and fraud who was “overrated in his prime” and “bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now.”

ok let me have a quick go. i actually think heidegger is a profound and important thinker, though i would also say there is an element of hoohah: a mystical obcurantism.well that's true of all german systematic philosophers, and heidegger was the best the twentieth century had to offer in that vein. even if he kind of encouraged a cult of himself, he's not responsible for the shocking submissiveness and credulity of his followers, whom i've had to live with in philosophy departments now and then.

now let me say that we live inside two centuries of totalitarianism and many philosophers are tainted. hegel is an inyourface state worshiper: he flatly asserts that the state is god. or consider schelling. marx is, i believe, an utterly totalitarian thinker who had a far more direct influence on actual totalitarian regimes and their genocides than did heidegger, who was too obscure to really wield any direct influence on practical politics. there are reasons that hitler loved nietzsche; a fascist reading of nietzsche is not entirely disconnected from what he actually said. well, you might also grab folks like hobbes or rousseau.

and we are, right now, still in the middle of the cult of the state as represented by all these people: essentially no one does not advocate total state power: it taints everyone from rawls to habermas to zizek etc. and in a way this is just the reflection of the reality of our amazing progress. so i more or less hate the political philosophies of all these people. it's a harder question on heidegger than most, because even more than most he does not say: here's my totalitarian system; there is no clear advocacy of any particular politics in heidegger, though it's not wrong to keep feeling a fascist undertow. 

but our intellectual life is unimaginable without hegel, marx, nietzsche. nor would we want to imagine that even if we could. many of the ideas are compelling, and you can't think completely outside them. now you had better keep your critical faculties about you at all times. if you start accepting stuff because marx said it or because hardt and negri said marx said it etc you are not only going to end up accepting totalitarian premises; you are actually enacting the submission that makes totalitarianism possible. most intellectuals do exactly that.

but i think that marx and nietzsche and hedegger, e.g., also can be wielded in a liberatory vein: the ideas are extremely rich, complicated, equivocal. someone like foucault  shows the kind of thing i mean. he's inconceivable without marx and nietzsche and hegel and heidegger. but he also exposes our totalitarian situation profoundly.

heidegger is not going to imperceptibly make you a nazi through some kind of secret mesmeric power in the text. read. read hard. read carefully. stay free in relation to the text. take what you can use and leave the rest. read...as an anarchist, or a radical advocate of direct democracy. read and never knuckle under to what you read. the question really isn't about the dictatorial power of the author; it's about the free resistance of the reader.

so on nov 21 and 22 - at 21 charter oak ave. hartford, connecticut - the north american anarchist studies network will forgather. i'll be talking on saturday afternoon about american anarchism, 1800-1860. it'll be all the anarchist intellectuals on the continent, more or less, and all the agents of the department of homeland security.

scary stuff from the obama admin with regard to indymedia (to which i've just added a permanent link, at left). apparently the justice department wanted, and demanded by subpoena, a list of all their visitors, backing it up with various threats, etc. oddly (since indymedia is far left), i caught this story on glenn beck (being guesthosted by "judge napolitano"), but i guess it's useful as a stick to whap the democratic administration. well, sometimes a thorough whapping is called for.

just to repeat: really both parties are more-or-less avowed opponents of freedom in any comprehensible form, and they are complementary in that the one wants to increase state power by expanding half the government and the other the other half, while they actually agree on many particular abrogations of autonomy, such as those embodied in standardizing and federalizing education, or in surveillance powers.

According to the EFF, Indymedia received a request (PDF) in January for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the Indymedia site on June 25, 2008. But the request went further than simply asking for the computer addresses of visitors -- the subpoena ordered Indymedia to turn over all identifying information it may have about visitors, including their addresses, email addresses, bank account numbers and social security numbers.

EFF reports that, when they challenged the subpoena, the Justice Department backed down, and responded with a one-sentence letter (PDF) that rescinded the subpoena. But at the same time, Justice Department officials threatened an Indymedia web administrator with charges of obstruction of justice if she revealed the subpoena's existence. Officials told the administrator, Kristina Clair of Philadelphia, that publicizing the request "may endanger someone's health" and would have a "human cost."

on the fortieth anniversary of sesame street, i have a project for its producers: count how many times you counted from one to ten.

some things i wrote about ss over the years:

(1) The truly dark age of the cartoon, however, extended from around 1970 to 1985. The chaotic anti-authoritarianism of Daffy and the Yippies atrophied into a grim political correctness. Sesame Street, though not a cartoon, was the model of the new children's programming: devoted above all to affirmative action and sledge-hammer didacticism. Soon every children's program was conceived as a piece of moral or educational training rather than as an entertainment. Childhood became as a pure training-ground for adulthood, and there was to be not a moment's surcease from the improving messages.

(2) Children's video in the seventies and eighties became an utter blank, a politically correct insipidity, a mindless parade of friendly tokens. The Care Bears, Sesame Street, and Barney taught moral lessons that no one could possibly disagree with, or else they muttered the numbers 1-10 thousands of time as if that were "educational."

(3) If whining out the numbers 1-10 for the 5,243,291st time were entertainment, Big Bird would be Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. The first generation of kids raised on Sesame Street responded by becoming the hardcore neo-nazi skinhead punks of the early eighties. They shot heroin and loved mindless destruction, yet they were the merest amateurs at nihilism. The second generation understood that resistance was useless, and with a frozen Big Bird smile, Al Gore welcomed them all - regardless of race, creed, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, disability, learning style, sexual orientation, age, or the size of their buttocks - to the Pure Void.

it might seem odd for a person of my politics etc, but i have no particular problem with executing the dc sniper.

dude. this "we live in stories" crap is so over. actually, if we were the stories we tell, there'd be no evil at all. your body getting riddled by bullets is not a story. at any rate, i just want to point out that the wearethestorieswetell thing originated with literary critics, who really wanted to live in stories - that is, curled up on their couch with books - and then somehow entered public consciousness in a kind of hackchump postmodernism. it sort of sounds good, or like an explanation or something. push it even slightly and you realize it's a bizarrely backwards and misleading metaphor. it doesn't help with the ethics, the aesthetics, the metaphysics, the science, the history, the psychology. it's a gigantic univocal pseudo-explanation that does absolutely nothing.

brooks: "Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged." ok. so. i freely select my story, and i select a story that leads to cooperation and goodness. (really?) what is my story, my story of the whole world and human history? ain't got one, dave. maybe you do. but if you do i can guarantee you this: it's false. but of course "false" makes no sense in a world consisting of stories, whatever that could possibly mean. actually i have a thousand stories and a thousand beliefs and experiences that don't fit into my thousand stories. it's a mess out here. but at any rate, if you wanted to explain islamic extremism, how useful is it to say that they selected a bad story? =0.

ok: here's what i mean.

how am i ever going to deal with my envy of slavoj zizek? christ now he's writing for the nytimes. well, maybe like this: for all of zizek's super-bold rhetoric etc - admittedly toned down here - the position is an extremely conventional statist leftism; really he just wants us all to be swedes. the great imagination of the prose is matched by the utter dullness of the actual positions. it's cool that he loves utopian thinking: a kind of nice reversal. but what does he actually want? "socialism with a human face." gee whiz.

just to give the capsule refutation: once you've constituted a state sufficient to give you your socialism, then whether it retains a human face is entirely at the whim of those who operate the power you've constituted.

really i'm not going to bother to link it up, but how can the washington post and etc, write the lead for the 'house passes healthcare bill' like this: "landmark, historical, crucial victory." well, it will be a landmark historical turning point in the march of human history (or not) if it passes the senate and is signed into law. but it won't be. really, they should tone down the enthusing and report the news, if any. it could hardly be more slanted if they just wrote "the house of representatives today passed an incredibly cool and lovable bill, demonstrating again the wonder that is nancy pelosi's beautiful inner light, which is our tanning bed."

mr fun writes, re: me on eboo patel:

now while this piece is dishonest, it is also combatting an American narrative that concludes with American interference in the Middle East, since (we all know) that is where Muslim terrorists come from. now the piece is dishonest, but the case you make for the truth here is and has been used as the kernel of American entire foreign policy for the past 8+ years.

well that's true, isn't it. and serracho says "chicken and egg': a good question, as the washpost makes clear today: they hated and ridiculed him and keyed his car down there because he was a conspicuous muslim. but on the other hand, even in the midst of disasters military and otherwise (for example, the destruction of tibet), i don't think you've seen, for example, buddhist suicide bombers or random mass murderers. for that matter, precious few shiite muslims or even christians, though you get the occasional eric rudolph. but adherents of sunni islam seem to do this every single day in many different locations. you want to call that a coincidence?

of course, most sunni muslims don't fly planes into buildings etc., and i'm sure many are peace-loving sweeties with love in their hearts. but on the other hand, when the next person shrapnelizes a woman's market or girls' school someplace, are you going to be in any doubt about their religious affiliation, or about the kind of thing they would say in justification of their own acts?

i might say the problem with this particular style or approach to violence is that it is anti-tactical, bizarrely irrelevant. your tibetan monk might be in despair. might be oppressed. but he's not going to start blowing people up at absolute random; that bears no relation to his despair. all over the world, people are in grinding poverty, despair, pain. they are devalued and exploited by the west or by christians or by commies or kleptocrats, etc. it would not be strange or even perhaps wrong to respond violently. but simply to start shooting or exploding or immolating people selected at random would not appear to have any possible moral justifcation or any fucking use. there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from? because it appears to me to be pretty unusual in human history.

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward. i say that terrorism is real and well beyond stupid, and i say that 90% of it proceeds from sunni islam. that might be wrong and dangerous to say. is it false?

suicide bomb in pakistan kills 12: The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid.

so i sat up last night and watched ghajini, on the rec of my student charlie. it's supposedly the highest-grossing bollywood movie ever. it is excruciatingly bad, and i might just leave it there but i won't, of course. i should say that i don't know from bollywood, which could be part of the problem, but it will...stay that way.

one thing that's remarkable is the juxtaposition of genres. ghajini is based on memento, and (half-heartedly and half-competently) conjures up the super-dark tortured paranoid collapsing-time atmosphere of that film, but it's also a light-hearted screwball romantic comedy and a series of michael-jackson-influenced music videos and an oprah-like uplifting social commentary. the incoherence is absolute, but maybe it also accounts for the fascinating trainwrecky charm.

anyway, as a dark concept/action film it has everything that memento had except the intricate jigsaw plot, the cool cinematography, and the intelligence. it revolves the backwards time structure into a flat series of flashbacks. the super-bloody action scenes seem to be the only really decently-directed moments, and really, not so much.

the romantic comedy elements are far less believable than, say, the average sandra bullock movie, which is saying something. it's about a supposedly super-cute billionaire who meets a poor...model. together they save orphans etc. it at once gives you an absolutely uncritical cult of consumption and an unbelievably superficial commentary on the brutality and injustice of poverty. there's also no apparent actual connection between the actors, though the girl is kind of whimsically charming like bullock on a good day or whatever. the dude wears three-piece suits that also in every scene grab his biceps like a claw so you always see how buff he is, the real theme of the film, the only thing that holds it together.

so if you had an interminable sandra bullock romantic comedy juxtaposed with and ending in a bad imitation of a quentin tarantino bloodbath...but even that doesn't do the thing justice

because then there are the music videos: we just stop the film entirely and lurch into, say, a desert landscape, where the actors do pelvic thrusts in florescent polyethyline outfits to mind-numbing hindu techno. when the first one came on i thought it was a super-ironic joke or parody. by the third i was just screeching and writhing in terrible pain. the music is utterly empty, meaningless, with overthtop hyperemotional lyrics. really, india, like continental europe, should produce no popular music domestically, but import it all from us; they just have no frigging idea of any kind.

the "acting" is appalling. i guess my favorite performance was by the pop-tart/lingerie model who played a "medical student." the plausibility of her being a medical student was entirely expressed in the fact that literally every other sentence she uttered started with "as a medical student, i.." "hello, i'm a medical student and..."

the sub-titles were only sort of in english, which did help the comedy: "her trivia are priceless!": a deep expression of love.

but you know somehow i didn't turn it off. i'm not sure whether i watched it because i was charmed by the idiotic kitsch, or because i somehow got caught up in the absurd story, or because the world series is over, or because i was too demoralized to press the power button, or what. but i did watch to the ohsotragic yet uplifting end (an amnesiac birthday party at the orphanage!), rooting for the whole cast to die, painfully but forgodsake quickly (the thing is over three hours long). and i guess i learned something about art, by contrast.

of late, i've been paddling in quite the lovely little philosophical backwater, which i might term "post-idealist british metaphysics." in the late nineteenth century, british philosophy was dominated by folks who were in some sense and in some degree hegelians: t.h. green, bernard bosanquet, and f.h. bradley. "analytic" philosophy arose, in my view, as a rebellion against idealism, not only against its grand and basically non-empirical system-construction, but against its turgid, obscure, profound prose. (in fact, the british guys even at their worst wrote much more clearly than hegel, e.g., or than germans in general: a basic aspect of british thought beginning to end.)

so, bertrand russell, g.e. moore and co started ripping idealism apart and going for certain, clear results under the auspices of fregean logic. they more or less proclaimed all metaphysics, by which they meant really the philosophies of their own teachers, to be doa: actually meaningless and pointless. they tried to achieve (and succeeded to an amazing extent in achieving) extreme clarity and precision and certainty. after that, wittgenstein, logical positivism, etc. analytic philosophy dominated the whole field in the uk and us and australia for the whole century, and it retained its anti-hegel rage: really there were and even are purges, where we declare that you people who read hegel or heidegger aren't philosophers, are spouting nonsense, and must not be hired, granted tenure, allowed to work with grad students, etc.

big fun! but one thing that happened is that through the 1920s and 30s there were a whole bunch of "systematic" philosophers in british universities who were still basically working in the green/bradley framework, while also grappling with russell and moore. these guys were still building systems at the same time as they were trying to hold to or re-develop an empiricist-clear style.

so anyway, i'm sort of thinking i'm going to write a "system" of philosophy, running through epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics etc in a "bone-head" or "direct" realist vein. in trying to see what's out there i got hold of a book called a theory of direct realism, by j.e. turner (1925). well, from here it looks bizarrely incoherent methodologically, lurching from russell to hegel, from super-precise logic to hyper-woolly idealism, from rank scientism to rank speculation. that's a product of a professional dilemma at a certain moment. but it also in a way suggests that these strands could have been synthesized in various ways had the analytic folks not been in their own way stalinists.

but exploring the footnotes etc i touched on a literature with which i was unfamiliar except as names or except for their translations or commentaries on kant, etc: people like robert stout, or norman kemp-smith, c.d. broad, pringle-pattison, etc. one of the interesting things about this lit is that most of these folks were trying actually to crush hegel in a realist vein. but their style was still essentially the grand metaphysical manner, which they did not know was already unreadable when they wrote, and which essentialy has not been read since.

the great find in this world of funk is, for my money, the astonishing genius samuel alexander, whose work, including the massive slab of systematic metaphysics space, time, and deity (1920), is entirely anti-idealist and pointedly clear, indeed almost painfully lucid. but it is also in its way squarely in the speculative, here's my system-of-everything style. what is says, beautifully, is that believe it or not space and time and even we are actual material objects in a reality independent of our consciousness. and then he makes the next move: consciousness itself is a real thing in a real world. now that for my money is the real problem with the idealist tradition: that it denies that, which is...ridiculous. alexander is, in fact, far less idealist in such matters than are russell or wittgenstein or carnap. stylistically, he's closer to german idealism. doctrinally, he's a much more thorough critic and opponent of it than the heroes of the analytic tradition.

indeed, that tradition at least started out as "phenomenalist": it has us building reality out of sense data: all we knew was our own mental images, tactile sensations, etc. this is exactly how british empiricism ended up devouring the world in the first place, why it had to eventuate in kant and hegel. it's understandable that the analytic dudes loved hume and hated hegel, wanted to re-institute pre-idealist empiricism, or didn't really know where else to start. but really that was not the best move. start with a world constructed out of sensations and you end up a solipsist or a transcendental or absolute idealist, and analytic empiricism had to be saved from this fate again, for example by austin. well, alexander just rips phenomenalism apart. he notes dryly that it is incompatible with our own experience of the world and status as natural creatures.

space, time, and deity was welcomed as a classic at the time, and then fell off the cliff when the analytic style became entirely hegemonic. it's a model of what i want to do, though i doubt that anyone i've ever met has ever read it. it indicates a counter-factual history in which anti-speculative philosophy took a different mode, where plain-speaking realism replied to hegelianism in its own terms and killed it. whether we'd be better off in that history than this one is a hard but cool question.

this, by now, is mechanical, not only for muslims but for non-muslims, and if truth was pragmatic or merely strategic, the idea that acts of violence or terrorism have nothing to do with islam would be...true. now let me say, there are many varieties of islam. you're not going to find sufi saints in suicide vests. not only that, but of course there are christian fanatics, and there are people who go on shooting rampages for non-religious reasons or for no comprehensible reason whatsoever, which is really the position on something like this: any explanation - including religious fanaticism - is inadequate because the effect is both infinitely in excess to and virtually completely conceptually detached, arbitrary, in relation to the cause.

but if like eboo patel you find yourself explaining away act after act day after day as a misunderstanding or having nothing to do with what the people doing these acts say they are doing, i think you are being disingenuous, or perhaps believing what you need to believe in the teeth of what's true. if you keep quoting the peace-loving passages of the koran and ignoring the justifications or celebrations of violence in the text or the extremely violent early history of islam - its teaching that the infidel deserves death and its history of giving people what it says they deserve, i don't think you're being honest.

at any rate, i don't feel the necessity to pretend to believe what, if it were true, would make the world a little better. and indeed, if you know that you're doing that, you don't actually believe what you say you believe: believing p is taking p to be true, not taking it to help us all live as brothers.

i might admire you for being good, but if i think that the reasons you're urging me to believe that p have nothing to do with whether p is true, by definition it's not possible to find what you're saying convincing. you (the politician, pundit, or just schmoe) say that p because it would help to believe p or it would be admirable to believe that p or we would all feel better if we believed that p or if we all beieved that p the world would be cured or something. you say it and i nod along for reasons that have nothing to do whether what we're saying is true. you talk, i nod, and neither us believe at all. (the graduation address: "anything you can dream, you can accomplish." no one denies it, and no one believes it.) now i think we pay a huge price for that ultimately; i don't believe it really is a long-term solution to anything or that it really usually has good effects. it's just living in a cooperative fantasy or a tissue of lies. but of course by my own lights whether it does or does not have good effects cannot be the question.

i wish i had something enlightening to say about fort hood. but on another topic, there should be some pointed way to redecouple tea parties from the republican party. any subversive insurgent event at which john boehner is waving around a copy of the constitution is, um, horseshit. the good part about the tea party movement is that there was no organization, no spokespeople, etc. it had a nice anti-statist flava, albeit with little chunks of, you know, racism and stupidity thrown in. now i think they'd better come up with another name/strategy for the movement. you need to come up with something that boehner can't use or simulate. truly, if you had actual libertarians and fiscal conservatives out there, they'd have grabbed john boehner and waterboarded him.

saw lyle lovett this morning on morning joe. bizarrely, he talked about music rather than global warming.

e.j. dionne : tuesday's elections "were a timely reminder that President Obama needs to tune up his celebrated political organization and find a way to make Americans feel hopeful again." er. why 'timely'? because 'reminder' takes 'timely' as 'rhetoric' takes 'empty.' notice that it's not a timely reminder to lower unemployment or stop engaging in an orgy of debt, but to crank up the 'celebrated' (that should be 'much-vaunted') political organization. what we need is...even more hope-y posters. we need to induce a soaring feeling or impression of hope, without origin or object. ah the power of words, of vision, of hoohah! for we are humans, and humans hope like earths quake. we are the stories we tell, so never, ever stop yapping.

ross douthat's columns have been a mixed bag. he hasn't, you know, riveted me. this is good stuff, though, and i might especially point to the characterization of the function of the president in our system: "part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat."

400,000 names are on the fbi's terrorism watch list. i like this a lot. it shows a nice heart of paranoid totalitarianism: a half-cracked stalin freakiness. it is entirely incompatible with the notion that we live in a free society or a democracy. on the other hand, it is completely unmanageable, utterly useless. what can the fbi do in a population that is just crawling with terrorists, where everyone is a suicide bomber, although no suicide bombings have actually taken place?

they add...1,600 people a day, based, you know, on anonymous denunciations. i insist that we think about what this says about the american stasi, and the american people. but i really also insist that we giggle about it: really, the fbi is a gang of evil fuckheads, and an insurgency is obviously more than warranted. but the evil fuckheadedness is mitigated profoundly by the intense stupidity and slapstick comedy.

so i'm assuming i'm already on the list, but if not i hope this entry gets me an audition.