cheese it, the cops!

just watching simon schama do the same thing on farred zakaria. he referred to the tea party movement as "an animal lashing out," "extremely angry," "rather anarchic," "potentially violent," etc. my opponents, and members of their social stratum, are animals: an excellent and boldly traditional argument indeed! i'm glad they brought on an intellectual.

frank rich's column today is an excellent sample of the leftish msm's approach to the tea party. there is not a moment of actual treatment of issues or arguments, only a haze of fear and ad hominem abuse. he just tries to surround the whole thing in a poisonous cloud of threat and craziness. it's all innuendo and tangential connections. let me put this gently: i can do the same to you, frank. or i'll leave that to glen beck and his chalkboard, showing all your marxist associates and anti-americanism. but that wouldn't actually have any tendency to show that what you believe is false, would it?

i do have to give some credit, though. it's like they finally realized that the tea party is not a republican movement. obvious from the getgo, but it was a stick so they used it to thrash.

just gonna crow cause my university of maryland terps just won a thrilling game in double ot over the virginia tech hokies. the incomparable greivis vasquez had 41 points.

there was a time when i would be delivering my assessment of lady gaga before you'd heard of her. let's just say that i've lost a little batspeed.

the first thing to say is that she is a new york art student. the style of the videos is nostalgic about a jeff koons aesthetic: it's pomo revival. but the visuals are of high quality; better than koons, e.g.: very bold; interesting palette; absorbingly profuse; bombarding you with images; also very comical, or at least i hope so. it's a perfect intersection of pop music, fashion, and the visual high arts. of course the music video is a better medium all the time, in giant flat screen.

there's something touchingly human about her beneath the cyborg exterior. some of the outfits are obviously clumsy; you plainly see the girl fumbling with the clothes/set. she is no beauty, i believe, which would distinguish her from the obvious analogy: madonna. also not a madonna-level dancer, of course.but she far exceeds even madonna in visual innovations.

but where she is similar to madonna is that her music is truly conventional. there is absolutely nothing distinctive about her singing, or for that matter the vocoder effects etc., it's completely familiar dance-pop; or even based on 80s synth-pop (go listen to lene lovich, say) although often an excellent example. the visuals are so bold and beyond-fashion; the music is so completely conventional. one would say banal, but there are really nice little touches, like the 'rama rama gaga gaga' chorus of the unbearably catchy "bad romance." not only is it banal pop; it's perfect banal pop. but it's not fundamentally any more sophisticated than aly and aj. when she appeared on american idol, millions of people looked and said "whoa. what the fuck?" but they had to be comforted by the fact that the music was no stranger than paula abdul's. if the music corresponded to the visuals, she'd be bjork or whatever.

it's an interesting combination; you appear at once an avant-garde and a mass artist, in different mediums which converge at the same site. the gay audience must be gigantical; it's kind of a whole tradition of gay dance music and its outrageous outfits and its crossover, this time put up by a fashion institute of technology "conceptual" designer. gaga dada.

so partly the musical strictures are imposed by dance music, and in particular gay dance music: necessarily, it starts with completely rigid machine bpm. it's hard to build something creative or new on top of that. and partly there is a democratic or egalitarian love of the banal: the music is the occasion of collective expression, so everyone has to be able to understand and move simultaneously. glam as a whole shows this structure: it's not exactly musically surprising or even, um, good. but the look is transgressive.

listening to the whole of "fame monster," however, is demoralizing. i guess getting drunk and hating yourself and sleeping around and worshiping fame and money is a tried and true formula: "glam" really is the genre. this time it passes through three layers of irony, though.

much-revised intro  of my josiah warren book, now titled "the practical anarchist" (fordham u press forthcoming) is up.

text of my lecture at goucher college: marxism and anarchism, or, karl marx was a totalitarian

you know, i've had the world's craziest week. so today i'm just chillin, blogging, listening to lady gaga ((!) i seem to be in a pop mood), watchin snow blow around. that to me is a good day.

so let me have a crack at this collective consciousness thing. the basic idea would be found in hobbes: the famous frontispiece of leviathan: the sovereign's giant body incorporating all of us, which coincided with the dawn of modern political philosophy. it is just astonishing the permutations the idea has taken: once you look for it it's everywhere all the time: left right and center.

any group or collection of people could be a collective consciousness. it could be a nation, a class, the users of the same language, a gender, a race, all oppressed people, all oppressors, or even absolutely everybody. it could be rousseau's general will, the hegelian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, social constructionism, pragmatism, feminism, communism, communitarianism, the people, the culture. it could be obama or palin, heidegger, wittgenstein, alasdair macintyre, george herbert mead, richard rorty. it could be progressives, reactionaries, schizophrenics or psychotherapists, bureaucrats or seccesionists, slaves or masters.

ok it's a mistake, but it's not a mere mistake. how people think has a lot to do with their language, for example, and a language is a series of social conventions. you know, french people are different than chinese people. men are different than women. the consensus that is most deeply entrenched is the hardest to see. people have collective decision-making procedures that could allow a number of people all to embrace the same idea or move simultaneously or in coordination in the same direction.

and it reflects a truly deep or the deepest human desire: for merger, with god, with the world, with one another. it's a sexual wish. it's a spiritual wish. it's what you receive when you drift off to sleep or pass out after sixteen shots of tequila: lose yourself, as eminem said. it's what happens in a mosh pit or at an inauguration or in suicide or in sexual ecstasy. it's what happens in front of a great work of art (like "poker face" by lady gaga, haha). it's solidarity. it's you and your mom, you and your child. it's a wedding. your pets. it's god's love and alien abductions etc.

and yet all this yearning would make absolutely no sense if we were already incorporated into a single consciousness. it's what we can't have, or else we wouldn't always be trying to make it happen. right? and the opposite yearning is possible too, of course: to stop agreeing, to stop pretending to be the same, to run away or be alone.

and if language is conventional or social it is also bent by each person, sometimes profoundly. and as i keep insisting, there's more to life or the world than language, such as bodies in space, bodies with space between them. there are mega and micro linguistic communities, in which each node is unique in its particular configuration and relations.

no one literally shares your pain or your annihilation. at least most items of consensus are up for grabs or can be brought to consciousness and attacked. you don't exactly know what i'm thinking or feeling right now, or you don't know it the same way i do, or you could be wrong.

whatever provisional or temporary mergers we achieve with one another we also achieve with trees, animals, dirt, rocks, machines. we don't only experience these through the lens of the social, we experience the social through the lens of them. i'm closer to one with the water that's somewhere close to me than i am with my fellow...whatever it may be. it's around me and through me and it is me.

the collective is...collective: it is each as well as all of us. if individuals are unreal or epiphenomenal, or if "the polis is prior to the individual," then there is no polis, any more than you can have tables but no molecules. we are far less plausibly thought of as one organism than is a nest of wasps or ants: we're more like the big cats. or not, i don't know, somewhere in between. or just what we are.

where you want to get worried is in how the idea of collective consciousness and the yearning for it are used, and how the illusion of collective consciousness is enforced: how your departure from our consensus is not only a betrayal of us but supposedly of yourself, how people are punished for not nodding along. the dictatorship of the proletariat or the nation or the race is going to have to be forged, enforced. people are going to have to be forcefully included, and forcibly extruded. you're going to be tempted to identify the isolated will of you as the collective will of us all, and then reach for a cattle prod or start handing out cash.

now in my view, saying that the government is a threat to the rights of its citizens is like saying the sky is blue on a sunny day, but more tautological. obviously any huge body of extremely heavily-armed people, with the greatest system of prisons the world has ever known, unlimited funding, etc is by definition a threat to the rights of everyone, even each other, even in a case in which they are at the moment entirely sweet and benevolent (which of course is never actually the case). however, that 56 percent of americans also think so kind of surprises me and bodes well for our slightlyfree future.

The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: Only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and nearly seven in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.

this really does tell you something central about the american left and is why you should simply not be associated with it.

hey adam! that's frigging beautiful! exactly. but i need general hospital!

you know, what bothers me isn't the partisanship per se, if that means, you know, advocating a particular position, perhaps kind of rigidly. what bothers me is the unanimity, the way each and every person on the same side says exactly the same thing in exactly the same words: "government takeover," "party of no" etc. "non-partisanship," by people of this degree of independence and intelligence, would be just one degree worse: absolutely everybody senselessly chanting the same words in a mesmeric trance. because very frankly at the end of the day there is a disconnect.

anyway, i don't see why they bother with the human bodies. what am i getting from robert gibbs that i couldn't get from a machine, besides the occasional 'um'' and the 'very frankly' tic that precedes each empty repetition? actually in a way gibbs isn't that egregious: "spokeman" is his job. (personally i'd rather be a professional shitlicker.) but how can senators just sit there echoing each other or repeating some memo?

this is true of the television pundits as well: you might hear the very same "thought" in the very same words dozens of times by various commentators, all recycling "the common wisdom" as if they just made it up or were discovering something.

i don't believe in collective consciousness, the great overwhelming myth/mistake of modernity. but i have to say that these people really, really try. the first requirement would be stop thinking, and just look around for what other people are saying and try to say it too, letting the simultaneous thinking and then the collective identity follow. they want to be one person, one thing, like mashed potatoes made from human bodies. it's important to see that in their devotion to that great ideal or in their desperation to be rid of the burden of individuality they have to start by trying to empty themselves into each other, destroy themselves as moral agents.

one problem is that when everyone's trying to think and speak the same, there's no center: there are actually no thoughts because there's no actual consciousness. or if there are, it is totalitarian structure in which the consciousness of one person is in fact directing everybody's bodies, operating their mouths like puppets. if there are any ideas, in other words, they have to be someone's ideas.

robert wright, addressing the question of whether the plane-into-irs dude was a terrorist, has the following crack at a definition: "In common usage, a “terrorist” is someone who attacks in the name of a political cause and aims to spread terror — to foster fear that such attacks will be repeated until grievances are addressed."

now when a reporter, even a good one - or virtually anyone else - starts trying to define terms, i think they should actually like call a philosophy professor. it's amazing how bad most people are at this. no doubt they have many redeeming features though. now really are we working with "common usage" here? what would be the evidence for that or the possible alternatives?

so here for example, methods (suicide bombing/kamikaze missions) are irrelevant. so is the nature of the organization, if any, or the cause. so is the target: e.g. non-combatants. any of these are more promising strategies than wright's.  almost any military action, and many other acts of violence - say in the context of gang warfare - counts as terrorism on wright's account.

as i've said i don't think terrorism is a strategy. i think it is an act of expression: more like a pollock than a policy. one way to see that is that it persists even when it is obviously useless or counter-productive. it a display of complete commitment, devotion, submission etc. with a nice admixture of despair. and i say that it is politico-military violence aimed primarily at non-combatants, no matter what the justification; it's not only, or usually, about getting grievances addressed. now this ends up counting hiroshima, for example, as terrorism. i think it was.

watchin the women's long program, and the description of the background of cheltzie lee, the australian champ, is kind of emblematic of our moment: 'her mother is an african-american from louisiana; her father is of chinese ancestry, from bangladesh. like many aussies, she likes to surf.'

in what is a beautiful example of american political discourse, democrats - in unison, like the machines or parrots they are - keep saying that the republicans are "the party of 'no'." however, the republicans - not realizing that responding to machines and parrots is as useless as responding to tea kettles or shrubs - deny being the party of 'no.' so i am stepping into the breach. i think it would be excellent to have a party of 'no'; a nihilist organization. rather than merely being entirely empty while continuing to simulate life and intellection, we embrace the emptiness at the heart of american politics explicitly. because quite frankly, at the end of the day there is a disconnect. a disconnect between each thing and each other thing, and between each thing and itself. indeed it would not be too much to say that in our universe at the end of the day there is nothing other than a disconnect.

forward my minions! no! no, no, no no, no. no.

oh hell no.

took janie to see percy jackson the other day. pretty damn good movie for what it is, and i would also say of the books that they are written with far more wit and verve than hary potter. the movie in a stray remark gently suggests that barack obama is a demi-god, and i'd say that that has been the problem both ways round. the worship was ridiculous and unseemly and pathetic, and the disilliusionment is in process. a reasonable assessment of the human being would have been better for him, and for you, and for us all.

in many ways our society is better for females than it is for males. indeed, being a boy is itself a learning disability, and should be (as in fact it is being) medicated or institutionalized. as we shift from a manufacturing to a "service" economy, we reward sitting still, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and stuff; so dudes are fucked, no doubt. however, don't mistake this for a permanent condition, and i think that we will soon descend again into total insane hyper-violent barbarism in which ravening hordes of berserkers wander the steppes of manhattan. then stuff like being in touch with your emotions and yapyapyapping will be extreme drawbacks. we will so be back! in other words, don't confuse a little localized moment for an evolutionary epoch.  

the bland beast of technocracy tom friedman roundly asserts today that taxes have been going down for the last 70 years. i must say that this news surprises and pleases me.

And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.

but as our tax rates approach zero i do want to say that "leadership" in the friedman sense is not about giving things away or making grants. it is about coercion on a massive scale to reach whatever ends tom friedman wants us to reach.

don't worry. i am in charge here in the mansions of the damned.

according to the nyt, the big new fashion idea is modesty. let me state this carefully. it would surprise me if you could sell that to american women.

watchin the cpac cattle call on cspan; right now it's tim pawlenty, who as i've said before i'd be betting on as the republican nominee for 2012. he is very good. but just as explicitly as possible the positions are entirely incoherent. his pac is "freedom first," and you know he did a rap: not freedom last or freedom in the middle but freedom all day every day. in the next sentence: "we will stand up for the sanctity of traditional marriage. we don't give constitutional rights to terrorists. the sacredness of human life. god (=jesus) is in charge." the next guy: we made english the official language of iowa. really. the official language of iowa. people. think through this set of ideas. pretend that you are capable of rudimentary intellection.

well american liberalism is an exact mirror image of this incoherence. it's just ridiculous, as though none of these people are capable of thinking at all. i think we should just erase the american political spectrum, parties, and so on and see if we can come up with a few positions that, you know, hang together somehow. so say i'm following you slavishly while you're saying with great passion "yes and no!" "absolutely and absolutely not!" what would i agree with if i agreed with you? where am i going when i am going in opposite directions simultanously?

well i did rag on obama for not meeting with the dalai lama last fall. so i express my approval that he did so today.

well, the internal revenue service, on a massive, systematic scale, is engaged in taking your stuff without your permission by sheer coercion, i.e. they are an organization entirely devoted to strongarm robbery, top to bottom, soup to nuts, boss to janitor. however. that doesn't mean you should fly planes into their offices. because i don't think theft should be punishable by death. now on the other hand, what they're stealing your money for is..."the greatest military the world has ever known": a killing machine of unprecedented effectiveness, in other words. (well along with troubled asset relief program.) on the third hand they were helping people in haiti. but anyway, whether or not it's deserved, one might at least get worried about the effectiveness of this particular strategy: not really going to put a dent in the operations, i feel. my personal strategy is to try to pay them whatever they tell me i must so they don't fuck up my life. in other words, my approach is servile capitulation, and if they require me to express my enthusiasm for being arbitrarily dispossessed, well no doubt i'll do that too.

i've been grooving on olympic figure skating. but one thing i don't understand. how come every single man is wearing sequins, in outfits that range from the merely tasteless to the pointedly excruciating? one would think in an activity that has such pronounced elements of art that one would occasionally run across someone with some rudimentary taste, or someone who wanted to manifest some sort of dignity, or someone who wanted you to watch what he was doing and not the way his day-glo epaulettes were shimmering.

now you may well say that this response is homophobic. true, true, and probably you're also not going to find me listening to techno or broadway show tunes, or sobbing about the tragic fate of judy garland. but is every single one of these dudes gay? or are they only playing gay on television? and really it seems possible even for a gay man to appear in public in a way that emphasizes his art.

i ain't even gonna give you a picture of johnny weir in his glittering hot-pink corset etc, because after all he is johnny weir.

philosophy is the art of addressing conceptually unanswerable questions, such as "did you get my last email?"

again, sorry for no blogging. life is crazed. a couple of items though.
today would have been my brother adam's 50th birthday, if he hadn't died of a drug overdose in 1992.
i'll be lecturing on anarchism and/vs. marxism at goucher college (towson md), tue feb 23. kelly lecture hall 8pm.
ok i'ma start bloggin agin.

so the news networks are covering bill clinton's like routine follow-up operation (at least that's what they're saying it is) exactly as intensely as they covered the earthquake in haiti. if i was them i would send in anderson cooper and dr. sanjay gupta through a catheter in a magic schoolbus. kaboom!

ice-age wyeth:

i begin to think of the index as a literary genre in itself; i like the alphabetical as opposed to narrative ordering; it's less arbitrary. anyway maybe you can access the index i just wrote for political aesthetics on googledocs? or probably it's more like a craft object, like a work of stonemasonry.

we've had 48.5 inches total according to weather.com.

if i was cnn, i'd be parachuting anderson cooper and dr. sanjay gupta into downtown baltimore right now. kaboom!

If you aren't confused enough...

Spamiola- Reporting from Sana'a

Remember the Al-Fadhli guy we talked about? Former Al-Qaeda operative, nothern government ally against the south, President's relation, and currently leader of the southern seperatists movement. Not enough that he's got us all damn confused,he decided he wants to prove to everyone that he is NOT an Al-Qaeda guy at all. I find this pretty hilarious.