cheese it, the cops!

on tony judt: 

His current intellectual preoccupation is with the role of the state in western societies – the subject matter of his NYU lecture. His thesis is that over the past 40 years, western democracies have forgotten the positive virtues of collective action. "What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms," he says. "We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, what can the state do that is good?"

At the end of the lecture he was struck by how many young people came up to him expressing amazement at ideas they had never heard before. "This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else."

this probably pretty accurately describes also the position of zizek. needless to say, i am trying to be exquisitely poised on the opposite side of the see-saw. and i don't think our problem is too much individualism. the opposition between self-serving capitalism and the state is a false opposition (or else we're truly screwed).

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if there were ever a justification for terrorism, then the chechens have it: they have been subjected to genocide. the reasons that chechen terrorists are 'black widows" is because the russian state has annihilated - frequently, tortured to death - their fathers, husbands, sons. however, let me say this: that does not make it right or sensible to attack random subway passages. i personally would not quibble with any chechen attacking any real state target: anything involved in the "security" apparatus of the russian dictatorship. blowing up non-combatants, though, is monstrously wrong and also not in any way sensible or effective: as i say often: an act of expression, not a strategic or tactical action.

the basic idea of statism is that the government is all of us, making decisions collectively. if that were true, then any chechen would be justified in killing any russian at any moment. but it's not true. the people responsible for the chechen genocide are the actual individuals who directed it and the actual individuals who participated in it.

whose country is it? right. black folks'. latinos'. but white folks' too, right? this land is, etc. it won't do just to reverse the oppressions, will it? it's the tea partiers' country too even if they are unemployed, and for that reason among many others, the wrong sort of people. you'd get the feeling from blow or eugene robinson, say, that these folks are to be disqualified on the basis of their race and, most particularly, their class.

robinson, blow and their huge dominant ilk lob the term "anti-government" at these people as though to be anti-government was self-evidently to be insane. (to which i would just say: right. and you're therefore pro-government, i.e. a lover of your own subordination, a political masochist.) robinson in some column and many of these people at one time or another associate the claim that "obama is a socialist" with psychotic hyper-violence. well i am a political philosopher, a professional, and i'm here to say: i'm comfortable with the claim. but surely y'all said far worse about dick cheney, for example (come to that, so did i).

start out with this presumption: a large protest movement might just have a legitimate set of grievances, whether it's students at columbia or unemployed waitresses from amarillo. and make up your mind that any peaceful political expression - in particular that which is critical of the government - is protected by the first amendment and in any case is absolutely central to the idea of democracy. catch yourself sneering at people on the grounds that they went to the wrong college, or no college at all. listen to yourself just constantly hurling abuse at the "wingnuts" or "tea-baggers" and understand that lobbing names at people is not an argument, even if you went to harvard. consider the idea that america might really have to do with something other than the domination of the state in every aspect of every person's life, cradle to grave. pretend to care about freedom in some rudimentary sense: pay it lip service or something.

you can glory in your capitulation. that's cool; i congratulate you for finding someone to whom you can capitulate enthusiastically. it's obvious now that that's what you wanted all along. well, most folks do. but as you do, i want you to remember that dick cheney ran this country ten minutes ago and sarah palin will run it ten minutes from now. then what kind of terms are your going to be using in your extreme anti-government insane rhetoric? then are you going to take responsibility for the actions of a few anarchists at the wto when they break windows at the bank of america? etc.

the picture that blow or frank rich deploy is one of steady inevitable progress, so their idea is that the tea-partiers pine for an america that is lost forever. but white right-wingers (of a kind) ran this country a year and a couple of months ago. and the pendulum can swing again. see? it's never time for anyone to assume that the government is on their side forever and hence that to be anti-government is to be an evil extremist.

it makes all kinds of sense that a college committed to pacifism would not fly the american flag or sing the national anthem. as i've said many times, and as adin ballou or leo tolstoy argued, pacifism entails anarchism. indeed, pacifism entails anarchism obviously, trivially, because as you know if you can disperse the cloud of hooha for a second, state authority rests entirely on violence. don't believe me? ok let the u.s. government disarm entirely and renounce violence. then let it try collecting taxes.

more extreme violence...at least rhetorically.

* After American abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in church last year, Coulter was asked to condemn the killing by conservative Fox host Bill O'Reilly. She replied: "I don't really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester. ... I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don't want to impose my moral values on others."

and you have to admit: rarely has an act of violence (i refer to coulter's words) been that funny. she kills me.

here is a piece by ruth marcus that, bizarrely, takes a thoughtful and even humble attitude toward health reform.

listening to ex-npr dude michael goldfarb on the bbc radio show "the world" this morning: "the tea party movement is scary. it's extremely violent...at least rhetorically." you can't tell me that this ever-increasing conflation of yapping and killing isn't setting up for a major repression of speech. anyway, it's a bit hard to figure out where the rhetorical violence leaves off. perhaps goldfarb''s assertion is itself a monstrous act of mass murder. at least rhetorically.

it's amazing how much principle one displays in defending lively protest and free speech when the protest is against people you don't like; amazing how crazy and dangerous it all is when it's directed at your own position. i guess repression of those with whom we disagree is a kind of universal human impulse.

tony judt, a mainstream leftist if ever there was one, frames the drift of the current political debate nicely. the right, in its cynicism, is suspicious of state power, refusing to learn the lesson of history that state power rocks and is not at all dangerous, a few holocausts, world wars etc notwithstanding. we need to return to the public-spirited idealism at the center of leftism: a faith in the people and institutions that govern us and the coercion by which they do so (summarized as happy ever-increasing taxation), an extreme idealistic hopeful enthusiasm for our own subordination. anyway, thanks for makig the position clear. the one quibble i have about this account is that the right in general is not quite so libertarian as the one judt condemns. it's not that the right doesn't want to impose its values, it's that it wants to impose different values. by judt's standards, that makes them beautiful idealists too, just misled i guess.

the idea that the passage of the healthcare bill is triumph of hope over fear is, of course, just empty propaganda. so: if i argue that anyone might be in a position to lose their healthcare, or that you might not be able to get treatment for your pre-existing condition, etc, am i not appealing to fear? isn't fear a perfectly good motivation for legislation, or for killing legislation? didn't the new deal programs appeal to people's fear of poverty, illness, old age, etc? why not? we are fragile human beings. when we go to war, we do it from fear. when we go to school, we do it from fear. say you're standing in the middle of route 95, and it's fear that motivates you to dodge the oncomong truck. is that an error or a betrayal of the best that is within us? actually: is there a distinction between hope and fear? as i dodge the truck, i hope to live and fear dying in the very same act. you can't have ne without the other, no matter what your fucking poster says. anyway: just shut up with the slop and try to give me the frigging argument.

history sure is boring and repetitive, ain't it? there have already been eighteen historical moments in the march to healthcare legislation, all of which i have already forgotten.

once upon a time i had a student named alex, one of the more problematic in my career as a teacher. i taught him in several classes from his first to last semester, which was a year ago. he usually showed up full of enthusiasm for the first couple of classes, then disappeared for weeks or months on end, then desperately tried to get the work done the last week or whatever. bright as hell, albeit the only student i ever saw drinking a beer in class.

he initially did the disciple thing a bit, was all about my books and blog etc. but he went off me because i was way too depressing and pessimistic. he cultivated optimism as a religion and became an aficionado of the ray kurzweil singularity thesis, which i hadn't previously heard of. he spent a few hours in my office trying to persuade me, indeed proving the whole thing mathematically: some moore's law-type argument, mustering all the greatest advances in human history into an accelerating pattern of amazing and inevitable progress. not only were we, in particular he, going to live forever, but when we achieved immortality we'd immediately realize that war and environmental destruction were non-optimal. in other words, if we could make it to 2035, we would be living in heaven. forever. it would be perverse or crazy, he said, to disagree with people as smart and informed as these singularity dudes.

he was disappointed that i just kept rolling my eyes, kept saying i doubt it, and kept saying i am just not the sort of person who can believe something like that, being profoundly disaffected, cynical, etc. i kept telling him that the people who were going to be doing all this were, unfortunately, people, and that it could be expected to be a disaster, whether or not it was immortality. he was extremely disappointed by my irrationality.

the singularity was an argument, in alex's hands, for smoking, drinking, and doing drugs: soon it wouldn't matter what you were doing to yourself. the dickinsonian, unforgivably, does not give causes of death. but i assume alex died of an overdose. of optimism.

day of rage.

Konstantin Doroshok, one of the protest leaders, said he negotiated with a Moscow official who agreed to allow a peaceful demonstration as long as participants refrained from calling for Putin's resignation. But Doroshok said the official later flew to Kaliningrad to tell him the deal had been overruled by others in Moscow determined to provoke bloodshed and portray the protesters as radical separatists.

so let me get this straight: if you call for putin's resignation, you are subject to violent reprisals. you know i could point to the press repressions, the assassination of critics (esp re: the chechen genocide). but the story linked aboove is plenty for you to understand what sort of regime is in control in moscow.

i'm at 93 out of hundreds of thousands on the nyt ncaa bracket contest. better look quick though because when the next set of games ends in an hour and a half i'll likely be fucked.

really i'm a huge sports fan, but just don't blog about it. but a bit more crowing: my various brackets had the northern iowa victory over #1 kansas yesterday, one of the greatest upsets in tournament history. and not by chance: i'd seen uni several times and felt they had a shot, anyway. the key was lucas o'rear's (yes, o'rear's) sideburns, which are extremely intimidating. course i messed up a bunch of other things, but 'm currently #117 on the nyt bracket contest.

one thing to see: whomever is running afghanistan is going to turn a blind eye to opium production. otherwise, you're going to destroy the economy and consign peasants to starvation. drugs are no more to be associated with terrorism than with democracy etc.

yo

WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- A 16-year-old boy who police said made an announcement at Walmart ordering all black people in a southern New Jersey store to leave was charged with harassment and bias intimidation, authorities said Saturday.

The boy, whose name is not being released because he is a juvenile, grabbed one of the courtesy phones at Walmart's Washington Township store Sunday evening and calmly announced: "Attention, Walmart customers: All black people, leave the store now," police said...

"This was an extremely disturbing event on many levels," Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said at a news conference. "Any statements like these that can cause harm or grave concern must be addressed as quickly we possibly can."

really we seem massively confused these days between yapping and killing, pranks and extremely disturbing, gravely concerning events. obviously, they'd like to send the kid to the electric chair or a re-education camp. but if the idea is that the act was criminal because it "harmed" people then i want to know, really, who and how.

the contrast devloped by david brooks, among others, between communitarianism and libertarianism, is tendentious. unless you're intention is to build a community through coercion - which is indeed the secret center of communitarianism - they are perfectly compatible. and if you think you can build a community through coercion, i think you are confused.

just gonna crow a second: on my ncaa bracket i had 14 of the 16 teams that advanced yesterday, including a bunch of upsets. my rank is 144 on the nytimes contest, which i figure probably is out of some tens or hundreds of thousands. i rock, beeches! now on the other hand i had marquette in the final four, so that loss ramifies throughout. and no doubt today will not be as fortunate. however, if the md terps win it all i'm golden.

bought a baseball today with the following warning: "for recreational use only."

sometimes with regard to the catholic priests/altarboys it's said that, you know, the frequency of pederasty among the priesthood is probably similar to that of the general population. um. horseshit. it seems to be everywhere, all the time. one would have to think that really there was an informal practice what we call child sexual abuse in the church: that this was a conventional practice, perhaps even to be encouraged as an aid to...celibacy, especially as a screaming misogynist might understand it: the real degradation is to touch a woman. i bet there are documents of this, going back centuries, only you can't subpoena the vatican, you know?

then again, as i've said many times, you can see that someone who views their own sexuality as horrendously sinful - especially self-loathing gay men in societies of extreme homophobia - would want to make a vow of celibacy. and then of course like most of us when we swear off sex such people are not able to keep that vow. now sex with boys might actually be proposed as a necessary outlet, a way to keep people in the priesthood.

i would say that if you haven't learned this lesson before now, you should let this teach you to stop being a catholic. or anyway be one only in the very attenuated sense in which you repudiate the authority of the human hierarchy of the church entirely. now that you can't exactly be a catholic and do that should teach you something...

Discussions ranged from whether President Ronald Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).

Of particular contention was the requirement that lessons on McCarthyism note that "the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government."

The Venona papers document communication between the Soviet Union and its spies. Historians dispute the extent to which transcripts show Soviet involvement in American government.

Also contentious were changes that asserted Christian faith of the founding fathers. Historians say that the founding fathers had a variety of approaches to religion and faith; some, like Thomas Jefferson, were quite secular.

now henry, i wouldn't think that the assertion that hip hop should not be taught as part of a lesson on american culture or that jeff davis's inaugural address should be included or that reagan should get more space are false, exactly. it would be perfectly possible to emphasize the christian faith of adams, for example, while de-emphasizing jeff's deism etc. this is not a series of false assertions; but rather, at worst, distortions of emphasis, like george washington carver's box. it ain't that easy!

the tx reactionary curriculum controversy will seem less dire if you ditch the basic delusions that: children are perfectly plastic and curricula make them what they are; that history at any level consists of a reciting of uncontroversial facts; that people remember what they learn in school; that history textbooks hold anyone's attention; that children agree with whatever they're told. such things are the nightmarish platitudes of those - starting with plato - who hold that we can transform the word by re-engineering a generation. the efficacy, and even the possibility, of education strike me as profoundly questionable. so i'm chill!

you also might think about this as the opposite number of a thousand pc interventions: the kind that got george washington carver or somebody's wifey their own shaded box. now, if you think that it's legit for leftists to re-write history books to reflect their contemporary ideas about social justice, you need to expect a backlash and also that everyone will play the same game. i think a lot of people would view a fundamental purpose of education as mobilizing the coming generation against global warming. you can call that science if you like, but it's also activism of the kind that's everywhere in school textbooks. i don't know: teach whatever the hell you like.

i wouldn't mind my kids getting taught by a creationist or a global-warming denialist or a mccarthyite. i better not mind, since really they're already getting indoctrinated - insofar as such a thing is possible - with a million things i disagree with. they are taught under the universal presumption, for example, that government has legitimacy and is based on some sort of social contract etc. not only are these views with which i disagree, they are views which i have literally demonstrated to be false, and which, to boot, reflect a groveling capitulation, a global failure of personality. even children have to think. now teaching them to think is just more of the same: teaching them to agree. so i say: tell old pharoah, let my babies go.

i am not a skeptic. quite the reverse, i guess, unless the reverse is dogmatism. rather i am pluralist as regards knowledge. i do not think there is a single technique, method, procedure, style or even a small group of them, that exclusively or invariably leads to knowledge. i say that whatever way you reach the truth (which i believe is out there; indeed that it is precisely as common as dirt) is a good way. for example, some subject-matters at some moments suggest or require science; others require sudden flashes of intuition or improvisational riffing to uncover. i actually think that teaching ought not to be scientifically studied (and that in some sense it cannot be). it is a human relationship and has to be processed or accounted for in a way that is in keeping with its actual subject-matter.

to take another example: i propose that aesthetic qualities (beauty, for example) can be the subject of perfectly true-or-false utterances: perhaps judgments of beauty are no more subjective than judgments abbout weight. but that doesn't mean they are quantifiable or that you need the same epistemic procedures to uncover and describe them. that there is one way to reach the truth (the alleged method of "science" for example) is itself an a priori metaphysical structure into which you're trying to jam the world. wait and see what works or what sheds light or what makes sense or what compels assent.

hey i just want to briefly thank henry for participating, and for consistently representing a different point of view here, over a period of years. usually we all gravitate to people who confirm what we believe: part of the problem of contemporary american political discourse. henry does better!

actually, there are cases where i would defer to expertise, especially if i didn't care very much how it turns out. but one might point out that expert opinion now on education is more or less the opposite of what it was thirty years ago, and will reverse again, no doubt. and one thing to keep in mind about experts: they are less critical and more unanimous than an average population: their status of experts is in part defined by their agreement with one another. they are more subject to irrational fads than the average illiterate peasant, for example.

the nyt argues with regard to texas that curricula shouldn't be politicized and should be left to teachers and experts (really? teachers? somehow i don't feel they are sincere about that); the expert thing is more or less their view of every issue of course. but of course this is disingenuous, and if teachers and experts were recommending, e.g., a more positive portrayal of conservatism or having second thoughts about darwinism, they'd be calling for democracy. (by definition, of course, no expert could endorse a more positive portrayal of conservatism.) let's say that you're setting and enforcing standards in a school system through the use of taxpayer money. then according to our system of government, the taxpayers ought to be setting the curriculum. in other words, you need to get rid either of the public school system or the democracy to do what the nyt thinks (at this moment) ought to be done.

if the state government of texas, or more relevantly at the moment the federal government, is going to set standards for curriculum then they are going to be, and should be, subject to political adjudication.

hip hop answer key

Identifications:
(1) Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, "Planet Rock"
(2) Public Enemy, "Rebel Without a Pause"
(3) Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
(4) Grandmaster Flash, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of ASteel"
(5) Ice Cube, "Today Was a Good Day"
(ec) KRS-One, "You Must Learn"

(6) deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, graffiti
(7) DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash
(8) dub
(9) try C. Delores Tucker, Rev. Calvin Butts
(10) Zulu Nation
(11) d
(12) b
(13) a
(14) c
(15) a
(16) c
(17) a
(18) b
(19) b
(20) d

Hip-Hop Mid-Term
Spring 2010



Section I: identifications (2 points each)
5 items

Section II: short answer (2 points each): Write the number of the question and the answer in your blue book.
(6) What are the four elements of hip hop?
(7) Name the three founding deejays of hip hop music.
(8) The style pioneered by Jamaican engineers such as King Tubby and Scientist is
(9) Name two black leaders who spoke out against hip hop music.
(10) What post-gang organization was formed in the Bronx by Afrika Bambaataa?

Section III: multiple choice (2 points each). Write the number of the question and the letter of the answer in your blue book.

(11) Who among the following did not appear in Wild Style:
(a) Fab Five Freddy
(b) Lee Quinones
(c) Lady Pink
(d) DJ Kool Herc

(12) Which of the following was not an album by Public Enemy:
(a) Fear of a Black Planet
(b) Death Certificate
(c) It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
(d) Yo! Bum Rush the Show

(13) A person who performs the role of what people in the US call a 'rapper' is known in Jamaica as a
(a) deejay
(b) emcee
(c) b-boy
(d) preacher

(14) The first predominant Jamaican pop style was
(a) rock steady
(b) roots reggae
(c) ska
(d) dancehall

(15) Who among the following was not a black nationalist leader:
(a) Martin Luther King, Jr.
(b) Malcolm X
(c) Angela Davis
(d) Noble Drew Ali

(16) Who among the following is not from the west coast:
(a) Ice Cube
(b) Ice T
(c) Professor Griff
(d) Snoop Dogg

(17) Marcus Garvey's worldwide organization of African people was called 
(a) The Universal Negro Improvement Association
(b) The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(c) The Rastafarians
(d) The Moorish Science Temple

(18) Louis Farrakhan is the leader of which group:
(a) The Moorish Science Temple
(b) The Nation of Islam
(c) The Rastafarians
(d) The Zulu Nation

(19) Clarence 13x (Father Allah) was the founder of which group:
(a) The Nation of Islam
(b) The Nation of Gods and Earths (5 Percenters)
(c) The Moorish Science Temple
(d) The Zulu Nation

(20) Ice Cube will
(a) love
(b) charm
(c) salute
(d) swarm
on any motherfucker in a blue uniform.














Section IV. Respond to one of the following in an essay. (60 points).

(a) Briefly set out the basic doctrines/key figures of black nationalism. To what extent do you think hip hop is a black nationalist political expression? Answer with regard to specific artists/moments.

(b) Chang and Sartwell both trace the origins of hip hop music to Jamaica. Do you think they overrate this influence? Describe the connections and perhaps some of the differences.

(c) The relation of hip hop music to gangs is complicated. What are some key ways or moments at which they intersect?

(d) To what extent do you think it is reasonable or plausible to look to hip hop artists for political leadership? What are some of the ways artists (such as Run DMC, KRS-One, Public Enemy, NWA, all or others entirely) have taken on or refused this role?

(e) In the light of the argument made by Robin D.G. Kelly, to what extent do you find the hip hop we have dealt with so far this semester misogynist or otherwise politically problematic? Array some examples (artists/songs) on either side of this debate and assess.

these people are so profoundly, entirely wrong. but i suppose if your vision of education is that little tommy has to compete with little wang in the new green global economy of the 84th century - the vision of flash gordon or thomas friendman - then this makes sense. personally, i'd just give little tommy a club and send him to china. the competition between tommy and wang is as to who can think least: whose thinking is most mechanical, i.e. closest to excellence.