cheese it, the cops!

huffpost on the naacp's report on the tea party. 

What most troubles the report's authors is the fact that the organizations within the Tea Party movement showing the fastest growth are the Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet, which have the most diffuse, locally based structures. "This would tend to indicate a larger movement less susceptible to central control, and more likely to attract racist and nativist elements at the local level," the report concludes.

i don't understand what has happened to people or to the concept of democracy etc. and i really, really do not understand what has happened to the civil rights movement. the very fact that a group would have "diffuse, locally based structures" is extremely troubling to the naacp. i suppose now they will be attacking 12-step programs, or volunteer fire departments, or the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for being too local and diffuse. any such movement might attract and has attracted extreme elements. fortunately, the naacp only attracts extreme morons. it's true that any organization without a politburo is dangerous and incomprehensible. sadly, organizations with politburos are also dangerous and incomprehensible. a pretty predicament!

i want you to notice that what the naacp says about the tea party is wholly, entirely, ferociously incompatible with the notion that the tea party is run by the republican party, or by mysterious evil financial puppeteers. better make up your mind. or really i would just issue in the most emphatic terms two attacks on the tea party which are completely incompatible with each other. my favorite fallacy and yours, the essence of american political logic: any argument is a good argument if i agree with the conclusion.

this beautifully confirms what i blogged on june 15: "there is no ceo of the tea party. jealous i think is not frustrated with that, just totally uncomprehending of even that possibility. there is no organization from which to expel somebody, and no one to do the expelling. (meanwhile everyone i saw that they actually did get on tv condemned racism.) but how is a guy "associated with the tea party in south carolina" supposed to start expelling people? ben jealous can expel people from his group, or could with the approval of the board of directors etc. but he cannot conceive of a movement without a hierarchy."

thanks chris bray!

ok so not to merely be savage: the altruism debate is important within evolutionary theory, although it's very old, and kropotkin - both a very serious scientist and the best philosopher anarchism has produced - was already arguing, compellingly or even decisively, for the de waal position in 1902. (he too was drawing moral conclusions, the part that wasn't decisive at all.) because some of the early formulations of evolution just portrayed the whole world as a war of each against each, it seemed to justify dog-eat-dog capitalism. well that was ridiculous, and again, even if evolution was absolutely nothing but a spectacle of mutual devourment, it would not follow that we ought to devour each other. but the opposite view, that evolution justifies an ethics of cooperative action - is precisely as false or as simply misconceived, though perhaps not as reprehensible. and i just want to mark that i think altruism - pure altruism - is perfectly real and something we see and do all the time, and that we wouldn't still exist as a species without cooperation.

so the point is important although behindhand within evolutionary theory. (i do want to drop a monkeywrench into the dewaal's apparently effortless use of other primates as indications of our own evolutionary history: also just a breathtaking fallacy.) but it does not bear on what values we ought to have or on the justification of those values. obviously it does not. you can't get ethics out of evolution any more than you can get, say, the pythagorean theorem out of evolution, or keynesian monetary policy out of evolution, or the principles of literary criticism out of evolution, or the latitude of madagascar out of evolution, or the periodical table of the elements out of evolution, etc etc. that's ok! that's not what this stuff is for, and it's breathtakingly obvious that these folks are out of the realm of their expertise. they don't even really know what questions to ask, or what answers have actually been given. they can't even formulate the problem coherently. but evolutionary biology might be interesting and important even if it does not solve absolutely all questions. 

this is really cool.

i always thought juan williams was almost completely uninteresting, just peddling bromides or conventional political positions. but i will certainly defend him in this case. the stuff he said comes up far far short of any sort of a firing offense for any sort of news organization that does not regard itself as the bastion of a particular ideology. as i say, we're rolling into a renewed era of extremely narrow, completely self-righteous, and utterly useless political correctness. y'all have fun!

seriously that's why we need to elect sarah palin, carl paladino, christine o'donnell. it's astonishing, but they appear actually to say things. in information theory, info is inversely related to redundancy: you can't be informed of what you already know. that's why there is no sense at all in listening to a speech by obama, for example. his take on the gulf oil spill, e.g., consisted of an undifferentiated hum well below the range of human hearing. but palin and o'donnell hold themselves to a higher standard: they are unpredictable. this opens up the possibility that they are actually communicating something. now that is a problem, because if you say something someone might disagree with it. it might turn out to be false, etc. but at least it's not nothing. i admit that that's a pretty low standard for political discourse, but it's also much better than we were doing up to that point. 

it may be strategically useful for the american state to take the position, or to maintain the rhetorical stance, that islam is hyper-mellow religion of peace. that doesn't make it true. and the fact that it is a useful thing to say does not entail that all of us, inside the war machine or outside it, must pretend to agree with what hillary clinton pretends to believe. 

i like the form of this. williams was saying that, like, when he's flying, seeing folks in muslim costume makes him nervous. he was reporting a personal experience, one that is surely typical in post 9.11 america. it's an experience we all have - well i wouldn't say 'nervous' but i also wouldn't say i don't notice at all. right? it's an experience we all have that cannot even be mentioned, like pretending there is no such thing as masturbation. the whole idea of these restrictions is to make it impossible to tell the truth or even to relate your own experiences. 

i guess i am in heavy blog mode! on evolutionary ethics. i assume that pretty soon these folks are going to start invoking evolution in detail as a set of moral principles. so if i was a 17-year-old trying to think about whether to go to the party, they'd tell me that drinking beer is counter-evolutionary. (however, it's worth saying that of course "peer pressure" is evolutionary, being the very essence of cooperation, so maybe i should drink beer after all, as long as i'm not doing it because i myself want to, but to establish my spot in the pecking order.) or if i was tempted to oppose, say, the democratic healthcare plan, i'd be informed that my activities were counter-adaptive, leading to an evolutionary degeneration of the species. or if i was considering whether to have an abortion, or whether to contribute to doctors without borders rather than oxfam, the evaluation would come in terms of what evolution demands. or say i was trying to figure out whether the afghan war is a war of self-defense. evolution says yes! pretty soon these people are going to appear in lab coats, on a set smoking with dry ice, interpreting to us the will of evolution. in fact, that is precisely what they're doing already. to which the only reasonable response is (a) that's horseshit. produce the chain of "reasoning," you self-deluded idiot. and (b) so what? why should i do what evolution demands?  

i think first you'd better get on board that evolution is not intentional, that it's not guided by a conscious goal. you've got a long long way to go on that. and second, it is amazing to think of creatures defying the course of evolution, rebelling against it, etc. everything i can possibly do is compatible with evolution, and i surely cannot violate the process by which i came to be and that orders the living world around me. it's like looking at a platypus and going: that creature is working against evolution! kill it! or criticizing some squirrel behavior on the grounds that it violates the very laws of nature, the principles underlying all life.

at any rate, in addition to being utterly implausible or just a complete non-starter in multiple dimensions, evolutionary ethics is completely insincere. its only actual function is as a pitiful argument for the stuff you already believe. so: ask yourself: are you genuinely open to empirical data showing that evolution selects for psychopaths and therefore that conscienceless continual random killing is good? will you take up whatever system of values is actually embodied in the evolutionary process (supposing that made any sense)?  i'll tell you this: evolution has not eliminated the psychopath. are you taking a scientific approach, at least as science was practiced before the great al gore: i am genuinely open to whatever the empirical results might be? no not at all. absolutely all you're doing is groping for any kind of "scientific" basis, no matter how baldly ridiculous, that confirms your utilitarianism, or your liberal politics. it's pathetic.  

so i'm sort of trying to develop a reading of american cynicism of the mencken/bierce variety. and actually, though it doesn't seem that way, folks like that are moralists, even extreme and extremely passionate moralists. they've given up all their naive idealistic hopes, supposedly, but they are exquisitely sensitive to the forces that made them do so: in particular, hypocrisy. i would see bierce and mencken as disappointed emersons, emersons who finally let the actual world destroy their optimism. 

one would have to think that this will happen here, that there will have to be a moment of draconian spending cuts. i wonder whether folks will respond in england as they have in france or greece, and one wonders whether, if the same sort of thing were to happen here, there'd be riots in the streets and so on. in some ways, it's a nice reminder of human limitations; it might take a decade or two when you blow the thing up onto a massive scale, but perhaps ultimately, as muddy waters put it, you can't spend what you ain't got, and you can't lose what you ain't never had. maybe the state is going to have no more luck than did god in transforming the basic human condition in which labor is necessary and death looms, or in making us good. god's utter impotence on all these matters is now widely known. maybe the state's will be too. in some ways, though, maybe we're a bit better braced for this sort of thing by a vague history of self-reliance, though that has been thoroughly superseded. i do note, however, that when christie does this in new jersey, people squawk, but they don't start firebombing police vehicles (or 'cars' as ordinary people misleadingly call them).

that i can recall, i have never voted for a republican for anything. as i'm pondering whether and how to vote this year, however, i'm thinking one possibility is voting straight republican (or at least where there's not a libertarian on the ballot). now i truly can't stand republican willingness to enforce religious principles by state power. their position on national security issues is repulsive. on the other hand, it's hard not to feel some sympathy with the party of no: that's something i can respect. of course the most acute problem with our current politics as i see it is the sudden expansion of the scope of federal spending = power. i voted for obama, but it is perhaps time to show that i'm no more down with what he's doing than i am with the pledge to america. the republicans are now struggling with the tea-party and ron-paul-type wings, and their strategy is basically at least small-gov rhetoric, so that's good from my point of view. (of course the spectacle of john boehner, libertarian, is not exactly convincing.)

and like a lot of actual liberals (of which of course i am not one) i am disappointed with the ways that the obama admin is not much different than the bush admin. they're really going to (a) permit openly gay recruits to join the armed forces, and (b) defend don't ask don't tell in the courts? i don't know: just let the thing go as unconstitutional and have done with it. who cares about the scope of executive power in the abstract, compared with the actual cruel and discriminatory treatment of many actual human beings? the bush/cheney national security state is, not to put too fine a point on it, deeply evil, and deeply incompatible with our form of government and with human freedom (and indeed in many instances with human life.) but the bo admin is just availing itself of all those resources. it's almost as greedy for cash and power as the bush admin on national security issues; far more so in terms of state intervention in the economy, the institutions for encouraging state dependency (social programs) etc. if i thought we were going to repeal the 14th amendment or roll back decriminalization of marijuana or gay rights, i would never vote for a republican. but as a slight counter-weight to the current superstatism it might make some sense. well, probably not. i don't know if i can really pull the lever! my demographic status may be more powerful than i thought.

also, i would say i am repulsed by the current wave of extreme, uncritical scientism: the rule of experts, emblematized by al gore but finally utterly ascendant in bo. in some ways i'd rather have a theocracy, because religion still depends to some extent on individual commitment. but the deference to science-like authority is all about offloading your responsibility for your own beliefs. it is an authoritarian structure, incapable of justifying itself, profoundly uncritical (these are all excruciating ironies in the face of its own self-understanding). i believe it is leading us toward some sort of nightmare, a pseudo-rational attempt to transform of the human species.

well, if i had to guess, i'd guess that anita hill was telling the truth. but the rather bizarre interaction  between hill and virginia thomas tells you more or less all you need to know about law professors. if ms. thomas wanted to offer an "olive branch," then suggesting an apology was the wrong approach. but i love hill's response: call campus security! someone left a voicemail on my phone requesting an apology! campus security turned the matter over to the fbi, suggesting that perhaps a law professor is running brandeis's security operation. i don't know: why don't y'all pretend to be human beings, or see whether human action is possible without litigation? anita hill considers anything that irks or disturbs her a crime, which might be a problem with the initial accusations as well.

the very darkest and yet most hilarious things i've ever read are the sick stories of ambrose bierce. (like my favorite murder, an imperfect conflagration, or, god help us, oil of dog). amusingly enough, these are often characterized as "tall tales," or even "tall tales of the old west": if you came looking for pecos bill, you'd be in for a rude awakening; that's why i'm going with "sick stories." obviously they owe a lot to swift, though swift in his utmost biliousness could have conceived nothing quite like this. bierce wrote a bunch of stories in this vein, each better than the last.

i think their amazing satiric bite comes from their routineness, which constructs an audience. the narrators just assume that they are speaking to an audience of thieves, murderers, animal-torturers, and ministers of the lord. that is, the stories of bierce characterize the society around him, the american reading public, his very own audience, as crazed psychopaths living just beneath a surface of highly polite, decorous appearance, a punctilious observation of social norms, the niceties of law or business coupled with perfectly routine mass murders. it's not only that that's what people do in the stories; it's that in writing into the world he creates bierce just blandly continuously implies that we are precisely the same.

one way to think about this in in terms of war. bierce was at shiloh, chickamauga, sherman's march across georgia, and war of course is the great theme of many of his short stories. what he took himself to have seen was the utter darkness behind the facade of civilization: his great theme.

see i just wouldn't take the bait; i wouldn't rise to the challenge. how can you have morals in a world without god? ok you'd better explain to me exactly how you get morals in a world with god. by sheer decree? is goodness simply overwhelming power? i don't know; your speculations have grown somewhat too cosmic; you want to be assured at a level that is just not realistic given our actual limitations, our predicament. however, this momentary spasm of scientism that we're in is just as speculative, just as much sheer assertion as the most rococo theological system. the problem though with taking something on faith or with the discipline of evolutionary biology is that the people who do it are not particularly insightful when they come to examine their own foundations. dawkins dogmatizes like an archbishop.

at any rate, expect from science the sort of thing that science can deliver, and not the same sort of thing you might get from speculative metaethics.

alright once more into this thing about getting morality out of evolution. let me just remind anyone who's forgotten that i don't believe in god and i think natural selection has to more or less be true. now let me add that i agree entirely with de waal and kropotkin and gould that cooperative activity is adaptive, or more strongly that without it the species would hardly have got going before extinction. so here's my only question: have you now explicated morality's binding force? have you justified your moral values? no. not even a little. 

first of all, though it is not implausible to think that cooperation is selected for, it is also not implausible to think that competition, murder, rape, and war are also selected for. depends on your circs. a pacifist human species would never have arisen. and since the basic form of the argument from evolution (though this is certainly wrong) is that any quality that the species widely displays must be or have been adaptive, then of course our violence and destruction emerges from evolution as surely as our cooperation. the only reason de waal does not believe that evolution teaches that we ought to kill the folks across the river is because he starts out with a moral theory, which he will work evolution to support.

and let's just say, counter-factually, that evolution always only selects for cooperation, and that any failure to cooperate is counter-adaptive. well this supports the idea that we ought to cooperate only only the further premise that the human race ought to exist. i, personally, reject this supposition utterly. but evolution itself certainly rejects it: there is no more reason the species ought to exist than that it ought not. evolution uses extinction just the way it uses flourishing, and just keeps right on. it no more favors the human than the protazoa. it loved the humble pterodactyl no less than it loved sir isaac newton, and killed them both indifferently.

even if it were the case that we always do actually cooperate, as evolution prescribes - the absolutely best possible set of facts for the evolutionary moralists - still it would not follow that we ought to cooperate. but of course we don't always cooperate. if evolution could justify anything, it would justify only exactly what is actually the case. a beautiful thought, but hardly a reasonable moral system or way to show that war is wrong, etc. it's adaptive insofar as it's actual. evolution selected for it insofar as it actually occurs (again that can't be right, but there is no other argument).

i propose that what i've just said is entirely decisive: a knock-down demonstration that the position of de waal or sam harris is false. it is obviously false, justified precisely only by wishful thinking. interacting with apes all day doesn't bear on this matter at all.

i guess what i'd ask de waal is why he wants a substitute for god. 

well now, this, by the very-often-excellent michael gerson, is absolutely exactly right.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," he recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, "and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared."

Let's unpack these remarks.

Obama clearly believes that his brand of politics represents "facts and science and argument." His opponents, in disturbing contrast, are using the more fearful, primitive portion of their brains. Obama views himself as the neocortical leader -- the defender, not just of the stimulus package and health-care reform but also of cognitive reasoning. His critics rely on their lizard brains -- the location of reptilian ritual and aggression. Some, presumably Democrats, rise above their evolutionary hard-wiring in times of social stress; others, sadly, do not.

Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president.

The neocortical presidency destroys the possibility of political dialogue. What could Obama possibly learn from voters who are embittered, confused and dominated by subconscious evolutionary fears? They have nothing to teach, nothing to offer to the superior mind. Instead of engaging in debate, Obama resorts to reductionism, explaining his opponents away.

 

why should you vote democratic, particularly obama style? because he's smart and his opponents are stupid, which ironically isn't exactly itself a scientific result, or even a non-fallacy. but if you want to be smart, or at any rate want to fail to be regarded as stupid, here is a very easy way: agree with whatever bo says. because where other people have policies and values - quaint notions from a previous stage of human evolution - obama speaks as Reality Itself. where other people have beliefs, har har, he has Facts. at any rate, i hope that as the american liberal becomes an entirely reviled vestigial minority - corrupted by continual self-congratulation, eeking out a subsistence living in the cliff dwellings of nyc or whatever, huddling together muttering the same words in the same order as evidence of their critical capacities - he or she will be able to comfort him of herself with his or her sat scores or with something tantamount to the ability to read the scientific american. 

it's funny to be circling around to mencken. he was the hero of my father and my grandfather: both franklin sartwells, both hard-drinking newspapermen just down the road in dc, for whom mencken was the greatest of their very own kind. i believe they both took on a semi-ironic reactionary stance in politics in conscious homage to their sage. it mattered that mencken came from a working-class background and never went to college; he was a practical newsman with ink on his hands. 

so i have a lovely weathered three-volume mencken autobiography, published by knopf in 1940 and consisting of happy days, newspaper days, and heathen days. they are inscribed "FGSartwell, 1943" and then "and Frank Sartwell, his son, to Crispin Sartwell, his son, on his 21st birthday. June 20, 1979" (that was in the last year of my father's life). but also mencken's undoubted status as a man of letters lent respectability or dignity to the status of newsman. 

bierce and twain were beloved on all the same grounds, and i also have my dad's devil's dictionary. i never met my grandfather, but it would shock me if he didn't cultivate a nice disillusionment with regard to the entire human condition and a humorous leverage thereon, since that is the code of the sartwells!

mencken (1926):

On Cynicism

One of the most curious human delusions lies in the theory that cynics are unhappy men - that cynicism makes for general biliousness and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact that cynics make other men unhappy. But they are themselves the most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too dreadful to put into formal words, at least usually has the merit of being true - and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence. He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom. The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months, two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the durable satisfactions of life.

 

here is my prediction for the future of our amazing species. it is not based on mere speculation, but on a careful and systematic and strictly scientific application of astrology, tarot readings, crystal gazing, and the reading of human entrails.

we white men have had quite an amazing run at oppressing everybody: we bitch-slapped you if you were non-white or if you were a non-man: we fucked some shit up.

now due to a variety of factors, including the liberation movements of the fuckees, we found that it was adaptive to develop a bad conscience. we've reached the point at which we at least have to mouth the various platitudes that result from regarding non-white people and non-men as our equals.

so preternaturally powerful are we according to these movements that we oppress people unconsciously or autonomically. every sentence we utter, however apparently innocent or irrelevant, constitutes a possibly oppressive act. we make people commit suicide or murder just by slapping each other on the back and jovially using the word 'gay.' try to kiss a woman today and you open yourself up to universal loathing and interminable legal proceedings. our merest sniff subordinates the entire third world, etc.

so we portray ourselves publicly as chastened by reflection on our own evil. we're never sure when we are expressing our freakish, loathsome power, so we simply try not to say anything with any content. we pay more lip service to racial and gender justice than do our victims. we are mellow benevolent universalists as we appear in public, though what we actually think in the privacy of our own heads is none of your damn business.

while we've been trying to be extremely agreeable lest we set a foot wrong, our immense oppressiveness has been addressed from the other side by the recreation of girls. boys have to be persuaded to ameliorate or conceal anything smacking of power, lest our profoundly unfortunate history be repeated in future generations. but girls of course need to claim their power: they have been taught assertiveness now for a couple of generations. whereas we keep our actual judgments and opinions to ourselves, knowing they are evil artifacts of injustice, the hyper-aggressiveness of girls is a blow for human liberation. the self-esteem of boys, so central to a monstrous history, must be suppressed. the self-esteem of girls must be encouraged to the point at which they glow like blinding suns.

in brief, we are entering into an era directed by the female. the "fair sex" never had to deal with white man's burden, never had to listen to the careful critique of their hormonal essence, never had to learn to regard their own history as a vicious human degradation, at least not as the degraders. instead, it is the history of an amazing rise against all odds that by all means must continue to and well beyond full equality.

this era will make colonialism, the slave trade, the world wars, gay-bashing, etc look like minor moral miscalculations. with the courage to be themselves and a capacity for self-reflection roughly equivalent to that of the tree sloth, women will run everything and devise means of competition with one another and oppression of us that will consume the world in a storm of fire. this i have seen. 

 

 

no telling when, but i have been soaking in mencken (and bierce and twain). mencken is truly astounding. fantastically productive, even while flirting around continuously with hooch and movie starlets (aileen pringle, e.g.), traveling about here and there, and supervising a variety of periodicals.

the prose is almost unbelievably alive, vivid in its every sentence; it arouses my envy. he is an auto-didact of epic proportions, and behind each little declaration is the equivalent of a number of ph.d.s: in history, philosophy, literature. the american language is an immense work of scholarship: tantamount to writing the oxford english dictionary. and even there the prose fucking sparkles. 

he is an extremely strong literary critic: frank, with an almost unerring judgment; he has a way of zeroing in on the writer's weaknesses, but is also capable of cherishing all sorts of surprising things. his assessment of bierce, for example, is harsh and loving and right. but this is entailed by his basically so-right reading of the whole american literary tradition.

throughout his life, people who encountered him professed themselves surprised to find the bitter cynic mencken to be the sweetest and most jovial person imaginable. this is not surprising at all; just beneath the terrible disaffection lurks a real love of human foibles, an inexhaustible curiosity about the human condition, which he fundamentally affirms as endlessly amusing.

the positions are beautifully and amusingly perverse: pitted quite consciously against his age. that his basic commitment in politics was to individual liberty - something he said of himself - is obvious. this is not to say that mencken is always right or in good taste. his germanophilia was sort of amusing on behalf of the kaiser during world war i; after that it got less charming. he had a pretty primitive darwinianism going, part of his reactionary realism, etc. but in a way those are quibbles. my sense is that mencken - a true celebrity in his own time - is comparatively neglected today.

what he got away with is almost unimaginable: screeching anti-religious atheism much more beautifully defended than in dawkins or even hitchens (treatise on the gods); pro-german tendencies; utter skepticism of the political and aesthetic consensi surrounding him; a systematic program to destroy every national myth, starting with democracy. what he has to say about such topics as women and marriage and sex is entirely unacceptably frank, brutal in its sardonic truth. and for all that he was a beloved piece of americana, a kind of norman rockwell character: the barber-shop skeptic. but here with insane chops, introducing nietzsche or ibsen to american audiences, for example. chicks dug him. writers groveled before him. he made baltimore into a kind of anti-romantic paradise, the anti-center of the anti-universe.

the book below tells the almost unbelievable story of mencken roaring through the twentieth century. for one theme, just three little girls, growing up best friends in montgomery alabama: sara haardt mencken, zelda sayre fitgerald, and tallulah bankhead, later depicted doing catastrophic drunken gymnastics at the algonquin, where mencken maintained a suite. admittedly their dads were supreme court justices and state senators. unimaginably sexy high-society fundamentally non-monogamous debs from the deep south on a party tear; oh and brilliant artists of various kinds. what if paris hilton was a genius?

 "Zelda never learned the gentle art of 'policing' her husband's parties," writes sara mayfield. "Instead, she rode with him on the tops of cabs, drank toasts to him from her slipper, and flirted with his friends." zelda is depicted more or less ghost-writing scott's books, and as producing the immortal sentence "plagiarism begins at home."

i've got to say that zelda vid is charming; the youtube tribute is its own little democratic artform.

i more or less share the current moral panic over bullying (well, sorta), and it's hard to look at gay students committing suicide and not suggest that something should be done. but i also scent a new tsunami of censorship and self-censorship in the offing: a new and even narrower and more excruciating political correctness. so various groups have been protesting the use of the word 'gay' in movies. i saw the statement of one group accusing vince vaughn squarely of causing the death of untold young people with the fatal phrase "that's so gay." please. you know there has to be some notion of art. so for example if you were trying to realistically depict loutish young american heterosexual men - and this is the essence of the current idea of comedy in america - they would absolutely have to say "that's so gay," as this is central to the actual vernacular. treating actual problems by demanding that people delete phonemes from movies is a sad admission that you can't do anything actual, and that you have massive totalitarian impulses, and that you are a philistine from soup to nuts. it's like blaming jim crow on mark twain using the word 'nigger' in huckleberry finn and suggesting that the greatest american novel must be burned. that is some gay shit, y'all.

one thing i dig: when someone declares her own wisdom continuously, while simply rehearsing the idiot nostrums of her demographic. at any rate, it takes you about three sentences to realize that rebecca costa is a sheer cretin, the sting of which is only slightly mitigated by her constant declarations of her own intelligence. these are no doubt inspired by her mentor: bill maher, the greatest monster of self-congratulation since jesus. we face a simple choice: facts or beliefs? do we agree with whatever the climate lab says, or do we...think and generate ideas independently somehow? 

at any rate, i'd tell her to read some epistemology, but that might hint that she can read. you can't oppose facts to beliefs: some beliefs are true, in which case they represent facts. fact has to be opposed to...you know, fantasy, irreality or something. "when facts become incomprehensible, we switch to beliefs." this sentence is itself incomprehensible. it indicates, if it indicates anything, both that the world makes no sense, and that in believing things we leave this incomprehensible world behind. 

the idea, a conventionality of the educated left, is that we can cease to believe anything, replacing a commitment to any proposition with the facts themselves. "fact" here refers to whatever the experts say this week. this is indeed a remarkable achievement, a transcendence of the human condition so profound that it makes no sense whatever. but i am relieved to hear that costa has eliminated mere belief entirely: for example, that she does not believe that the earth is growing warmer. 

i don't know, maybe there is an esl-type issue and costa doesn't actually understand how native speakers of english use the terms "fact" and "belief."

if the emergence of the miners on the surface was like a new birth, then the entrance of the capsule into the hole, as captured in seconds 6-12 of the vid below, was the...conception.

 

so i'm sort of thinking my next book will be the american cynic, focusing on the attitude toward life of ambrose bierce and h.l. mencken. for one thing, i've learned the hard way that if you're going to work through people's voluminous complete works, it helps if they are really, really good writers.

i hate to contemplate losing russ feingold from the senate. he's the smartest and the most principled senator. just to remind: the lone vote against the patriot act. watching him question alito on executive power was a lesson in american government.

allen ginsberg's howl is certainly the most important poem of the twentieth century: a liberation of all constraints, the manifesto of a new honesty, a whitmanian distillation of the very essence of america. it has but one flaw: it sucks. it starts sucking from the very first line and continues to suck throughout its epic extent. never has a poem sucked so effortfully or been more thoroughly or unintentionally dedicated to sheer suckiness. where some poems are profound, howl simply sucks. where some poems are witty and delightful, howl sucks and sucks. in its original context, it sucked. and for a new era, it sucks again just as hard. it is certainly a classic, and will be sucking still long after we are all dead.

the problem with hope is disappointment. the problem with disappointment, of course, is that hope could break out anew. if so, it must be ruthlessly repressed. if there's one excellent thing about the obama admin, it's that it's converting millions of idealistic young people into disaffected, disappointed, detached cynics: in other words, into actual human beings living in something like the real world.

headline: squirrels refuse medical care

better get it while it's hot; may be up on the washpost as a prank. it concerns a single injured squirrel which, prodded by a squirrel medic, leaped up and bounded away. the post seems to have the christian science squirrel but not the caustic spill in hungary on the front page

solomon burke rocked.

i'm so looking forward to secretariat. i heard diane lane is amazing in the title role. 

one thing the sanchez thing demonstrates yet again: oppression is a hierarchy, with each group vying for the honor of being the most oppressed group. with regard to each group, the group just below it on the spread sheet has the function of telling them to stop whining. and yet, without whining, there is no democracy. really we should develop a complete table with numerical indices of oppression, in order to rationally adjust our affirmative action programs. we could go from jewish/irish hermaphrodites (oq=3.211) to learning disabled illegal aliens (oq=7.349). multiply your oppression quotient by your sat scores and voila! merit. i can only imagine the pain and barriers that rick sanchez has had to undergo due to his last name, even though his latinoness is indetectible otherwise. he's grateful to be latino, but bummed out not to be black, but at least he's not jewish. 

i've heard a number of people express puzzlement over why some college kid would dabble in harassing, bullying, messing with, people that he perceives as gay. i've got a simple answer for you: one does this in order to establish one's own heterosexuality. and i think you'll see this structure in a number of cases: you pick out someone who can be interpreted as a little different, in almost any dimension. then to fuck that kid up on that ground means: i am not different; i am the same; i am the norm. now one thing i would suggest: social unity or solidarity cannot be produced except by means of such procedures. this is the sort of process by which social identities are actually constructed; it's intended for an audience of similarly desperate conformists. these are the procedures by which heterosexuality is articulated as a norm. but if you wanted to produce homosexuality as the norm, you'd have to move in the same direction: self-identification through systematic, or if necessary entirely arbitrary, exclusions. each exclusion of the other is an imaginary exclusion of a portion of the self, a lopping of differences to make oneself normative, a universal. each of us is dark. together, we are coagulated midnight: think about this when you think about your utopia of social cohesion, or when you assert that we are entirely constituted by one another, that our world is "social." all too social.

well the hysteria of the moment is bullying, not that it isn't an serious issue or a devastating reality in particular children's lives. i think you'd better first off figure out what exactly you mean. i would think that bullying involves harassment, physical or verbal abuse, intimidation, etc, directed at the victim. by that definition (well, it would need refining: it involves young people, probably, etc) the tyler clementi case is not a case of bullying. it's deeply wrong. it's homophobic. it's an entirely gratuitous violation of the sort of privacy we should all expect. but secretly recording someone and posting it on the internet is not exactly bullying. it's closer to slander or extortion.