cheese it, the cops!

listening to the media focusing on exactly one moment from the new sarah palin self-defense video: her use of the phrase "blood libel." now i think she or her writer probably vaguely recalled this phrase from somewhere and used it in the sense of 'libeling me and people like me as murderers,' saying essentially that she has blood on her hands. i don't know, it's sort of a gaffe, or unfortunate moment of some ignorance, though i doubt that most americans could elucidate the concept of 'blood-libel' in anti-semitic history very clearly. but it's hard to read it as anti-semitic, as it appears to identify palin herself as the jew (libeled for having within him the blood of the murderers of jesus). anyway, get over it and deal with the substance of the statement, which is irreproachable, more or less. one pundit said "you won't hear a gaffe like that from obama tonight." well, he's got more and better staff, for one thing; anyone can use the wrong phrase without understanding all the connotations.

let me try to make the 'disqualified' thing stick with a simplified scenario. ok let's take some assertion of fact, and stipulate that it is as likely to be true as untrue (the assumptions can be adjusted to deal with real scenarios). it could be 'palin influenced loughner' or it could be 'there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life' or something. now insofar as people formed opinions on such claims based on the state of factual knowledge at the time - which is the only rational standard - we would expect the yeses and nos to be relatively evenly distributed across at least some ways of sorting populations, namely those that are arbitrary with respect to access to information. so now suppose that all the leftists think that there is no extra-terrestrial intelligent life and all the rightists think there is. you wouldn't be justified in asserting of any particular person that their belief was based on irrelevant factors, but it would nevertheless appear that the beliefs of (at least) half the members of each group are based on irrelevant factors or are clearly irrational. that should be plenty to make you doubt what any one of these people - in this case everyone - says. it tends to disqualify everyone. it ought to.

a rational procedure would be to ignore the opinions of everyone in the debate, in that case. but now say there were a few anomalies: leftists who believed in extra-terrestrial life, e.g. it would not of course follow that they were actually applying some relevant procedure instead of just wishing or trying to boost their ego, for example (though it does indicate that the belief is not merely based on social desperation or in-group loyalty: surely a pretty good hypothesis about why the distribution of opinions takes on the form it does), but it would be a good initial presumption. what you couldn't do with the anomalous cases is apply the 50% rule, and you would need to check their actual belief-generating procedures. 

one premise of this argument is that one's political position is irrelevant to the factual claim that palin influenced loughner. i take this to be obvious. it's not like 'we ought to help the poor' or 'supply-side economics is wrong' or 'obama is my president' - bear on whether palin influenced loughner. that my anarchism is true does not bear one way or another; nothing could be more obvious.

this might make you re-assess the credibility of a lot of people, possibly including yourself. climate change is another compelling example. we've got a series of factual assertions, and we've got an extremely asymmetrical distribution of views through the political spectrum. that tends to impugn the credibility of every single participant, except those who are on the 'wrong' side of the factual question with regard to their political affiliation.

 

it really is astonishing watching what these folks will do to preserve their moral superiority to their opponents. so as soon as it's pointed out that there's no evidence of palin's influence, we start trying stuff like this: 'he assassinated a politician. it is by definition a political act.' no more than killing the baker cause he's doing your wife is an act of confectionary. here's the truly pathetic crap, though: "it's never wrong to reflect on our political rhetoric." it's never wrong to reflect on the beauty of the rose either, the question is whether that is the way to understand the actual case before you. the position - formed of course on evidence drawn purely from your own political positions - is that sarah palin is a murderer, that your political opponents are monsters. then there's screen after screen of completely - obviously - dishonest attempts to continue to claim that at the same time as you are saying that that's not what you're saying. i have to figure that this chain of strategic claptrap can't really be engaged in wholly unconsciously. could one really be that mistaken to this extent about what one is saying or why or when or about what? words for these folks have power. but no meaning.

you know, "the media" thinks in terms of constructing a narrative. that's even what they learn their job is in communications programs. and there's a half-assed lame-brained metaphysics that sort of says that narratives are all there is to reality. so they swing into action and they create a narrative. and the fact that they are beautifully fact-free - absolutely pristine of actual information - shows the whole big problem with that half-assed theory of truth itself. and it's also true that even the discourse will eventually be bent by actual facts; bad or purely hallucinatory or prospective though the narratives may be (they fit the event into a pre-existing template at almost any cost), they always also bend in the screaming wind of reality. still there could be more faced-up and less dishonest approaches, especially in the reporting of news.

cnn is actually polling on the question of whether extreme rhetoric led to the shootings, as if they think everyone is obliged to take up a position in absence of facts. polling is a key moment in imposing the 'frame' or creating the truth by constructing the narrative. indeed for all i know everyone actually does have a position on the matter already, perfectly predictable from their party affiliation. that's a hell of a way to develop an answer to a question of fact, isn't it? it's a kind of category mistake, as though: 'was loughner influenced by right-wing rhetoric' is a question like 'is abortion wrong?': you have to decide on the basis of your moral/political values. if you find yourself agreeing with your own segment of the political spectrum on this, i would reflect on your belief-generating procedures. i am going to regard that provisionally as disqualifying you: apparently the question for you is not at all about factual truth. btw, i don't think the facts are helping the glenn-beck-did-it theory so far.

thinking about y'all the same way y'all think about palin: what if there is an assassination attempt on palin today? maybe the assassin blows up a bunch of other people. before we actually find out anything, we will of course assert it's because a thousand op-ed columnists and television hosts held her, you know, partly responsible for "atmosphere" that led to the murder of all those good people. it's a matter of moral luck, for one thing: how bad your rhetoric is depends on what actually happens. so anyway, fox news develops a story-line: it's paul krugman's fault, etc. then it's days of: nobel prize winner kills with his words; how could american political rhetoric have grown so extreme, polarized, and irresponsible as to have produced a krugman? why is paul krugman so angry? you know people actually do follow slavishly along with what krugman says, like dylan klebold listening to marilyn manson.

you know i want to hate david books, and he is like a natural moderate - every insight brings us toward a reasonable middle - and i am kind of a natural extremist. but where other people just emote in a chorus, brooks really does think.

a good parallel - though without the screeching partisanship - is columbine. the media pivoted within hours to video games. pretty soon we were having a "national discussion" about that - whatever the hell it actually had to do with anything - and not about the actual event. well the actual event was overwhelming and you don't know what to say. but you can sleepwalk down the video game road - children imitate what they see like lobotomized monkeys - and everything seems comprehensible. really, cnn could have spent the last 72 on drowning pool and we could have made this all about music. it could all be about the diagnosis of mental illness. or...whatever works in the cultural mood of the moment. but at least there is some evidence that he listened to drowning pool. i mean we could just make shit up: you go straight from 'perhaps his state of mind was due to multiple concussions' - without there being any evidence that he ever had a concussion at all - and then spend the next few weeks on that, until people sort of forget about the whole thing. however, concussions are not as telegenic as sarah palin, so let's go with that.

no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary politics or a radical political philosophy or envisioned a big transformation can be entirely comfortable with the the notion that "anti-government" rhetoric must be...controlled, lest it lead to violence. that sort of thing threw eugene debs in prison and deported emma goldman.

it's amazing watching cnn; every piece frames the thing in terms of the dangerous rhetoric of the right. the coverage is focused on sarah palin, and on a hundred people calling for moderation and civility. now they've been upbraided enough to preface each such foray by saying: we don't know his politics. there is no evidence that the rhetoric was a factor, etc. right so how can it possibly be right to frame the thing this way right now? it seems like a bizarre case of journalistic...i don't know, malfeasance, like a violation of the whole basic practice. if there is no factual basis then how can this be the whole thing? i don't know why events like this immediately have to freeze into a shape. like after fort hood it took krauthammer twenty seconds to pivot to 'we need more profiling' and then that framed a whole big chunk of the debate. but this is more egregious.

one function of the hyper-simple explanation utterly abstracted from the actual human situation is that it gives people a sense that they understand and hence in some way might control events like this. but the cost of that kind of cognitive leverage is too high: you lose the thing you're supposedly talking about entirely. in this case, we just force the thing into the approved channel and then all the sentences flow autonomically; you can't tell one op-ed from the next. well you've done something, but getting an actual understanding of the actual situation was the opposite of the goal.

i guess this will oblige me to take it seriously when they produce loughner's sarah-palin -crosshairs map or show him to have been addicted to her twitter feed etc. what i'm saying is compatible with his turning out to be a straightup rightwing gun-nut irs-abolisher or whatever, and i am not going to call for these positions to be silenced in any case, though people ought always to reflect on their rhetoric, which i don't always do very well myself. but we don't know yet. 

look. at an absolute minimum you have got to wait and see what the process was that led loughner to his bloodbath. i just don't see how krugman or olbermann can emerge hours into the process, with obviously inadequate information, with a fully-formed (and identical) political interpretation. don't you think you ought to be a little more responsible as interpreters and a little less mechanical as commentators?

i might add that the notion that glenn beck or sarah palin is ("in some small part" etc) "responsible" for the "atmosphere" etc is just a round-about way of saying they are tantamount to being murderers, and that their continued existence endangers all of us. that is, the sort of attack the are mounting is a particularly clear example of the rhetoric they are condemning, and it is unbelievably polzarizing. ok so if you think we need to tone down the kind of rhetoric that could lead an unhinged person to kill, then you need to tone down this stuff. 

and there's no reason you can't, right now. we don't even know the story. so in that condition you can easily refrain from all pointing your fingers simultaneously, yelling "murderer!" (then qualifying it six times with just a touch of disingenuousness). you're going to attack your opponents for "demonizing" people?

i think it's the toxic atmosphere created by oprah winfrey that's directly responsible for the killings in arizona. winfrey has a gift bag for everyone...except disgruntled - well, psychotic - male loners. who cares about our self-esteem? only rush and sarah. the way to read the whole event is as showing that u2 fucking sucks. was the disgruntled male, loghner, inspired by "sunday bloody sunday," or was he just goaded into ultraviolence by the fact that simplistic little ditties are being staged like wagnerian operas? one thing the shootings clearly show: global warming is a hoax, or at least the evidence is not evaluable. it's amazing how, no matter what happens, no matter who dies or how, every single event just confirms my pet positions and shows that my opponents are evil and irresponsible. one thing you have to understand: words have consequences. and that means exactly one thing: everyone who disagrees with me - or indeed does anything other than chant along with the slop i am yapping - is a murderer. i am against censorship, but it's plain that there must be some limits. those limits are the borders at which standard-issue american liberalism shades off into any other position. 

on the nytimes op-ed page today, egan, krugman, and collins all use the event as a mere stick to bash their political opponents, just the way they used...columbine, ok city, etc. well this should teach gabrielle giffords an important lesson that we all need to learn: in the minds of other people, one's actual human existence has no meaning. your death is nothing but an occasion for the narcissism of others. the victims do not actually exist for any of these folks: they're read as little symbols internal to the conceptual scheme of the observer. or not even that: just little echoes of their own positions, an endless chorus of whispering shades, all redundant, because all nothing but confirmation after confirmation of what was already an unrevisable set of commitments or memberships.

i may have something to say about the arizona shootings eventually. my policy is more or less not to say anything unless i can say something that other people are not also saying. i guess an event like this puts my various little jokes about political violence - like the napolitano thing below - in a different perspective, and makes me feel wrong. at any rate, one thing i will not do is blame my political opponents - if any - for the shootings. i swear it takes people less than a moment to turn from anything resembling the human situation to blaming sarah palin, etc. at a minimum it seems like you've got to wait and find out what was actually going on!

you know, i often feel kind of guilty for being a football fan. sometimes it's a spectacle of pain, and there's delay after delay in the game as they deal with the knee injuries and concussions. but the violence is also a necessary condition for the beauty. i hated to see the saints lose yesterday, and i'm rooting for the city of new orleans. but the saints lost on one of the most intense and beautiful football plays i have ever seen: marshawn lynch of the seahawks running through, over, around virtually every player on the defense, breaking eight or nine tackles. you can't have this in ballet or something; it has to be improvised on the spot to deal with the real extremely volatile situation; and it can only arise in the context wherein everybody is trying to stop, smack, crunch the runner. it's like jazz music in which your body is at stake.

i like the idea of sending protests against 'report suspicious activity' wrapped in incendiary devices. i reconstruct the note to napolitano as follows: "to the homeland security secretary: i would like to report an extremely suspicious package, namely the one that just turned you into a smoldering corpse. thank you for your service to this great country, and thank you for...smoking."

you know, all these left-leaners squawking about the redaction of the constitution are just yapping. i'm sick of all the "gotcha!" crap on both sides. ok reading the constitution aloud, you have to decide what to do with pieces that have been superseded by amendment. there are various ways to deal with this; surely, reading the constitution as it currently stands is a perfectly good approach.

i do understand that the constitution as drafted acknowledged and carved out a place for slavery (though for an astoundingly plausible argument that slavery was incompatible withe constitution as originally drafted, see lysander spooner's the unconstitutionality of slavery, from 1845). the three-fifths thing was indescribably repugnant. anyone, tea-partier, beckite, scaliaist, had better acknowledge all this. nevertheless if i were reading the us constitution aloud on the floor of the house, i would read it as it currently stands. you're really accusing people of hypocrisy on the grounds that they didn't read out the prohibition amendment? please.

well, yeah.

“American society seems to believe that self-esteem is the cure all for every social ill, from bad grades to teen pregnancies to violence,” he said. “But there has been no evidence that boosting self-esteem actually helps with these problems. We may be too focused on increasing self-esteem.”

Study co-author Crocker added, “The problem isn’t with having high self-esteem; it’s how much people are driven to boost their self-esteem. When people highly value self-esteem, they may avoid doing things such as acknowledging a wrong they did.

“Admitting you were wrong may be uncomfortable for self-esteem at the moment, but ultimately it could lead to better learning, relationships, growth, and even future self-esteem.”

plus understanding human psychology as a drama of self-esteem leads to the oprah winfrey network, a reductio ad absurdum of the entire approach. actually this is a good piece. one thing that's implicit throughout, and which i certainly see in my students etc: self-esteem is conceived exclusively in terms of approval from others, which is pitiful in a way, and of course makes your self-esteem - the most important thing in your head, the precondition for any constructive activity - something with regard to which you are at the mercy of other people from moment to moment. one cocked eyebrow and these self-esteem vampires fall into an orgy of self-loathing or furiously try every strategy for uncocking your eyebrow. the main one would be forcing you to pretend you don't believe what you just said, etc.

 

along 83 south as you approach the baltimore beltway from up here, there is a huge glowing sign with our national motto: report suspicious activity. now, remarkably, digruntlement with such signs appears to have inspired actual, albeit little-bitty, acts of terrorism. 

spring '82. maybe my gf (later the mother of some of my children) was out of town, cause i don't think she'd have put up with this. we lived in an ancient icehouse down by the tracks in ellicott city. one day i was planning to go to the ramones show at shriver hall at hopkins (where i was a grad student). this suggested some preparation, so my friend dolan (as i will call him), my brother adam, and i gathered at my place on the banks of the placid patapsco. we started noonish, seeking an exquisite balance or, as i like to think of it, sobriety on a higher plateau: adam brought the bombay gin and grapefruit juice, dolan the cocaine, me the hash. we listened to ramones lps all day and engaged in a satisfying conversation, for drunk or sober this dolan was the most sparkling talker i have ever known: erudite, ironic, with great facility, perfect enunciation, and maddening superficiality. indeed i had watched dolan's undergraduate thesis - the camouflage of persiflage - unfold, and he was by this time not only an exemplary practitioner of persiflage, but an academic expert on the subject.

finally as dusk settled we tumbled into dolan's car for the drive into town. we took back roads, because it turned out that dolan, as well as being stomped to the gills, had no driver's license, and we were seeking police-free routes. we climbed through the hillls at oella, waving grandly to the local albinos. at the (red) traffic light at druid park drive and reisterstown road, we quite dramatically rear-ended a pick-up truck. dolan's head smashed the windshield. and yet he still yelled 'run!'

the three of us ditched the car in the middle of the road and dashed into the darkness of druid hill ('droodle' or 'murder') park, where we watched from behind trees on a hill as cop cars, fire engines, and ambulances converged on the scene. my sense of time might have been a bit distorted, but it seemed only moments before a helicopter was overhead ffpffpffping and shining a spotlight, converging on us in a spiral pattern. we took evasive measures, flitting from tree to tree, though dolan flitted limpingly.

finally he decided that he was going to return to the scene and "face the music." magnanimously, he suggested that adam and me ditch. so we made our way guerilla-warfare-style across 83, across hampden, across the ravine at wyman park, and up to the venue. there we thrashed beyond belief; christ we were already bleeding when we came in. that night as on many occasions, the ramones played for an hour or so and hardly seemed to care that they were making the most fundamentally sound rock and roll ever played, much less that we had lost even our common decency to be in their presence.

afterwards, we somehow got back to my place and spent the rest of the night trying to track down dolan in hospitals, jails, etc. fuck me, but he was already back at the family mansion in chevy chase. through his cut-up lips he'd told the cop "officer, i am eager to take a breathalyzer." the response: "son, you don't seem drunk to me." like i said, the best talker i ever heard. plus it helps to have the kind of family with a mansion in chevy chase, i think.

 

ok i did it. check it out before the copyright police get it! it syncs up beautifully 1:11-end.

well it is kinda cool watching them read the constitution in the house of representatives. why not? oops even fox didn't stay there for the whole thing and i can't seem to get it on c-span. if i were choosing a bit to read aloud, it'd be the tenth amendment: "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

you might think that if you were throwing together a montage of michael jackson for your seventeen-hour tribute film to the greatest entertainer the world knew before justin bieber, you'd want this to be the soundtrack: put me in a wheelchair and get me to the show. hurry hurry hurry before i go loco. i can't control my fingers, i can't control my toes oh no no no no no. propofol!

by the way, that's rock n roll!

some might call lebron james's birthday cake tasteless. but i think of it as african-american folk art. it doesn't exactly appear edible, but it corresponds very closely to the aesthetic developed in robert farris thompson's great book flash of the spirit.

if you don't think that the wikileaks material has been important, you might examine this summary.

well, dave. a miserable government that both oppresses and is parasitic on its people is quite a bit worse if it's very big than if it's very little. a government that wants to make war is much worse if it's very large and wealthy than if it's tiny and poor. on the other hand, of course, an extremely efficient effective government that helps us all prosper and be ethical should of course be of unlimited size or should coincide with everything. i'm trying to call to mind a few examples. but anyway, one might even worry about an excellent government when it grows hugely gigantical. though it oppresses you for good ends, there's no check on the future abuses. now i would say the state has been growing for centuries until we are all its little slaves - prosperous and upwardly mobile though we are - and you might want to take a few minutes out to debate the size of government after all.

if you want to see all sorts of people gasping in faux appreciation at famous art that really sucks, go to moma and see the andy warhol screen tests. then watch his films if that isn't enough. 

watcha watchin, crispy? 10-year-old jane is really into the next generation of animated tv series: cartoon network's adventure time and regular show. anticipated by chowder and misadventures of flapjack, these shows are characterized by a kind of humble, hand-made, emphatically 2-d, not-beautifully-drawn animation that still manages to do many interesting things. they're constantly surreal, happening in worlds with seemingly arbitrary physical laws, etc. the scripts are often hilarious, filled with clever sortofjokes and incongruous or arbitrary observations. they're transgressive here and there and are not designed for young children, although maybe your kindergartner would dig it on her own level.

adventure time is particularly charming, from the basic concept to the theme song to the drawing-style to the characterization. it has an amazing real innocence and a thousand knowing meta-ideas. it's about a kid - finn the human - who lives in a fairy-tale world that seems to be created to make him into a hero who can date a princess. plus he's got a completely matter-of-fact magic dog buddy to keep his feet on the ground, and an awesome hat.

regular show has a bit of a darker edge; the two main characters (a blue jay and a raccoon) are worst enemies as well as best friends, and sometimes the whole plot is just kind of pitiful and everybody is very much no hero. still it is mordantly funny once you find the rhythm. and in comparison to sponge bob or looney tunes or ren and stimpy (the classics of their eras), these shows are remarkably quiet; they have a very slow rhythm; that's surprising if you think communication has to always get faster; it's kind of a relief though. the very opposite would be something like fairly oddparents: just excruciatingly screechingly loud and idiotically fast throughout. anyway you'd have to give a lot of credit to the cartoon network for getting these on the air; they are initially very unprepossessing and they take (well they took for me) a while to sink in or to it takes awhile to start feeling the jokes. you probably can get adventure time and regular show in on demand-type services on cable and satellite.

if i were the operations coordinator for al qaeda or the greek anarchists or a fringe right-wing militia, or indeed for the pta of the local elementary school, i'd work on devoting the next few years - or as long as it takes - to erasing the oprah winfrey network. suicide vests, truck bombs, airbuses loaded with high explosives, dirty bombs, anthrax, sarin, beams of anti-matter, etc: i'd try them all, then start in again. then i'd devote myself to removing every trace of oprah from the cultural record: mention that name and you will be tortured just short of death, then sent crawling back out into the world, so that your horrendous disfigurement can serve as a warning. one good thing about this approach: you might get bono too.

cultural hippopotami, they bellow bigger than you and i, or even you and me; but what they bellow is meaning-free.