cheese it, the cops!

awww forget it.

it can be fun to argue politics. but it is futile. reasons have nothing to do with anyone's positions, and if one set of reasons for your position that x gets blown up, you of course don't ditch x, you invent or (more likely) mimic some new layer of arguments. the opinions are emotional commitments or are pathological, always. they have to do with your childhood, or what social groups you associate with or identify against. i include my own opinions here, of course. but i definitely include yours. this goes for presidents, secretaries of this and that, philosophy professors, nobel-prize winning economists, and karl marx, exactly as much as it goes for sarah palin or frank my barber. it goes for anarchists and totalitarians, capitalists and communists, leftists and rightists, al qaeda and homeland security. the differences have to do with how many defensive layers you can deploy, how thick the accreted patina is over the massive, evidence-independent commitment.  

vs opera

ok now i am going to get in trouble, by egress from my areas of expertise, if any. and plus the famous opera expert lisa simeone has been known to hang about. i've never really liked opera - any of it - and i would have to suspect that's because i haven't seen the right productions of the right works, or with the right people sitting next to me. but here is one objection: vibrato. opera singers have, putting it mildly, a lot of it; all of them do, as far as i can tell. alright and a huge and perfect vibrato is, i'm assuming, a very difficult achievement about which its achievers would rightly be proud. but take, for example, these slices of recent productions of porgy and bess, from fresh air. now porgy and bess doesn't totally kill me, though it's been awhile. but it certainly has some of the very greatest songs of the twentieth century: start with 'summertime,' for god's sake. there have been astounding works of art brought up from that well, like billie's version, or janis's. but when i hear that little slice, all i hear is gigantic wavering vibrato, like a very fast yodel. i don't even hear the lyrics, just the virtuosity, not the emotion, just the technique. indeed when you're wavering that extremely on every note between two tones, i'm not even quite on the tune anymore. precisely because it is such a technical accomplishment, the delivery cannot sound natural or sincere (well, to me, anyway). 

i would say, in a folk opera, and provisionally in any opera, the sheer hugeness of your vibrato is little but a distraction. at a minimum, i'd say: ok you can do that. congrats. now do you have to do it all the time? for some bits, or some songs, or some operas, perhaps it's appropriate. in others, not at all. or couldn't it be someone's style (like it is elvis costello's, for example (though only on the right songs!) and not others' (like costello's hero chet baker, who sings without a trace). if you want to create an impression of a certain kind of intensity, or you want play with or play up the sheer artificiality of the work, then hit it. if not, not. surely you are, for example, removing a whole palette of emotional effects just so you can waver at some perfect rate. say you're trying to convey the impression of black folks singing in the south in the early twentieth century. well, they just didn't sing like that, thank god.

now actually the first three of these singers employ some vibrato:. but sparingly, at the right moment, as demanded by the the song as they read it. but none of them try to stun you with sheer force of the vibrato. they do not let the technique get in the way of the music. i'm going to go out on a limb and say that any of these three versions is an infinitely better interpretation of this song than any opera singer has ever produced. perhaps there is some single ideal sound for which every opera singer is striving. there is not one ideal sound for which janis and ella and billie are striving. there is no one single right way to sing 'summertime': it depends on your idiosyncratic style and emotional life, your audience, the moment.

what an extraordinary voice that kathleen battle has: weightless. but i say the interpretation is mannered, artificial in the extreme, detached in its perfection from the human context of the song.

[the great clarinet solo on the billie version is, i think, by artie shaw. for that matter, listen to the way louis uses the vibrato in the intro to the ella version: tremendously varied, unpredictable, intensely expressive: sometimes almost choking the horn, sometimes letting the note ring clear. let that be a lesson to you!]

blast

i have the feeling that a disaster is sneaking up on us in afghanistan. sneaking up on us because we're paying attention to debt and unemployment. as well we might, but a stinging defeat would add to our sense of decline and to obama's ever-more extreme political difficulties. one error of judgment was when, in 2009, we re-inked karzai after he won an election by fraud. this and the hotel attack etc are beginning to make it clear that karzai can't even control kabul, which is more or less the entirety of his nation.

double down

krugmania is the idea that there cannot be too much debt. the actual debt as it grows larger than your entire economy  is never a problem; it's the fact that they're irrationally cutting you off, though cutting you off seems superficially to make sense because, following krugman, your policy is to give your creditors a 'haircut,' or simply refuse to pay back what you borrowed before. the solution is to borrow your way out of debt, a solution you should somehow pursue even though no one in their right mind is going to lend you any more money. that's the kind of insight for which they award nobels.

worst blurb ever

blurb from an ad in the new york review of books for beauty pays: why attractive people are more successful by daniel hamermesh (princeton u press). the blurb is by freakonomist stephen dubner. "He writes so lucidly and charmingly about such a compelling subject that you will never again look at a beautiful face (or an ugly one) without thinking of the many economic consequences. Bravo!" bravo? this seems like a terrible interruption of human pleasure.

compromised

i have to say that in my head 9.11 is quite polluted by nationalism. they just unfurled an exactly-football-field-sized flag at the ravens-steelers game. at least budweiser will never forget.

bedtime story

reading to my kids has been one of the great pleasures of my life (right now i'm in princess bride with janie). so i like the sound of this. the head-on-the-chest thing is evocative of many tiredly delighted, loving hours with emma, sam, hayes, vince, and jane. unfortunately i haven't always lived full-time with my kids. still whether it's every night or just weekends, it's often an hour at night and half-hour in the morning. one frequently thinks of one's difficulties and failures as a parent; this i think of as a success.

friday night jane asked me: how do you always know the right time to stop, when i'm just drifting off? well, for one thing, if you pause and she doesn't pipe up, that's it: not exactly telepathy. but also: i've been doing this for over twenty years. i know what i'm doing!

the day america lost its virginity

or not, exactly. before 9.11 i was shopping at wal-mart, driving kids to practice, sniping with whatshername, dealing with addiction problems, trying to clarify my ontology, inflicting philosophy on students, going to the bathroom, feeding the cats, doing the dishes, driving up and down 83. after, the same. the news on tv was different though. honestly the idea that we lost our innocence or invented partisanship is pretty silly. think for a moment of what american history has actually been like, or whether you might have had a sense of vulnerability in 1778, or 1863, or during the labor strife of 1890-1910, or in 1932, or as you hired a contractor to build your fallout shelter. how vulnerable did you feel if you were an indian in 1850, a black man in 1892, a shirtwaist worker in 1910, an okie in the dust bowl, a freedom rider in mississippi, a grunt during the tet offensive? american politics was screechingly polarized in 1800, in 1856, in 1900, in 1968, in 1998, and pretty much every year between, before, and after. it can be an important event in american history without transforming each of us entirely and all of us together.

woof!

i remember when the editors of major newspapers were crusty old bastards, played by jason robards, who were intent on exposing the corruption of the political machine. now, like every middle-aged woman in the country, they write unauthorized yet exhaustively detailed biographies of their golden retrievers. surprisingly, it turns out that there's a lot to be said for patriarchy.

popomo me baby.

let the post-post-modern era be here now. this is from a review by ingrid wassenaar of helene cixous' memoir hemlock, from the times literary supplement (it doesn't seem to be up on their site; it's from the september 9 issue).

One day, her mother misplaces a precious letter, and in her agitation becomes temporarily unable to read the word for whale (baleine). There follows an extended improvisation on the theme of being at sea. Cixous says that she would like to write about her mother's use of language: "This will be difficult, somewhere between onomatopoeia and epic, maybe we'll call it happ...showing the surprise the pounce of the happnimal upon life, or the sudden dive through the paws of death. Happ! there she goes! That sudden brutal movement of a pounce, that one also finds in the Germanic languages."

Happ, Cixous's comic neologism, goes straight to the heart of one of the tensions in European thought between the bodily and the spiritual. It recalls the sound of animals wolfing other animals, and has echoes in many European languages. Part of Ciixous's radicalism lies precisely in how she fossicks among the Indo-European roots of words that have acquired sedimented readings. Happ sums up in a word that observing her frail mother is not so different from stalking her.

please, please stop.

 

everyone loves their own demagogues

here's an amazing piece by the amazing matt taibbi. he thinks the republicans are moving the country toward civil war because of their refusal to compromise. and listen to their polarizing rhetoric!! well taibbi finds it hard to compromise with "an apocalytic cult" that is like "one of the authoritarian movements from early 20th century European history": fascists, in short. (you might want to think about how many of the fascist parties were intent on shrinking the government.) "the GOP party mainstream had sunk to the level of terrorism," he writes, "holding our economic system hostage in exchange for political concessions. This was a form of violence." surely, taibbi's observations, if true, richly justify a series of assassinations, for example, in order to prevent a civil war in which the fascist/terrorist/hostage-taking eric cantor becomes an american fuhrer.

this current crew of Republicans shook canisters of kerosene over the entire American population and threatened to light a match if it didn't get what it wanted. 

As Lofgren notes, this was insurrectionary, revolutionary behavior. Only the massive scale of the gambit prevented it from being easily identified as terrorism and criminal blackmail.

i want you to keep in mind that the congress is charged by the constitution with federal appropriations, and that all the insurrectionary violence, criminal blackmail, genocidal pyromania, and high treason of the republicans amounted to refusing to raise the debt ceiling beyond $14 trillion, except under certain conditions: that is, the way the fascist-terrorist-apocalyptic cultists poured kerosene on the american people was by doing what they were called upon to do as legislators, and voting in a way that taibbi disapproves of. indeed, the insurrectionary fascist treasonous terrorist violence consists of shrinking the rate of growth in federal spending, which tells you what taibbi thinks the american government is: a god to whom all things are due. the problem isn't terrorism; it's heresy: like any cultist, taibbi hates everyone who's in the other cult.

it will go hard for matt taibbi if the realization finally dawns: he is what he hates: an authoritarian demagogue whose rhetoric is meant to incite violence and is hysterically disconnected from reality. during the civil war, i'll be the guy on the other side, gazing with a dead stare into matt taibbi's eyes.

 

safer?

ten years after 9.11, i ask a simple question, for i am a simple man and capable only of asking questions that absolutely every person in the media is asking, like a chorus of mindless jackdaws: are we safe? did the bush administration's introduction of a gigantic security apparatus make it impossible that i might contract prostate cancer, break my neck in the bathtub, get tangled with jacknifing tractor-trailer? did it prevent me from growing old should i survive that long? did it make me immortal? i really got scared after 9.11, and still i have not been carefully packed away in cotton batting or pickled in brine. i want janet napolitano to keep me safe, to rock me like an infant and sing me comforting songs in major keys, for i am an american. where are our leaders? all i really want is for someone to tell me what to believe and what to do, and i want to believe whatever it is safe to believe.

every time i attack global warming

i get inundated by another natural disaster. man there were torrential rains here. this is from the next little town over: glen rock and the codorus creek. wouldn't have believed the codorus could do that, and i'm kind of pinched in by it on three sides. but they opened the roads pretty quick for the most part. all good here in new freedom, but wet basement and washed-out driveway.

 

completely

this specific and credible threat thing from homeland security is certainly a good moment to panic. behave with completely irrational erraticism, with utter abandon. let yourself go!

obama speaks

honestly obama's job package does present a political problem for republicans. you're going to get some bang, maybe peaking november 2012, for your $450 billion or whatever. obama needs a good job trend then, no matter what. repubs likely to dribble out some little pieces of it, grudgingly. on the other hand, there really is an immediate problem. on the other other hand the effect will probably peter out relatively quickly as well.

joint sessions are always fun. oscar red carpets for old and ugly people! relatively good speech, though. more focus and clarity than often.

he left the 'paid for' thing a complete mystery, though until "a week from monday."

debrief

yeah the hawking teds are praising romney and slamming perry. they love huntsman too. they're all about perry's anti-climate change and ss=ponzi scheme stuff. he can't win a general election, etc. it doesn't surprise me that they see it that way. he expressed skepticism about climate change!! i think he did better and that he's playing better than they think he is.

repubs debate

i do think bachmann is kinda toast. santorum will be the next dropout though.

chris matthews: we've got to win the science! against india and china! please, bitch. it's gotten so insanely generalized: pro-science or anti-science? well i like the physical sciences in some contexts better than i like the social sciences in any context. i reserve the right to think about what you're saying, even if you're saying it on behalf of 'science.' how many scientists think we need to win the science against indian scientists, whatever that can mean? stop reading thomas friedman before i come over there.

really no collapses or gaffes at all. that's always kind of disappointing, like if you go to a nascar race, you want to see a crash, sort of. or a hockey game etc.

9:49 paul did come on toward the end. they're all singing his tune about the fed now.

9:43 the crowd is cheering for the death penalty. yes! that's what we wanna hear. i wouldn't go to texas and kill their children.

9:38 rick perry reduced nitrous oxide levels in texas. that's hilarious!

9:35 huntsman's wielding science as a campaign strategy; we can't win if we don't believe in science! (believe in science, har har.) 

9:33 like santorum: we can impose our vision on the world. maybe he didn't say 'impose.' santorum did frame the decison: we've got to decide whether we're an isolationist party.

9:32 they are still way divided and equivocal on the wars and interventions. they're still stumbling toward a coherent position. they got burned by bush. 

oh shoot! cain! thanks, dong.

9:19 they're all fence-builders (except ron, who rocked that one). be bridge-builders! huntsman did say 'let's remember we're dealing with human beings.' more than generous, from these folks.

9:15 bachmann's for a cash test for immigrants: if you're broke, you can't come.

9:11 newt's still on english as the national language. dude. take that shit and go.

9:09 perry just said he'd secure the border with predator drones. romney is going back to building a 2000-mile fence. not clear whether he means mexico or canada.

9:02 paul just does not come off that well in this kind of context. he doesn't seem perfectly fluent. he's better in a one-on-one interview.

8:45 santorum says things like: 'it's not about saving money, but saving people's lives.' (on 90s welfare reform, for which he atkes credit.) he's like a real christian, not an ayn rand christian,, a capitalist christian. remember when jesus gave the money-lenders the old heave-ho and denied rich people the kingdom of heaven? the 'i'm for rich people increasing their capital! thing of perry's is just not going to rally with his super-sincere social beliefs etc. this is the republican problem. party of capital or something else? the original wave of tea-partiers were probably no happier with wall street than with obama.

at a break: it's actually a competent group. no one has embarassed themselves. so far so good for perry.

8:37 well paul says that eliminating the minimum wage would 'help the poor.' er. 

8:29 cain is for 'loser-pay' laws; like if you sue wal-mart, and lose, you pay their expenses. well that will end all suits against large corporations.

8:25 perry blames the federal gov for tx being last, with 25% of the pop uninsured. that is just nonsense.

8:19: newt is always better than you think he'll be. he actually says something; not mere focusgrouped bits

8:14: ooo michelle looks a little...embalmed. same old schtick, already getting old. don't count those foster children again!

8:11: cain: 'if 10% is good enough for god, 9% is good enough for the federal government.' crisp. sounds cheap too!

8:09: despite myself, i'm often impressed with santorum. he's kind of thoughtful and sincere, though spouting catch-phrases here a bit shrilly. well, he's desperate. already.

8:06: damn romney and perry both sure look like presidents. like if you were hiring some handome, spray-tanned old stiff to play the president in one scene of your tv movie. their voices too: like veteran sportcasters: perfect inflection.

8:00: brian williams: "the toxic gridlock that is washington dc." geez, that's my home town! the traffic does suck though.

 ok i'magonna try to do this liveblog thing right this time. one entry, with times noted, growing from the top.

probably do some live-blogging of the repub debate tonight (if i still have power; weather's crazy here!) it's be interesting to really get a gander at perry.

sweet home popomo

i was talking to a colleague yesterday about the 'theory' course we require of our art history majors. five years ago, when i started teaching in the art department at dickinson, she and i both knew that theory was essential: that you just couldn't send someone to a high-powered graduate program without it: that art history was merging with art theory. now she kind of shrugged and wasn't sure it was so necessary. people now are back in archives, back teasing out the tiniest details, worrying about attribution, reading all the contemporaneous documents, etc.

i bet that it's kind of like that in art schools too (i used to teach all the theory/philosophy at maryland institute college of art). in 2000, everyone understood that you could be a web designer without reading barthes or baudrillard, but also that if we were actually going to produce any downtown art stars, we'd better get them on barthes asap. now i bet they're a bit back to hand skills and stuff.

another sign of the post-postmodern era. 

internationalist nationalism

as you may know, i am not tom friedman's biggest fan. one thing that's...interesting about him - captured in today's column or in the new book - is that he's an 'american exceptionalist,' a screeching nationalist (depite his apparent internationalism), in a particular sense: the only real question is how we can re-assert our dominace of the world economy: everything (education, foreign policy etc) is devoted to that end. that's what 'restoring american greatness' means. i'm not sure what that's worth, to be honest. for example, let's say that friedman's big fear is realized and china overtakes us economically. offhand, that's liable to bring a lot more people out of poverty. i hate seeing poverty, but i'm not sure that, other things being equal, a situation in which chinese people stay poor and we do better is any better than the reverse.

when i think of american exceptionalism, i don't think of dominance in global capital. i think of a republic established on individual rights and liberties, a tradition of limited government, emersonian self-reliance: cussed independence, anti-authoritarianism, and basic good sense. i think of the whiskey rebellion or john brown or william lloyd garrison. i think 'a country boy can survive' or malcolm x. i don't think of heaping up riches through an alliance of capitalists and politicians, etc., or the beauty of extreme bureaucracy. being broke is as good for those values as is being wealthy. when the housing market tanked, they stopped tearing apart the countryside down here for subdivisions and strip malls. that is ok.

war and self-reflection

this is a rather remarkable piece of self-reflection from bill keller, about his response to 9.11 and his regret at having endorsed the invasion of iraq. also it's good at reminding us what the climate was like immediately after. one rarely sees a columnist at this degree of self-criticism. i went straight-up bloodthirty; i didn't even quibble about justice; i demanded vengeance, which i thought was actually a more honest response. and i endorsed the invasion of afghanistan, though i was totally in detail in a series of columns opposed to the iraq operation. i'd say in retrospect afghanistan is a quagmire and is unlikely to have a good outcome, and it's been a decade. i'd still demand the death of osama and the members of his organization, but not a full-scale invasion, puppet-regime scenario. that's easier to see now, obviously.

disaster!

let me ask you this: climate change models are compatible with or actually predict terrible droughts in texas and georgia and non-stop soaking rains in pennsylvania and new york. now, if there were a terrible drought in pennsylvania and new york and non-stop soaking rains in texas and georgia, i predict that climate-change models would make just as good sense of that. (seriously, if it were reversed, do you think anyone would withdraw their claims or wonder about them even for a moment? the slightest doubt is evil.) if that is the way it is, the process of modeling etc is entirely non or anti-empirical: a pure a priori science, like that of the pope or michelle bachmann.

the drought in texas and the flood in new jersey shows the results of climate change. let's say that rainfall was average in both places this year. would that count against climate change? you cannot do 'science' or, indeed, think at all along these lines.

what i'd say a bit more thoughtfully is that the climate-change spokesmen such as gore think that every dramatic weather event is a pr opportunity. but what they say is that it constitutes evidence. now there could be - i suppose, there is - actual empirical data that would bear on the question: careful temperature measurements over a significant number of years in a variety of locations, for example. but wielding every hurricane and every drought in a pr campaign is discrediting; it might even work as pr, but it ought not to. and it hints that you'd use anything; it discredits you as representing a rational approach.

damned if you don't

the cia was closely connected to the gaddafi regime. that is evil and unacceptable. but if it was, then turning against that regime was a moral accomplishment.

she's unique

sarah palin rocks.

gov

let me try to clarify my feelings about the us gov, obama etc, since folks seem to think i love it/him above all things. first, like all governments, it is in my view not morally legitimate. i take myself not only to assert that, but actually to have proven it, insofar as political claims can be proven. the us government shares that with the assad regime. i also think that it is entwined with a global capitalism that i find repugnant, and that is one of the major oppressive forces in the world, and also that our military - the spending, adventures, weaponry - is fearsomely dangerous: it threatens everybody's life every day.

however, all things being equal, i'd rather have even a distorted democratic system (distorted by corporate money, e.g.) than a straight-up entirely unaccountable totalitarian system. i would rather live in this system than the chinese system, or the soviet system, or the idi amin system, or the pinochet system, etc, and i say there are real differences. admittedly, the responsiveness or responsibility to the people of the american government is a matter of tradition and cultural values rather than any actual safety we have if obama or someone decided to go totalitarian and the military acquiesced. we've had our scrapes: you might consult cheney's memoir. we need constant vigilance.

in the last decade, the us government has done many many bad things. the iraq invasion/occupation killed many people for no immediate reason (certainly not for the reasons the bush admin gave), though it also deposed a classic despot. we have tortured people, and i'd say we don't know the full extent of what has happened and what is happening. that is why free speech and press rights are so incredibly important. that's why, for example, i regard bradley manning as a hero and a political prisoner, and decry his mistreatment. i do not regard it as equivalent to khamis gaddafi stacking political prisoners in a warehouse, then throwing in grenades and firebombs, then setting up a crossfire on those who emerge, and then heaping their bodies in maggot-infested holes.

but we do have an incredibly wide-ranging free press, though it is also distorted by corporate domination. but it is less corporate-dominated than it was thirty years ago: many more outlets, and anyone can blog anything or tweat etc. even the wikileaks stuff got published, is available, even if the cia is also hacking it.

obviously, there are worse and better applications of coercive force. that the police have sometimes raped people is no argument that it is wrong given the actual immediate circumstances for that particular policeman to prevent that particular rape. indeed, anyone who is in a position to prevent a rape is morally required to do so. i don't think there is any way to make our engagement with the arab spring into a simple act of oppression, and indeed we acted sluggishly because of the many connections of our military and our corporations to middle eastern despots, kleptocrats, and torturers. that was disgusting. but if we condemn that, we ought to congratulate the us state when it finally turns on them. i actually do think that nato ordered airstrikes to save the people of benghazi, and that nato helped the people of libya remove a monster of oppression. 

for that matter, i'm very not down with religious fanatics flying jetliners into buildings or suicide bombers on the bus, and few people have ever deserved death more clearly than osama and his cohorts.

anyone who opposes torturing people, robbing people, raping people, shutting them up and shutting them in, ought to want the same for assad. or if you're not feeling bloodthirsty, then an immediate comfortable retirement in a place he can do no more harm.

i think obama is better than bush, and that he's actually trying to wind down our wars. now that's not to say i love him and day to day my politics might be closer to the tea party than the obama admin, at least on sizeofgov or deficit-spending-type issues. so anyway, let me be me, and try not to operate on a worldview with no room for any nuance, or that basically responds to an a priori position that anything the us gov does is bad. rather, try as best you can to gather up the most reliable info you can on any given situation (which is difficult, i know, and all media outlets need to be approached critically) and analyze it on its own.

sr

perhaps the most astonishing development in philosophy during the time i've been doing it is that movement has emerged that believes in a reality external to the human mind. now, that might strike you as not all that impressive, considering that everyone - including all the philosophers that denied it - believes in a world external to the human mind, and you might think that reality would have some strange reactionary defenders all the way along. maybe so, but the disease had many forms and has seemed more or less inevitable as death since descartes, who argued that we only have acquaintance with our own ideas. so then...hume, kant, hegel. phenomenology, logical positivism, hermeneutics, narrativism, postmodernism: all asking the bizarre question of how the mind constructs a world, rather than the perfectly sensible question of how the world constructs a mind. to say that, circa 1993 i felt alone is an understatement, though compared with most people i'm comfortable alone.

at any rate 'speculative realism' has emerged incredibly quickly in continental philosophy, in large part due to the prodigiously energetic writer/wheeler-dealer graham harman. the 'movement'  encompasses a number of eccentric figures in continental philosophy, formed up by harman into a group. it recovers bits of deleuze, badiou, zizek, and constructs a new canon out of figures such as latour and quentin meillasoux (whose book after finitude is a key, though strange, moment), on both of whom harman has published books in the last few months. also it's very internetish, and the books appear incredibly quickly, often with open access, from presses such as re, zero, and open humanities. (re's anthology the speculative turn is the place to start). really it has had to forge its whole own world of publishing, blogs, mini-conferences, because it is obvious to everyone who does philosophy of any sort that they themselves are making up their world, or that we're making it up together by telling stories, etc. 

that would really be the dawn of the popomo period, and one has to think that sr is opened up by the death of the pomo generation: baudrillard, rorty, derrida, gadamer etc. it is also, perhaps, a response to the fact that we actually do live more than ever in representations and before screens; that would make you yearn for the real.

there could be a corresponding development in analytic philosophy, and indeed for twenty years and more ontology has re-emerged in analytic philosophy as a legit enterprise.

i have to say that - even though harman publishes a book every month or two (the quadruple object, he says on his blog, took 86 hours) - the whole idea is still nascent. whenever harman builds it up, he does it by clawing his way out of phenomenology: he uses and attacks husserl and heidegger. well, ok, but obviously we're headed someplace else and the origins of this thing in phenomenology are contingent and will, i think, eventually be irrelevant to what develops (i'll give harman one big insight out of heidegger for making objects inward, mysterious etc, but little else, really). also it is developing in many directions at once, and each figure (paul levi bryant, manuel delanda, iain hamilton-grant) has his own eccentric metaphysics. that part is just good, but a little canon will have to settle in.

they're also groping toward new ways of writing, and harman's prose style - kind of rollicking and anti-obscurantist - is as radical within continental philosophy as his positions. reading harman i have the sense that everything is open: you actually can write how you want or how what you're saying demands you write. again, that's why there has to be a new publishing world.

anyway, for the first time in my career, i want in. here is more or less a movement i endorse, something i wouldn't have believed possible. 

 

call me

when obama refuses to relinquish power (a refusal backed up by the total resources of american armed forces), puts malia and sasha in charge of death squads and the oil industry (respectively), nationalizes all television stations and imposes a regime of total censorship, and then deposits half u.s. gdp into his offshore accounts and the bodies of tea partiers, graffiti artists, and random fifth-graders into his mass graves.

9.11 and the decline of us

you've been waitin - albeit without a lot of patience - so let me go the other way. meditating on 9.11, i'd say that, as a country and as a government, our response was an extreme freakout. at the time people were so bewildered that they said things like 'this changes everything,' and over the last decade we've basically figured out how: we used it to drive an extreme buildup of state power and projection of it around the world: the us has tried to become an international police state. one of the least savory aspects was getting entwined with the most vicious regimes in the world (including gaddafi's, but also mubarak's and assad's and saleh's), which we figured could be of use because they could torture with impunity. also we managed to establish or beef up some of the world's most corrupt governments: afghanistan's and pakistan's, for instance. we established a gulag of secret prisons and torture facilities, and anyone who simply believes on the basis of their assurances that the obama administration has ended such programs is naive. we created surveillance programs, foreign and domestic, comparable in the electronic age to the stasi or kgb nightmares.

in short: first, we showed ourselves to be cowards, in that the reaction was a twitching irrational panic. we showed ourselves to be incredibly spoiled: we wanted only to be safe, even in a situation that did not threaten the safety of most people at all. (now when obama or anyone else says 'the first obligation of the government is to keep americans safe, it is a mere commonplace.) we showed ourselves to have progressed far beyond the values on which our country was founded. we showed that we are lovers or worshipers of authority: all we wanted was for dick cheney to protect us from the outside world and from each other. if we're now in a profound economic decline, this is an image of our profound moral decline: how far we have come from an ethic of frontier self-reliance and so on. we responded by acts of extreme oppression and pathetic mewling fear.

the fear and the oppression feed on each other. if america is in decline, we have shown elaborately that we deserve to be.

hope he survives long enough to produce the documents

here is the courageous attorney general of hama, resigning, and enumerating the crimes of the regime in that city. 

 

the syrian regime's explanation: he's being forced to do this at gunpoint by terrorists and germs (their favored description of protestors). meanwhile whenever gaddafi wants to issue another mind-numbing hallucinatory rant, he puts it on syrian state television.