cheese it, the cops!

pleasure center

you can see that this light-up-the-x-region-of-the-brain sort of approach makes people happy; it keeps giving nyt op-ed columnists the sense that they're talking about Science. i just want to make one remark about the 'pleasure center': obviously, pleasure (for example) is a hyper-primitive psychological term, and it is the psychology you bring into the experiment that determines the sort of result you're looking for, or what would count as a result, or what sorts of things we test. same with 'addiction,' and the idea that every problematic behavior or every habit of a human being is an addiction (kristof's position here, more or less) was an utter stampede before and completely outside the brainscan fad, which here is more or less an attempt to freeze a momentary paradigm or cultural formation as an eternal truth. as you may know, i would myself resist as extremely wrong the idea that addiction is a matter of pleasure. you'd be better off regarding it as a pursuit of pain, and i think the idea that addiction is the pursuit of pleasure is a view developed by non-addicts. but in any case the idea that, for example, you run marathons for the pleasure is extremely counter-intuitive, and it would occur to someone who was already in the grip of a 'theory' of human motivation (one which turns out non-explanatory, or is very dormitive-virtuey).  'pleasure' is the worst sort of psychological butchery or philistinism: there just is no such thing, really, and it stands in for anything that motivates anyone or anything that anyone pursues. we get it as a universal explanation from, you know, british utilitarianism, where it is the acme of all value etc. it was going to make human motivation comprehensible - or even, quantifiable - on a single principle. well now 'scientists' can pay off on bentham's hedonic calculus with their little light-ups. that a warm bath, kinky sex, a good burrito, cocaine, the sistine ceiling, money, and a five-mile run all cause the same sort of feeling is just false, and if you didn't already suppose that they must, somehow (because there is one thing in common to everything we pursue, and it's in the head of the pursuer), you wouldn't have 'found' these alleged structural similarities. that all these things must somehow be the same is something you brought to, not something you discovered in, the observations. indeed, none of these things are actually located (only) in the brain, and the whole thing presupposes an internalist theory of mind: what is real for you is what happens in your own little brain, which i want to to say is a bizarre picture. but don't worry. there will be a next paradigm.

raising cain

i have to say that that cain cigarette ad is the best i've seen since gravel. it makes fun of political advertising, and actually gives a little slice of human reality, which traditionally must be completely expunged in political discourse. you empty focus-group fuckers just got smacked by something real. that smile is priceless.

 

 

is law school necessary?

here is a good question. and here is a good answer.

republicans rock

christ: a fence on the border. obama's birth certificate. again. a flat tax. the last actual idea republicans had was decades ago, i guess. it's a bundle of dogmas and idiocies, much of it revealing slightly-concealed resentment, bigotry, or cruelty. it's expressive rather than having any bearing on actual public policy: every action another repressed symbol of some psychological condition or glitch.

free lisa

[disclaimer: lisa simeone is a friend of mine.]

now i am not really interested in the question of whether, strictly speaking, she violated npr's poicies. if the policy really is that no one associated with npr, or producing or helping to produce any sort of content for them, can explicitly advocate political positions, such a policy is ridiculous. first off, npr actually has people on-air expressing their actual opinions, people whose job it is to express opinions (often, though, these actual opinions are pure pablum, a la juan williams or cokie roberts). but say the post had a no-advocacy by employees policy and then started applying it to charles krauthammer or e.j. dionne, or for that matter to their music critics. 

now, i can understand a news organization trying to limit the public expressions of opinions by its reporters. i have to say, i disagree with even this, because it is devoted to creating an impression of impartiality, rather than to achieving actual impartiality. it simply makes it a little less easy to assess the impartiality of any given piece. it's like banning the 'appearance of impropriety,' while letting the actual corruption proceed unchecked. it makes whatever bias is actually represented even less honest.

but to prohibit the off-air expression of political conviction on the part of the host of 'world of opera' or 'soundprint' is just ridiculous. you might as well prohibit placido domingo from endorsing herman cain or whatever. there is no possible justification of it whatsoever. if, like zurowick, you want to put the whole thing on whether simeone actually violated the "ethics" policy that is actually in place at npr, you're considering this thing far too narrowly. but if so, then the policy needs to be changed, not the world of opera. oddly i was listening to cornel west and tavis smiley hosting a show on an npr station just last night. believe it or not, they have publicly expressed their political positions.

npr is obviously so incredibly sensitive to accusations of bias that they react far too strongly to any hint, which ends up messing them up much worse. the treatment of juan williams was idiotic, and then the crazy overcompensation against the decision and the andrew breitbart thing was wackily overwrought; fire everybody etc. well, never accept state funding if you don't want to answer to jesse helms, as i used to tell karen finley. but also try to respond to these pressures calmly and thoughtfully, and try to continue doing your job in the right way. so i'd say they fired juan williams because they actually are basically a unanimously leftish organization that hates fox. then they had to thrash wildly the other way because the firing showed that. and ditching simeone is part of this thrashing. i don't know. get over it. hire ron paul to host your world of hip hop show or whatever. you're not going to have a whole huge staff and whole archipelago of contractors none of whom have any political opinions; let a thousand flowers bloom and then really really try to cover politically contentious subject-matters fairly. that is the best you can do.

[anyway, no one on the right or left actually has any opinions; all they have are social affiliations. an opinion on x is a relation of a person to x. what a democrat or a republican, liberal or conservative, has instead is a relation to a demographic segment, expressed in pseudo-propositions that the people in that segment parrot in unison. what matters is producing the right syntactical unit to express your belonging; it's not about what it seems to be about, or the items that would under decent circumstances be referred to by the nouns used. (alright myabe that's a little arch and hyperbolic.)]

left-right ideology

[just back from my mom's in little washington, va, where both she and my ex-wife/gf performed autobiographical monologues. my mom's included the story of my brother bob's murder. i was rocked a bit, but 11-year-old jane was crying. i'm going to try to get on this lisa simeone situation tomorrow. we already know she rocks.] 

here is a nice piece bringing tea partiers and occupiers together and letting them see the commonalities. really, i think the hope has to be to get beyond the left-right ideological spectrum. obviously the left-right split has rendered our political system completely useless. on the other hand, who cheered the iraq war? the mainstream right (msr) and the mainstream left (msl). who did the bank bailout? msr and msl. who's competing for the most possible fundraising from wall street? msr and msl. take the commonalities more seriously than the differences, is my advice to you.

the alternating unanimous catch-phrases, rival sets of potted experts (all of whom i have utterly discredited), contrasting demographics, etc might disguise the fact that the whole spectrum is a single political ideology. we should think of it that way and develop its antithesis. the dilemma is always state or capital, but they are merged, and they are both forms of dependency and subordination, between which they bat you back and forth like a pingpong ball. the state represents by definition the most assymmetrical arrangement of power that our species is capable of producing; capital of wealth. it more or less goes without saying that these are going to coincide in the long run.

so i propose that the opposite is self-reliance and mutual aid: the dignity of autonomy and voluntary internal organic community organization. it is individualism and inter-individualism. the (early or sincere) tea party and the occupy movement provide actual models on the ground of such activities: they're fun and goofy and theatrical and human. they are not gigantic bureaucracies, and have actively resisted hierarchical forms of organization.

so don't listen to the voices, like msnbc and fox, who want to line you up against each other, or who are focused maybe on your race or age etc. don't develop a legislative agenda (admittedly, basically too late for the tea party). show us what you want us to be.

 

Stealing the keys and taking Crispin for a spin...

Has anyone else noticed the resemblance between Crispin and Steve McQueen? 

Elevating the tone of the conversation...

"What kind of dickhead asks what would Jesus do..."He's the son of god and he shits all over you...you can't do what Jesus do, you're the king of nothing and he's the king of the Jews..."

It's really an amazing question. It's like asking what would Thor do...you're not Thor and you're not Jesus. For the record: The AXIS of AWESOME is kind of a band, kind of a comedy act -- sort of a drunken Australian version of Barenaked Ladies only with clothes; a male version of Garfunkel and Oates whom, unlike Garfunkel and Oates, you probably wouldn't want to see naked, and don't use the ukelelelelelelelele in their act. (If you do, for some reason, want to see the Axis of Awesome naked, nothing wrong with that except aesthetically...shudder.)

So, from the mouthes of babes, previously noted for their Four Chords explanation of classic rock, here are the blokes from down under, who are probably still getting over losing in the semis of the Rugby World Cup to...Italy, I think. Maybe Wales...

Meanwhile, to elevate the tone of the conversation..What to do when you're lost in Juarez and it's winter time too...a  with some Steve McQueen aspects as well...

 

pausing only to reload

i have to say, i don't really much care how gaddafi died. and even if i were libyan, i don't think i'd have an interest in putting him on trial; i'd rather have an accounting based on documents etc. but it's hard to believe anything except that he was abused and executed; it's going to end up being one of those 'he committed suicide by shooting himself seventeen times in the back'-type accounts.

now if i were on the transitional council, i'd want him dead. and if i lived through the battle of misrata, i'd want him dead. if i were pulling him out of a drainpipe, i might shoot him. maybe he was waving around a platinum pistol or whatever. look what is the point of trying him? pinning a murder on him beyond a reasonable doubt? do you have any doubt?

subversive activities

hey lisa: give us an update on your situation? sorry i've been out of the loop for a couple of days here.

world loses gaddafi

despots are people too. but it's good when they've matured into dead people.

people aren't that bad

rather a remarkable experience. i'm handing back mid-terms in philosophy of art and i give the usual disclaimer: if you think i added it up wrong or you want to talk about the essay, i'm happy to. so tom comes up and says that i had indeed added wrong: he got two points he shouldn't have. not only that, but these two points took him from 91 to 89, A to B. never seen anything quite like it. i guess you'd say i was ethically impressed.

between a rock and a hard place

american politics, and even world politics, really is caught in a scylla-or-charybdis dilemma: state or capital? every word out of the republicans is antigov, pro-biz. and the dems are fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the state: 'i will not accept a solution without revenue increases.' both of these modes of organization are profoundly hierarchical and oppressive. the problem with the discourse is that it never quite cognizes their identity or at any rate symbiosis: beefing up either beefs up both, more or less. really, you're pissed at wall street. who you gonna call? tim geithner and larry summers? that's who citicorp called when they were in trouble. i think one of the strategies of squishy totalitarianism is to keep pretending that there are two forces, each of which could be used against the other. that way, no one turns against the whole thing, or against hierarchical modes of power distribution. that's why occupy shouldn't develop a program of regulatory change or something; they should - as they are, i think - trying to develop non-hierarchical forms of power and self-organization.

all that bail-out action simply consolidated the banking industry in even fewer hands, and one should look clearly at how 'regulation' is used to construct and consolidate monopolies (in media, for example). the unification of capital and state is breathtakingly evident all over u.s. history. and yet there's nothing to liberalism but more state, nothing to conservatism but more capital. it could not be more obvious that the conflict is basically only apparent, and that oscillating from one to the other just makes the oppressive forces we confront ever-more inexorable.

last night's debate

i did watch the republican debate last night. perry's attack on romney as a 'hypocrite' etc for employiing illegal aliens was shockingly combative, but it's not exactly a policy difference. really i have reached the conclusion that perry is an idiot (this is someone who spent years defending the intelligence of george w and reagan, or rather attacking the constant iq-oriented abuse they took as mindless elitism and self-congratulation); i doubt there was a single really syntactical sentence out of perry the whole night, and he displays mastery of no subject-matter. if he did, you could not know it from the way he speaks. but he did put romney in struggle mode.

the fact that everyone was sitting there with a disclaimer like 'it's tough to lose your home,' and then going on to say that they wouldn't help anyone with that and that banks should foreclose more and faster, was a bit disconcerting. and one thing you definitely see: there is absolutely no human sympathy or connection in any of their approaches. bachmann was striking in this regard; she almost teared up as she told 'moms' to 'hang on,' etc. now, i don't know that she has any help in mind either, but i know that there's something wrong with the emotional set-up of republicans in this regard; that was the only even pseudo-human response to the disaster going on around them right there in vegas. you get the same thing on immigration, where the consensus position seems to be to electrocute desperate people or rain death on them from the skies.

santorum always appears more sincere and more thoughtful than the rest of these people, especially when it comes to religious questions.

i thought paul did well this time out, though. it helps that he has this immediate trillion-dollar cut thing to focus on, and he consistently surprises everyone with attacks on corporate greed, regulatory capture, big drug companies, militarism, etc. 

a thousand to one

trading a thousand of your prisoners for one of ours, i think, does kind of hint that each among our people is worth a thousand of yours. and the media coverage is likewise a thousand to one: shalit utterly individuated, palestinians treated en masse.

make the pie chart more complex

like any slogan or contagious rhetorical flourish or unanimous mumble-object, "99%" is ageing with extreme rapidity. and it does have a kind of 'bolshevik' or 'moral majority' flavor: you're with us or you're a super-rich oppressor and all alone.

pro-bureaucracy anarchism

things have reached a pretty pass when "anarchists" are fighting for gigantic bureaucracies, lifetime patronage positions, infinite state pensions, and so on. i'd rather see them enthusing about austerity or encouraging the useless thing to collapse. 

But though salaries have been cut, the government has yet to lay off anyone. The main reason is also one of the very reasons that Greece got into trouble in the first place: The government is in many ways an army of patronage appointments built up over decades. When election time rolls around, state workers become campaign workers, and their reach is enormous. There are so many of them that almost every family has one....

The government has about 700,000 employees and 80,000 more who work for government-owned entities like the power company. Thirty years ago, experts say, the public sector was about one-third that size. (Until a census was carried out last year, however, government officials admitted they did not really know how many employees they had.)

Even if the new plan passes, it may yet run into legal challenges. Greece’s Constitution grants its public servants lifetime tenure, a situation that may go a long way toward explaining their indifferent attitude toward getting things done.

 

 

hacked by barney

sesame street site hacked: replaced by porn videos. attack of the disgruntled toddlers, no doubt. and who could blame them? sesame street is the most painfully earnest pc propaganda ever inflicted on unformed brains. its greatest accomplishment is counting to ten 18 billion times. that's edutainment!

a priori economics

let's try framing the economic debate like this: (right) sovereign debt, and its accompanying spending, are a or even the basic problem; it's become untenable in greece, for example, and soon european economies will fall like dominoes for this reason. you're unlikely at this point to borrow or print your way to growth, and if you try (even with some positive effect on employment short-term, increased unemployment benefits/meeting all pension obligations(=increased demand) etc). you'll wake up with a completely unsustainable level of debt, and a calamitous world financial collapse. (left) the last thing you want at this moment is austerity; you directly reduce employment (state employees) and demand, causing further contraction. the problem is precisely that the right parties in england and us etc will lead their economies into a death spiral.

what's funny is that all the data can be smoothly incorporated into each view. did the stimulus not work because it was too small? or has the idea been refuted by its trillion-dollar tryout and with it another disastrous debt balloon? honestly, who knows? or what information would count? one thing i do know: everybody's position depends not on information, but on whether they were leftists or rightists to begin with. that all the pre-slump rightists hold one opinion on what the data now show, and all the pre-slump leftists the other, demonstrates that no one's position is responsive to information. i write this watching paul krugman and steve forbes on fareed zakaria.

so let's say that, with regard to the population of economists, we can predict anyone's assessment of the effects of a 2 trillion dollar stimulus in 2012 by his political affiliation circa 1999 with 90% accuracy. (i'm betting it's at least that high.) then that population is obviously impervious to any evidence bearing on the present situation. only the outliers should not be assumed to operating with a strictly non-empirical method. well, or consider the question of any given economist's diagnosis of what went wriong in the great depression, a question of some urgency at the moment because of the analogy to the current situation. what if we found that one interpretation of the data correlated with one position on (say) gay marriage, and the other with the other? at that point, it's time to find you some new economists.

i am not you

the right's response to occupy is the same as the left's response to the tea party: these are the wrong sort of people. e.g. francis fox piven: "Consistently, the Tea Party sympathisers in American politics today are almost all white, and they are better-off and older than the general population." (obviously francis fox piven is black, poor, and young.) a thousand commentators have said the same, and regarded that as putting an end to the matter. disqualified by your race and income, though it would surprise me if the average income of tea partiers was much above the average. anyway, if 'dirty hippies' etc pisses you off, you might recall the incessant 'tea baggers.' i think that the main distinctions between the two are demographic rather than ideological (you come from the wrong state; you don't even live in a city; you're white(=racist); you're male; you don't drive a hybrid, etc: i disagree with you even when i say the same as you, because i am trying to express the point that i am not you). this is actually almost the only way to account for the left/right split, which is incoherent ideologically. let's say that they will both have similar critiques of both obama and romney, who are competing to raise wall street money. understand that romneyesque republicans and obama-style democrats together did the bailout, e.g.

josiah warren, back in print after all these years

the practical anarchist is out from fordham. now, it costs $55; make sure your library gets it. some of the material is available, in less polished form, at the josiah warren project page.

poetry cannot truly be translated, for which we should all be grateful; no language has too little poetry.

needs pralines

i must say that herman cain has a certain charm. i'm not sure there could be a better answer to 'are you the flavor of the month?' than 'black walnut tastes good all the time.'

haven't we learned anything?

i'm glad to hear that romney and huntsman are members of a non-christian cult. there are two sorts of people i could never bring myself to vote for: (a) a christian (anyone who believes that the eternal god appeared in time and died could believe absolutely anything), and (b) the sort of person who believes anything that the majority of americans believe. haven't we learned any lessons from our long string of failed christian presidents elected by popular vote? geez.

sacha baron cohen's new role

as mutassim gaddafi. i can hardly wait for the film: watch the people of sirte freak out as he struts around talking smack in a ridiculous accent, threatening to drop them into mass graves. har har!

outrage

so mitch mcconnell, etc, on the obama jobs bill: 'it's just political grandstanding; everyone knew it could never pass; they're just playing politics.' of course, when the republicans in the house passed a debt-ceiling bill which included the demand for a balanced-budget amendment, the democrats said exactly the same thing, with the same pseudo-outrage. and we could go back or forward and see the same thing over and over: that is, with all the passion in their hearts, each side condemns the other for doing what it itself did last week and will do again next week. after that, they wonder why no one believes that they're sincere, or why no one can be bothered to listen to them at all, or why their approval ratings are below zero etc. tell you what: get that crap out of my face.

i propose to you that when people are talking merely strategically, merely to arouse a certain response, without regard to the questions of whether they themselves believe what they're saying or whether what they're saying is true, they are not actually talking at all; they are not actually engaged in linguistic activity. they're simply humming, squawking, or otherwise producing non-referring noises. when someone is speaking merely to manipulate you or control your response to something, they're at best doing what my cat does when she hits my door and meows. it is some sort of primitive or rudimentary form of communication, i suppose, but it has no semantics. sadly, this also makes it ineffective as a manipulation - there's nothing it would mean to agree - and makes the people who do that sort of thing ineffective as manipulators.

i'm against it

here's the fullbore academic presentation of against consensus. oops i kicked your ass!

update: i guess i didn't understand google docs. you'll have to send a request to get access, or just email me.

generation of vipers

the promo for anderson cooper's special on bullying: "everyone's a bully, and everyone's a victim." damn, gettin rough out there!

spam

sorry about all the crap in the comments. can't seem to put a stop to it, just delete it from time to time. i'm not sure why human ingenuity is so dedicated to putting incomprehensible crap in the comments section of blogs.

casus belli

puzzled that iran would try to kill the saudi ambassador (well, if they did)? there are many continual flashpoints of difficulty between the two. but one word that might come up is 'bahrain.'

race traitor

one of the hardest jobs in america is black conservative. people immediately start squawking 'race traitor.' indeed, attitudes like the one expressed in that piece are exactly the reasons why cain says black voters are 'brainwashed' into voting democratic. the idea that every black person has to have the same leftist poltics started driving perfectly smart people around the bend at latest in the harlem renaissance, when zora neale hurston was more or less extruded completely for not being a richard-wright communist etc. 'brainwashing' is way too pejorative, but the consensus enforcement takes place largely internally. in general, constant policing of a consensus is a good indication that what some group believes is very likely to be false, a claim which is, i believe, demonstrable. on the other hand, conservative tokenism isn't exactly the most liberatory attitude either.

at any rate, the idea that you ought to have certain political opinions in virtue of your membership in a particular social group certainly is the idea that it does not matter whether your views are thoughtful, plausible, or true. you're supposed to generate opinions according to whether they enhance group solidarity, not according to what the views are about, whether there's any evidence for them, and so on. well, for that matter try being a non-left humanities prof, etc.