cheese it, the cops!

bye, earl

earl scruggs was among the handful of great instrumental innovators in twentieth-century american popular music. comparable figures are people like louis armstrong, little walter, jimi hendrix. the banjo in his hands yields an amazing combination of rhythm and melody: it's the most percussive of the string instruments, and scruggs created the role of the banjo virtuoso in bluegrass: during his solo, he drives the band faster and faster, like an accelerating train. the other people i mentioned above actually played behind the beat, giving their playing a kind of relaxed swing even in a furious solo. but actually earl has somewhat the same effect: you start wondering whether there's any limit to his speed, and then it almost sounds easy. still the right expression playing like that would be a grimace of extreme concentration, like roy clark.

you hate to say someone shouldn't change, but the semi-electric earl scruggs revue albums in the 70s with his sons etc were not very good.

walking the cow

i've been checking out a truly eccentric or fabulous figure of the kind you sometimes run into in philosophy: walking stewart. i'm in possession of a copy of a work by stewart from around 1793, apparently titled: The Revolution of Reason, or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature: Of Man, Of Human Intellect, Of Moral Truth, of the Existence of Universal Good: From the Era of Intellectual Existence or the Publication of the Apocalypse of Nature, An. 4. or 5000. damn i wanted to use that for my next thing.

thus far the writing is pure funk: he has his own whole jargon, like a preincarnation of heidegger. but even with the actual walk around the known world, he's also very much a british philosopher, and he lurches into extreme clarity:

Human reason by controuling the exercise of the passions, will, no doubt, procure longevity to the body; but should imagination, through analogy, suppose the procuration of immortality by the infinite ratio of increasing reason, it would be downright insanity; as well might the man who lifted a calf every day, till it became a cow, expect to lift a house, mountain, globe, universe, and ultimately, carry all nature like a hat under his arm.

so: there are limits to human reason. there are limits to knowledge or science. or: the fact that moore's law has worked out this long doesn't infallibly indicate that it will continue to do so. or you might say: beware the malthusian style of inference: well if it keeps on doubling... i'd like to send that as a note to my bete noire ray kurzweil and anyone else who proposes to carry all nature like a hat under his arm. i am a secular believer in original sin: i think we are irremediably flawed, and that the singularity is going to suck exactly as much as we do, since it will have been perpetrated by and for us.

i'll perhaps be keeping you updated on walking stewart. or if anyone knows anything or has a read on him, let me know.

just say no to drug testing 6th graders

central pa rocks.

women's issues, women's interests

speaking of 'the war on women": even after santorum has taken a relentless pummeling on 'women's issues' (=contraception and abortion, at least at the moment), cnn exit polling in illinois shows santorum with 33% of the men, 38% of the women. that is, more republican women than men voted for santorum. your classic more or less second-wave feminism, now fully annexed by the democratic party, understandably wants to portray women as more or less monolithic (um, that's why there was a third wave): they all have the same interests: pro-choice etc. i'll just say: actual women don't necessarily see it that way.

now's the time to whip out false consciousness. awww, don't. been a long day.

the vatican speaks for you in all things

frank bruni argues that "Neither Rick Santorum nor the Vatican speaks for most American Catholics." perhaps i am just bewildered by the whole idea of catholicism. but i would have thought that letting the vatican speak for you is more or less a necessary condition for membership. if you disagree with the pope on a wide variety of issues, you're a protestant: that's what 'protestant' means. it seems like maybe catholicism, like judaism, has mutated from religion to ethnicity: you're a catholic if your mom is. but the catholic chuch qua religion is certainly the most epistemically authoritarian religion this side of scientology. if you're uncomfortable with that, just ditch. ok maybe catholicism is central to your identity, though you don't believe a damn thing it asserts. oh i don't know: work up a new identity, one that's closer to your identity.

Thugs and changing times without change in people

I've been quiet even though there have been a lot of things I've wanted to chime in on. However, the murder of Trayvon Martin has provoked a response. When exactly did behavior by self-appointed guardians of the people as lousy as the B-Specials in Ulster in 1968, the Klan in 1954, or the Security Forces in South Africa become legal in Florida? Self-defense is a universal defense if there actually is a threat...a black teen armed with skittles doesn't cut it as a defense for murder or Manslaughter 1. Florida is now less civilized than South Africa -- hell, the stats would probably bear us out on this. Sad -- we're less a civil society than we were in 1980...but then, why does that surprise me?

Slante' friends, we need it. 

subjection

david brooks quotes c.s. lewis: 

Lewis describes the joy of religious contact, but discovers he can’t achieve joy by seeking it: “I smuggled in the assumption that what I wanted was a ‘thrill,’ a state of my own mind. And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else — whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard — does the ‘thrill’ arise. It is a byproduct. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer.”

well i think this is profound, though it's not a thought i had applied to religion. but this was really the disaster of modernism (i.e. descartes and after): a continuous subjectivication of reality. if one took pleasure in something, what was of significance was the pleasure, not the thing, to the point that one took oneself to be acquainted only or primarily with one's own sensations: philosophers went through a series of bizarre contortions to construct a world from some person's sensations (this reaches its outermost, perhaps, in someone like carnap). how we make a world out of our impressions: we wasted centuries on this bizarrely backwards question: it was entirely solipsistic, utterly human-centered, and intolerably grandiose: each of us a little god, a world-creator. (you still see this in, for example, narrative theory.)  this was the death of the whole concept of beauty, for example. the 18th century (hutchinson, hume, kant, e.g.) connected beauty to an experience of pleasure. by the time you get to santayana, for example, beauty just is pleasure, whichh i think is just a kind of bizarre category mistake: my pleasure isn't beautiful: it is a response to a beautiful thing, and the idea that when i experience the beauty of the night sky i am delectating my own pleasures is, first, just wrong, and second, a good way to lose the beauty of everything but oneself. the pleasure has to come, as lewis insists, as a byproduct of a dedication to the beautiful thing that calls it out.

appointed by demographics

ok gonna blog, goddammit. watching 'up with chris hayes' (guest-hosted by ezra klein). they're talking in total puzzlement about the republicans' shift to the right, and they're saying that it's suicide: they are alienating latinos, women etc (indeed, they've declared 'war' on women). they're going to get their asses kicked; they're on the wrong side of demographic history etc.

now i think this response has something to do with where the members of the panel live. here in rural pa, you'd be surprised how conservative the women are: sexual mores far stricter than the men, e.g. i live in a town called york springs, which is in the middle of tens of thousands of acres of apple orchards, and which these days is dominatedly latino, believe it or not. now i was talking to a guy at the only viable biz (lua's mexican shop) the other day, and he was going all reactionary on all kinds of things, even immigration. for that matter, the 'up' folk might underestimate how conservative the black population is, and i've been saying for years that it would not take much to break off part of religious black america for the republicans. it's just that they don't seem to have any idea how. (but even opposition to gay marriage would play well.)

we're still fighting the sex war of the sixties, and i think that that's the heart of the current contraception debate etc etc. let's just say that raising teenagers, for example, or teaching college, might make you think twice about indiscriminate promiscuity as a road to liberation, though many many women and men have tried. i actually think that a more puritanical sexuality is liable to have a long future, and to be expressed indirectly in our politics for the forseeable future. actually the extent to which a lot of our political discourse is indirectly about sex is immense.

in other words, i don't think there is a demographic inevitability to a left turn, though that's the kind of argument that 'progressives' have been making for a couple of centuries: we are the future. well, we'll see.

 

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

va

well, projecting virginia for romney. still, even in a two-man field, paul's 43% or whatever it may be is impressive. or interesting anyway; if he could get a clean shot...

so tired

the limbaugh/fluke contretemps shows something, i think: american right-wing politics is tired, like they really haven't gone anywhere since '64. the limbaugh schtick is getting really old, and i grow unspeakably weary of the republican candidates for president (with the exception of paul, who of course will sweep supertuesday).