cheese it, the cops!

social construction of ignorance

you're probably not going to be too sympathetic to the example i'm going to use, but i want to say that the pragmatic theory of truth, and also the idea that truth is a social artifact produced by convention or agreement (rorty: 'truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying') is just wrong. their negations would be nearer the mark. ok sexual orientation is not a matter of choice. now note: i am not declaring that to be false. i am declaring that the enforced social consensus about it should make you suspect that it is. the proponents of such a view believe that its acceptance would have excellent political results. here's a very clear way to see what's wrong with pragmatism: the political results are irrelevant to the truth of claim, and they yield a motivation for purveying the view that is disconnected from its truth. this is obvious. whether sexual orientation is imprinted on your genes: the evidence on that has to do with genes etc: a happy polity is neither here nor there. believing it might help you toward self-acceptance; well that's obviously completely irrelevant to the truth of the claim.

if a factual claim is being insisted on by people for whom the truth of the claim would produce desired political results, you should immediately provisionally assume that the way the opinion was generated had to do with those desired results and not with the evidence for the claim. for example: paul krugman says that austerity has demonstrably failed. and science is a social world as well as a quest for truth, and as the matter linked above shows, one that is fully capable of pressuring people into expressing agreement about factual matters for completely irrelevant political reasons.

i think along these lines you should suspect scientists just like anyone else; they too are immensely subject to the social enforcement of ignorance. think seriously for a second about the actual social consequences spitzer faced for his position. after the gantlet of beatings and ostracisms, anything he says should be viewed as likely to be mere capitulation.

one reason this is a good illustration is that the whole politics and self-esteem-enhancing aspects of the position could easily reverse valence. so once we get some tiny way beyond the stigma, perhaps people would like to regard their selves as things that they had themselves a hand in creating. 'it's not my fault!' might give way to a pride that could happily take some responsibility. whatshisname on glee: "i'm gay; i create culture." but only because you absolutely can't help yourself? once the choice would not be regarded as evil or defective, you might be happy to have made it. after awhile, "i'm sorry, i can't help being black,' would itself be regarded as a projection of racism, as this thing is of homophobia.

i actually think that the way people arrive at a sexual identity is immensely complex: a course of genetic elements, social situations, contingent events, individual decisions and so on. but the point here is: whatever evidence there is for the present consensus position, it is thoroughly socially and pragmatically useful or essential according to its proponents. that's why the evidence is very likely to be distorted. the social situation is such that an honest attempt to find the truth is unlikely for anyone.

truth is what your contemporaries will hang you for saying. truth is what does not work in the way of belief. ok those are not adequate theories of truth. but they're better than rorty's.

doc

aww, so long doc. not only was he an encyclopedia of american roots music, but he was among our greatest guitar players and loveliest singers (he played a mean harmonica too). that "will the circle be unbroken" album was key to my discovery of the music i love.

doc watson, earl scruggs, ricky skaggs, alison krauss: that there is a band!

bending space itself

here's a rough sketch of a life of walking stewart, eventually to be extended into an introduction to the life and thought. this at least gives a rough idea of the astonishing itinerary.

In which a striking resemblance is noted between HD Thoreau, Herr DOKTOR Professor Sartwell, and Chuck Prophet

 However, as I dare say you - like Jean-Paul Sartre - have noticed, people can be annoying. We need distance from, as much as we need association with, one another. Thoreau tried for both: he would walk from Walden Pond to Concord, hang out with his dear friends the Emersons and the Alcotts, and then retreat to his hovel to be fairly happily alone. Walmart is no Concord. And if Greg will pardon my saying so, he is no Emerson or Alcott, though possibly he is a better golfer than either. Then again, he is also not my dear friend... 

Crispin Sartwell  is a friend of mine. We are supposedly charter members of the Defeatists as well as my being an occasional commentator here. As you most be aware if you're reading this,  Crispy is a philosophy professor for Dickinson College, a former rock and roll critic, a retired environmental terrorist and a fairly interesting guy for a lot of reasons, including his part time job as a blackjack and three card monte dealer in an alley in back of Trump's in Atlantic City. He has kids, college looming and teaches philosophy at a private college. Cut the man some slack, OK! Selling a piece to the NY Times is a big fucking deal -- he can afford new socks, and some actual hamburger now.

This is an interesting piece for a lot of reasons. Although some of the Defeatist-Malcontent collective and carp fishing gang professed confusion at what he was saying, I think he was being  cynically lyrical. Crispin appears to be going through a phase, sort of a male menopause thing...I kind of like the idea of Walmart as our Walden, since except for pithy phrases here and there, I despise Walden...The Transcendentalists were smug, self-satisfied bourgeois Babbits who inflicted themselves on us ever since. Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau are not and never were Tinker, Evers and Chance. Or, Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The insufferable rightness of the Yankee ascendency irritates me -- concepts do have dates, citing another philosophical friend of mine, Mary Hunt.

 

However, it says a lot about the leveling experience of our current distribution of wealth. The wealthy are really wealthy and the middle-working-under classes are going shopping for Guatemalian Strawberries and Pride of Gwangzhou Blu-Ray players.

I picture Walmart- Thoreau in a Lime Green UnderArmour  T-shirt with khaki shorts and Birkenstocks with anklets...with some bacon flavored tofu and Miller beer as well as the blu-ray and socks...they'd probably be white, with colored strips at the top of the ankle. He's also got a 20 pack of toilet paper, some duct tape and a couple of HelloKitty training bras...he nicked himself shaving, and uses too much Aqua Velva. He whitens his teeth, and sells real estate. He has a Blackberry. He goes by "HD" or "Davie" and takes antidepressants.

 

Alejandro is the guy with the sunglasses...in a radio studio in Seattle. Chuck, in this case, looks kinda like Thoreau...or, Crispin. 

 

dimestore thoreau

true, i'm in the nytimes.

real walking

walking stewart's realism:

It burst upon my intelligence with a blaze of light the following momentous and natural notion, That all facts, relations, or analogies of things, were totally independent of all human opinion, and its forms of logic or language. Fire, light, matter, motion, mind, exist now with al their qualities, as they existed at all times of antiquity; and no errors of language or opinion can give any alteration to their different qualities, or degrees of relations, or analogies in real existence. (Philosophy of Sense, 166)

Miami officer fatally shoots naked man who is allegedly chewing on another man’s face

(headlines)

i seem to have worked out how to update my website, and i've started a zone for walking stewart (as i've done before for nathaniel rogers and josiah warren).

keep on walkin

De Quincey puts Stewart "among the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry," in Paris during the revolution, Lapland, "the solitary forests of Canada," "the deserts of Asia and America," etc. John Taylor - "Oculist to the Prince of Wales" - places him in Persia, Armenia, and walking to Edinburgh to talk to Dugald Stewart. Rumor adds Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, he was simultaneously present in various locations in London. De Quincey:

In 1812 it was I think that I saw him for the last time; and by the way, on the day of my parting with him, had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of ubiquity ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine: I met him and shook hands with him under Somerset-house, telling him that I should leave town that evening for Westmoreland. Thence I went by the very shortest road (i.e. through Moor-street, Soho--for I am learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham-court-road; I stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook Walking Stewart. 

That is, there is the vague suggestion of X-Men-like mutant superpowers (teleportation? time-bending? or perhaps ubiquity itself), no doubt of advantage to a philosopher.

 

 

solitary traveller

ok an update on walking stewart (1749-1822), the outsider philosopher who walked home to london from madras, from abyssinia to siberia, and around america. etc. he was a pro-french-revolution radical in the 1790s, i believe, and a pro-british militarist in the napoleonic wars. (among other things, he promises that the if we realize the truths expressed in his aptly-titled the philosophy of sense; or, the book of nature, revealing the laws of the intellectual world founded on the laws of the physical world, forming the sun or source of moral truth or sensitive good, as the physical sun, the source of light, heat, and motion to this planet of the earth (1815), we'll kick napoleon's ass.) (honestly, one could be forgiven for thinking that stewart was a hoax perpetrated by tom de quincey and percy shelley, or even by crispin sartwell. i'm working on the theory that he was fully actual, or actual in the same sense that you are.)

as that title indicates and as a moment's contact with anything he ever did will demonstrate, he was an extremely eccentric thinker and person, with a particular aptitude for tortured expression. "He has generally been treated . . . as a madman," writes de quincey. "But this is a mistake; and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his books." later de quincey takes back the 'mistake' bit: "certainly, when I consider every thing, he must have been crazy when the wind was at N.N.E."

also he was continuously, comically, grandiose; i guess you could say i wish passages like the following, from the first page of opus maximum, or the great essay to reduce the moral world from contingency to system (1803), were intended to be funny, but either way they are.

    I shall open this stupendous Essay of intellectual energy  with the
most important discovery of the moral laws of nature that was ever
made by human intelligence, viz.
  That the word knowledge signifies no more than a capacity of mind
to conform the relations of thought to the phenomena or appearances of
things, whereby we conceive the course or order of nature's action
independent of its essence or unknown causes.

now, on the other hand, there are many interesting features of his philosophy. he is a materialist, indeed some passages are close to quotations from lucretius. human consciousness is a little material bubble in a big material universe, which we can and do know; he is a realist. but he has an almost hindu vision of the oneness of all material things, really a mystical vision in which each of us lives in and as the whole which is in constant redistribution. death is the dispersal of a material body, and also the extinction of consciousness (he is an atheist; de quincey: "In many things he shocked the religious sense, especially as it exists in unphilosophic minds. . . . And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter obscurity in which his works have slumbered than that they should all have escaped prosecution."), but it is not our selves we should be concerned about; rather, the good of the whole through all of time. here is one way (among myriad) that he expresses his "great parent idea": "the incessant transmutation of matter from one human body into all the surrounding bodies of nature, both in life and death" (philosophy of sense, xv)

he is a pragmatist in his way: 

It is most certain that the utmost limits and speculatios of practical or theoretical good must be brought to the measure of experience; for, whatever systems of policy, moralist, or philosophy the mind may form in imagination, they must all be brought to the test of practical institution, to prove their result of utility or good. (Philosophy of Sense, xvii)

but he also rails at the scientism of his day, which is extremely rare in the period and place of his early authorship, and which may have actually influenced the shape of british romanticism (wordsworth knew and admired stewart; de quincey loved the guy, and regrets that for the last ten years of stewart's life, he de quincey was too pre-occupied with taking opium to see him stewart); he keeps saying that there's plenty you can't prove by experiment, and you should free yourself to reason analogically, or in whatever manner is appropriate to the material under consideration.

The doctrine of experimentalism pervading the whole continent of Europe, can exist only as the fashion of the season among thoughtless wits and scientific idiots: it stands in direct opposition to the laws of intellectual power; for, what can prohibit the process of thought to follow the necessary laws or course of its own actions . . .  that is, ideas, experimental sentiments, notions of analogy, and phantasms? (philosophy of sense, xviii)

he explicitly rails against enlightenment french thought, and indeed the french to last atom of their very being, and holds that logic, while ok in its place, is an arid landscape where ideas shrivel up and die; you've really got to use your imagination, to paraphrase the pips. he's very in the rousseauvian cult of nature.

also he is, as you would expect, deeply cosmopolitan, in a certain way, though also by the end of his life a british chauvinist. so he says, for example,

    Before I began my travels I was of a very irritable disposition; but,
after a very short period, I had found so much opposition to my will,
and so much to offend my feelings, in the censure and curiosity of
strange nations, that I at length acquired a temperance of toleration
that has ever since formed the greatest cause of happiness in my life.
(opus maximum, xxiv)

he is insistently autobiographical but also not. he actually does not reveal much about specific adventures serving the nabob, etc. supposedly he wrote 30-odd books; i've been able to identify by title about half that so far, and i've got five or six things sitting around; the pile is very intimidating. one title i like: roll of a tennis ball through the moral world, a series of contemplations by a solitary traveller.

at any rate, this seems to be the project right now. so maybe i'll try to publish a selection of his writings with an intellectual-biographical essay, the de quincey, and scholarly apparatus.

booker's burning building

cory booker's nausea dominated cable news this week and illustrates all that is mind-numbing and full of shit about american politics. political parties and campaigns actually try to produce collective consciousness through simulated unanimity. if we all say the same words in the same order we will cease to be distinct persons: a fantasy of solidarity and an index of self-loathing. the campaigns send out 'surrogates,' all of whom must pretend to believe exactly the same things; to belong and to rise in our hierarchy, you're going to have to pretend not to think, not to have any opinions or even words of your own, not to be a particular human being: in short, not to exist at all.

booker went 'off-message' or even 'off-script'; he 'went off the reservation.' well, why do i need cory booker reading someone else's script? is he appearing as a person or a character in a sit-com? do i really need to confine cory booker to a reservation? people started talking about whether booker's political career could survive his disagreement with the thrust of a particular campaign spot. agreement was enforced upon his mouth, goodness knows how. it had to be more or less: take it back, or you'll never work in this town again. personaly i think you'd better make a little room for actual individual differences of opinion. when i listen to cory booker, i want him to speak his own words, or else i want you to put the person who's actually speaking on television. there really is no reason to have squads of people to all say the same thing; a basic understanding of television might suggest that you could just play an obama soundbite or ad over and over instead of lining up marionettes to recapitulate it every hour for days. 

here's one slight drawback of the simulated agreement: you just know that much or most of what the political consultants, party leaders, and surrogates say is totally insincere. or they are beyond sincerity or insincerity: when they say 'unemployment' or 'austerity' or 'immigration' or whatever it may be, the term does not refer to unemployment or austerity or immigration: it refers to their need to belong and their ambitions. the words are not connected to their referents, but to your head, which they are trying to manipulate. at that point, it really could just be nonsense syllables, as long as we are producing them in unison. then you wonder how people can be so apathetic; you'd be better off trying to explain how anyone could ever pay any attention at all. there can be no reason to.

people always regard politicians as dishonest, which i propose is the only rational response to the state of our political discourse. now there are various dimensions of honesty. you might have a secret life, like john edwards, you might be massively corrupt. those things are occasional. but the insincerity or trans-sincerity is universal. the only reason you're saying that is to manipulate me, and someone else wrote it based on focus groups: that could not be more obvious or more continuous, and it is certainly a form of dishonesty. this is why the only useful or interesting people (or, indeed, the only people) in american politics are folks like bernie sanders and ron paul.

hard to be your oppressor

the elizabeth warren/native-american-affirmative-action thing is pretty funny. she says she based her self-reported ethnicity on 'family lore,' and that's certainly plausible. in fact, it's an american tradition to throw in some indian: cf. noble drew ali. my grandmother told me stuff like that and also that we were descended from thomas jefferson, possibly because there was an early-19th-century thomas jefferson sartwell. and since the racial/genderal composition of the faculty was always based on self-reporting, i occasionally myself have grown tired or offended enough to respond 'other' or 'south-sea islander' etc. on the other hand, harvard relentlessly promoted warren's minority status, especially in the 90s golden era of identity politics, when your professors were on hunger strike and your students enraged until you hired (any damn) black woman. life was a celebratory parade of tokens, and every white dude - no matter how milquetoast, no matter how apparently sincere our recitation the approved forms of words - carried the collective guilt of centuries of kicking your ass.

elizabeth warren in full drag pow-wow blackface regalia

That which really matters...not a lot

 

In which Crusader AXE reflects on work, fast cars, Kierkegaard, cats and the meaning of life...and invites Crispy to hang out the cafe with him and his friends Soren, Socky, Rhett and Waylon...

The tragedy of cheap beer fortunes and the right wing in American folk art

In which Crusader AXE confuses John McCain with Henry Plantagenet (the fifth of that name) and enlists Blind Faith and Warren Zevon to make some kind of obscure point with pianofortes and lutes and stuff...

own the stars

this here is a reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of intellectual property. not only did ford claim to own 'the blue oval,' but it put this abstract geometrical/chromatic concept up as collateral on a loan. maybe i'll try this with 'anarchism' or 'knowledge is just true belief.' or maybe i can identify some investment-grade polyhedrons or topological forms. if someone tries to sell you the brooklyn bridge, it's a con. but at least it's plausibly something that could be owned, like a particular physical object. but people actually do purport to buy, sell, and collateralize things like 'the blue oval.' it would be much more plausible to claim ownership of a particular cumulus cloud or the planet neptune.

losing some soul

i reviewed a donna summer show long about 1981 for the washington star. i remember saying something like this: 'the sex kitten stuff has distracted from what was there all along: the best soul singer of her generation.' now in the late 70s i went straight from grateful dead to ramones. the hippies and punks both coded as opposite of disco, though there were continuous overlaps as well. it was, in my imagination and that of a lot of others, authenticity as against artificiality, and sincere expression as against commercialized, pandering claptrap. i don't think i consciously had on board then the sexual-identity aspect of this distinction, which is not to say i wouldn't have said that disco was gay. also since then i have gotten very worried about the authentic/artificial distinction, in pop music and elsewhere: i got onto the post-modern suspicion at some point, and at some point it occurred to me that springsteen was as much enacting a gender role as was rupaul. 

disco, like a lot of really straight-up pop, has aged well; it is unpretentious, for one thing. and in retrospect - as i suddenly saw at that donna summer show - it is more continuous with and central to the unfolding of african-american popular music than it seemed at the time. donna was framed in state-of-the-art production - not very stax - and actually had a pretty eclectic oeuvre (for example, the great 'hot stuff' sounds as much like foreigner as like gloria gaynor). but at the heart there was a churchy shouter: not that far from aretha, though more malleable. even if disco was a producer's studio form, donna put on a great live show. in the other direction, disco is as fundamental to hip hop as is funk, and herc and flash sampled nile rogers's 'good times' incessantly.

now however, i still gravitate towards an aesthetics of authenticity in pop music, even if i can't defend it. and in the culture wars of the 70s, i'd still go anti-disco every time. i have to say that the idea that hedonism is liberation is one i just can't gravitate towards: cocaine and promiscuity just aren't going to save you: demonstrably, i would say. so if you're nostalgic for gay bathouse culture of the late seventies, i'm just going to try to disguise my disgust at the whole thing. i still think the disco bands looked silly and that the production was too processed. i might still long for recognizable instruments, and not think that moroder's electronic tracks for 'i feel love' etc overall had the most positive influence.

but i do have a bunch of disco on my computer, and it did produce some insanely catchy and delightful music.

stop-stop

see ya chuck brown. looking back on it, late seventies/early eighties dc was a rare music scene, what with the invention of hardcore: bad brains, teen idles. also the excellent blues revival bands that were still the basic dc bar fare: the nighthawks, e.g. i remember go-go shows at big concrete barn downtown: chuck brown, touble funk, rare essence etc. when kool herc started working the turntables in the bronx, he did it to extend the break or the drum bit. go-go just did it with squads of actual percussion instruments. go-go had a cool swing, but it also git a bit incessant after a few hours.

Pirates? ARRRRRR

In which Crusader AXE seats Crispin, Hegel, Mies and Grover Norquist at the Whist Table in Hell's Casino to debate letters of marque and macroeconomics. In Greek. 

 

lit-bashing 101

response to cb:

i have been entertained or even delighted by many novels. in my teens i read *lord of the rings* a dozen times or more. in my twenties it was wodehouse: i read all hundred novels, more or less. thirties: well, for one thing noir: hammett and especially chandler. etc., and i've read a lot of the classics, some of which i liked a lot, and many of which i thought were absurdly overrated. now i don't doubt that a decade in middle earth or blandings castle had some effect on my personality. but no more than watching a lot of sports on tv, or driving a honda and many other activities. the novel is an excellent form of entertainment. you just need to stop bloating your little pleasures into a profound, world-transforming and person-transforming Truth. people (mostly lit professors) have tried to understand all human life and personality in terms of the novel: as 'narrative constructions.'

you'd better keep this pretty amorphous. there have been novels that actually had some real effect. supposedly goethe's *sorrows of werther* gave rise to a suicide fad, for example. other than that it's stuff like 'the invention of the human,' or a kind of deep insight into the zeitgeist or something: you'd better keep it at that mega-wooly level where the assertion just kind of sounds profound but has no actual content, because actually novels are just little rectangular objects with ink stains, which basically don't do a damn thing. yo that's ok! 

if it's any comfort to you, i regard philosophy the same way, more or less. it's not implausible to argue that locke, or marx, or confucius, had dramatic social effects. but that's three out of thousands. (however, no novel has ever had those sorts of effects.) i fully expect my books to have no effect on anything, and i'm good with that. it's like my hobby or whatever; i find it intrinsically absorbing, and that's why i do it, and that's good enough to keep me going.

you should get worried if i start saying that 'life itself is a philosophical treatise,' or 'we are the polemical essays we compose,' or that the structure of the universe itself is a syllogism. or when the dude at the honda dealership likens world history to a sales pitch. the novel has no more claim to reflect the very structure of consciousness and the nature of reality than does carpentry, or free jazz, or gastronomy, or gardening, or driving, or playing board games, or bird-watching, now if you're thinking that all of these are significant because they fall into a narrative structure, i say, first: that's not true. and second: it would work just as well the other way round: a novel is like a house, or like a meal, or like a commute. 

what about ping pong?

from the 'briefly noted' books bit from the may 14 new yorker: "there are no human activities more worthwhile than writing or reading novels."

rocking the norms

you know, i'm not going to use mitt romney's dog. but the high school bullying thing is interesting. the immediate provocation was the victim's non-normative hair, which justifies violence on the part of those who appoint themselves to enforce their group norms, no matter how arbitrary or meaningless they may be. well, mitt has never not had non-normative hair, i assume. he's just the kind of fellow who despises you for wearing the wrong blazer, much less dating members of the wrong gender. what i like about social powerhouses like this is that in their leadership they are complete slaves of the norms of their group, and preternaturally sensitive to them and how they should be extended and who's violating them and how. however, the norms change over time, and as you move through different groups. that's why you have extremely passionate commitments, but only momentarily, until the group consensus shifts etc. this is more or less why an alpha preppy passionately enacts whatever hooha will keep him on top for the moment, which is actually the opposite of actually believing anything. the first shall be last: romney's whole career in a nutshell.

marriage equality

surely the next logical step is to ban heterosexual marriage. anyone who's actually been stuck in a house with a person whose gender is apparently different from one's own will agree, of course. now, you may argue that god, while opposing gay marriage, positively requires straight marriage. but son, we are free, proud americans, not god's little goddamn slaves. god gave us free will in order to make it possible for us to sabotage his wacky totalitarian schemes. for though god has always been confident in his sheer power, he - like the rest of us - has had severe misgivings about his own benevolence. thus the great bellow of the god of monotheisms: "oh fuck, what did i just do?"

In which Crusader AXE discusses the relationship of Health Care to Tiberius Caesar and Captain Capitualion

"And if you spend your whole life dragging horses into Troy, You will not go to Heaven, you'll go to Champaign Illinois" -- Rhett Miller

 

 

Actually authorized Dylan re-tool of Desolation Row...

 

whew

well, that obama finally endorsed gay marriage is a relief. actually i do think it took some guts to do it before the election. but really it ought to be a matter of conscience, which is what biden was saying.

crotch bomber 2

yeah the point at which my infiltration of your group is over is the point at which you start strapping petn to my stuff.

never know

timothy garton ash:

The heart of darkness in Murdoch's Britain has been the incestuous relationship between private and public power: more specifically, between money and politics.

i wonder how many centuries or millennia of the coincidence of money and political power would suffice to make the left see that the state is itself a hierarchy and that - more or less always - it coincides with and exacerbates other hierarchies, in particular wealth. well, it's a faith, not an empirical position i suppose. the solution is to just keep beefing up the apparatus performing the oppressions you repudiate. maybe it'll work out this time.

gag reflex

this situation in which ric grenell was on a foreign-policy conference call but under a demand for silence is intensely disturbing and it is truly an emblematic moment, a time when reality actually seems intent on providing symbols like a fable, as if it were being directed by terrence malik. it might as well have been: get your fag ass back in the closet. surely this morning grenell can't be thinking of himself as a republican. after that, if these accounts have anything to do with what actually happened, no one ought to.

chen again

maybe the whole thing doesn't speak so well for us after all. we might speculate that hillary & co. basically just wanted this up out their face, and would take almost any superficial apparent deal to make that happen. sadly i often have kantian intuitions, and i do think that chen's life and well-being, once they were put in the charge of the u.s. gov, made an absolute, an infinite, claim. i would fight to preserve them under threat of war, trade or otherwise, etc.

spam

you know, i actually pay typepad to host this blog, so i get irritated by the absolutely chronic spam in the comments. it's a constant struggle to get it out. it's like kiddieporn, kiddieporn. one of the items i just deleted promised 'children with disabilities.' sometimes it occurs to me that homo sapiens deserves annihilation.

chen

that the u.s. embassy has sheltered chen guangcheng no doubt puts it in a difficult position. it also speaks extremely well for us. in the initial mini-crisis, people were suggesting that we might turn him over, which ought to be inconceivable. instead, this morning our ambassador is escorting him to the hospital. the current chinese state - a monstrous mating of marxist totalitarianism and hyper-capitalism - the worst of all possible systems, more or less -  deserves total collapse. meanwhile, we might try to save a few of the victims, and we are specifically obliged to in this case.