cheese it, the cops!

ravens, broncos, sport as story

that ravens/broncos game yesterday - certainly one of the best nfl games i have ever seen - shows what is compelling about sports, even really problematic sports such as i would admit football is, though i am a fan. first of all it was a matchup of two excellent and well-matched teams playing at something like their best. and second, the ravens got down again and again and fought back like mad every time. they almost lost the game a half dozen times or more, on first downs or receptions that were matters of millimeters. it shows something about the possibilities of human will, emblematized by the great ray lewis. a great game kind of effortlessly takes on a narrative form, and that was one incredible story yesterday, complete with compelling characters, many reversals and complications and complexities, and then a real resolution such as we do not usually find out here in our lives. but sports are not fictional though they are of course highly artificial: they are real-life literature, we might say: one of the few spaces in human life where the narrative form is really crystallized. 

my qualifications? they're right here between my legs

we definitely are reliving the 80s; we are in a second pc golden age. now, however, i don't think there's anyone left who might express skepticism. so, for example, according to everyone everywhere, the most important qualification to be a cabinet member is having certain sorts of pudenda. really i think the interview process could consist entirely of groping. as maureen dowd points out, there's more to y'all than ankles.

the basic idea is that a country or a company or a university should be run by checking boxes. i feel this is going to get more complicated as there are more boxes to check. indeed, lgbtqia takes half your cabinet right there. by the time we get to the santorum administration, people will be launching protests to get more octoroons in positions of authority. bring me binders full of octoroons.

see the trouble with romney's binders full of women was that it just cut to the chase and showed the dem-types what they were actually doing; it was a too explicit endorsement of affirmative action, without all the obfuscating bullshit.

wake me up when woody allen is over

i would definitely support any two 'scantily clad cocktail waitresses' who want to make woody allen's dream come true by stomping him to death. indeed, anyone, cocktail waitress or not, has my unconditional support in their efforts to stomp woody allen. at least there wouldn't be any more woody allen movies, of which there are way too many. actually, i could do without anything woody allen ever made, not to speak of his basic persona, which makes me ashamed to be a human being. you know really i don't see anything by woody allen unless some woman drags me, so i missed his cult-of-the-artiste francophile jivefest midnight in paris. so perhaps i shouldn't express an opinion. ok, keep buying tickets and wake me up when he's over.

call me back when you've said something

this column by charles blow is ridiculous. first of all, it's just an exercise in manipulation and propaganda. "extremist extremist extremist': it doesn't engage the opponents or characterize anything about their positions; merely hurls insults at them, in an attempt to join a bunch of people together into a gantlet to spit on, dehumanize, and degrade their enemies. it's amazing that people who, say, could endorse the occupy movement, just uncritically use words like 'revolutionary' in a completely pejorative sense. as soon as your people get power, everyone does the same thing: our noble protests have won the day, and now disagreeing with us is illegal. sentence after sentence is quotation from hundreds of other columns by hundreds of other columnists: blow can't even write his own shit, despite the fact that he has been entirely liberated from cognitive or empirical content.

this, let's say, is the difference between individualism and collectivism as applied to op-ed columns: blow's column was written by a vast committee of people whose collective identity is founded on (1) hatred of their enemies, and (2) sentences that they all chant in the same order. the first move in establishing a collective consciousness is to stop thinking or trying to formulate ideas on your own. just kind of look sideways at what the folks around you are saying, and say it too, even if you're a bit late. for us all to flow together like the waters, each of us will have to be submerged. for us all (or at least, or rather necessarily, everyone except the Enemy) to become one thing, each of us must cease to be anything. i hope charles blow's people have celebrated his annihilation/expansion, as he has become one with all that is, or at least with his portion of the political spectrum.

one slight loss connected with the emergence of collective consciousness is that the voice of all us is very non-distinctive, as it has to be. well, art is going to be impossible in these conditions. they're incompatible with any sort of stylish or distinctive prose. that is a small price to pay for the ecstasy of unity, however.

i just might say: it's amazing what people say about white guys these days. if you tried that with any other group, the pc police would tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. stereotypes, profiling, a string of sheer generalized insults hurled at the group: all acceptable in this case. there are some reasons for that, of course. that doesn't make the structure of thought plausible or decent. 'thought,' however, might be inapt: the idea is to find a slogan or a word and then recite together like maoist schoolchildren.

really, i think that the idea of collective consciousness is basically a fiction or a simulation. but it is a fiction that has to be enforced by myriad social pressures and, as its real enthusiasts have known, if not said, by pervasive coercion. and i do think that you cannot have even the simulation of a collective consciousness that does not rest fundamentally on exclusions; our unity is proportional to our hatred, and there are just no clearer examples of that than the approach of people like blow, in fact just exactly like blow or indistinguishable from him. if someday he condemns partisanship or says all americans need to pull together, just snicker.  

the favorite trope of leftists these days is condemning 'individualism,' which is self-evidently the essence of evil. but they need in the process to square up to the various dark sides of their own position, for example that solidarity is proportional to extrusion. we're all in this together, and that's why these monsters among us with the incomprehensible temerity to disagree with me must be silenced and exiled. this is completely obvious from their own expressions of their own positions: their plea for togetherness starts by attacking as evil idiots anyone who disagrees or who resists complete incorporation.

death of the individual

it's relatively rare that i would agree with rush limbaugh. but everything he says here is true.

decisions, decisions

in honor of the late james buchanan: my refutation of his argument for the necessity of state power. as a free bonus feature you get my (then-)little daughter running about behind me trying to mess up my video because it's taking my attention!

 

bad reactions

hate to say it, but when the admin's gun control initiative turns from study toward action, and in particular if obama proceeds in any respect by executive order, there will be a survivalist/right-wing/paranoid/ammo hoarding reaction; i would expect some scary shit. this is one reason to proceed somewhat carefully (remember, i'm leaving the gun control to you); if there is a hint of confiscation, bad reactions from pockets of rural america can be predicted. i wish i could explain the point of view of folks like that to you in a way you'd understand, if you don't feel you do. the line of thought is pretty foreign to the urban professional. and yet it is not less coherent or comprehensible than any given far-leftism.

ethics and evolution

one thing that is typical of our scientistic moment, as in the late nineteenth century, is the idea that we can derive morality or moral values from evolution. now, i am afraid not, and i will briefly state the overwhelming problems.

(1) the classical is/ought problem: evolution cannot account for normative force or moral claims. so let's say it was counter-evolutionary to take your stuff. is that a reason not to take your stuff? you might have many good arguments that it's wrong to take your stuff, but the idea that i am swimming against the tide of evolution might be met with a mere shrug. what if it turned out that some forms of violence or crime were adaptive? would that show that they were right? also evolution makes use of counter-adaptive behavior as much as adaptive behavior. acting counter-adaptationally is necessary to the progress of the species, and i and my offspring will pay the price if in fact i am so acting. 

(2) the basic inference has to be from actuality to etiology: arguments from evolution start by presuming that we are what evolution made us. so look: staring squarely at the data, we ought to speculate that both what we would think of as good behavior and bad have been selected for, insofar as we so stubbornly display both. insofar as evolution has selected us, it has, obvioously, selected both cooperation and competition, good and evil, happiness and pain, and so on. it appears, like the rest of nature, to be morally indifferent. if it was really selecting against theft or individualist philosophy or something it should have done better than it has so far in weeding out thieves and individualists.

in short if you want ethics without god you are going to have to find it elsewhere.

debt and propaganda

as i have said for so long, the one thing that everyone agrees on is that we should spend more through infinite deficits. or rather, everyone agrees about this except 'tea party republicans.' essentially we are almost reaching the point at which there are two parties: boehner/obama/macconnell/biden democratic-republicans, and the tea party. now, with regard to this issue at least, you should not listen to all the continual 'extremists,' 'hostage-takers,' 'ideologues,' and so on: they are the only force in any opposition to the ever-growing state and they had to jump ship here. they really are conscience-bound to fight on the debt ceiling, and i think they should. as soon as you hear terms like 'extremists,' invoked at once by everyone, your ears should prick up; it's obviously mere propaganda, yes? and really stop to consider the argument that we never really argued about the debt ceiling before. so what? it's never been now before. or maybe that was a mistake and people should have been focusing on that all along. anyway, the arguments need to be better than mere manipulative strategies.  

now of course one might also point out that a good percentage of these tea party republicans are much more committed to tax cutting or no tax increases than to controlling the deficit, so their net contribution is less than zero anyway. if deficits and debt could ever get you concerned under any circumstances, you should be concerned now.