cheese it, the cops!

systematic

this morning i finished a submittable draft of entanglements: a system of philosophy at around 210k words. the basic outline is six chapters: ontology, theory of truth, epistemology; then the axiology: ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. it's the first such system since samuel alexander's space, time, and deity fell stillborn from the press 100 years ago or whatever it may be. or maybe not. anyhow, now i've just got to tack on the kant/schelling/hegel/schopenhauer style preface: 'Since the very dawn of time, members of our amazing species have wondered about this and that. Well, ain't gots to worry no mo, cause ole Uncle Crispy has figured this sucker out, in a way that makes rational disagreement conceptually impossible. In the book you are about to read, all knowledge is comprehended in a new rigorous science, the universe reaches perfect self-consciousness, and history is annihilated into ecstasy. Or just about, anyway."

urine review

2013 was a great year to be anarchist, as usual. really, everyone saw this year that anarchism is the only non-nightmare option, the only future that any decent person could possibly want. or if they didn't see that, it's not because it wasn't maximally obvious. think for a brief moment about what the governments of the world did this year, and then tell me you want more. we win again!

i think, in the face of centuries of disaster, war, enforced extreme hierarchy in every dimension, genocide, grinding daily oppression by idiots, hare-brained schemes gone mindfuckingly awry, etc., the idea of the political state is easily the worst idea human beings ever had, and it has been refuted thousands of times over by its own reality. the only argument at this point can be: there is absolutely no alternative: we are trapped conceptually in this idea unto the deaths of each of us, our species, and our planet. so, if you really cannot imagine an alternative, surf joyously to oblivion!

a little more dylan

one response i get when i rag on, say, springsteen, bowie, the beatles, or, especially, dylan, is you can't say that. (no one has tried that on eyeofthestorm, however.) it's almost like it's totally incomprehensible: people have gone whole lifetimes without hearing bob dylan criticized. they don't believe i'm serious, and once they see that i am, they are personally deeply offended. actually, i think this is a very bad sign, and i think that one reason dylan has been put above criticism is precisely because he so palpably sucks so bad. his cultists have to make it impossible even to hear the music in order to defend it, because it is indefensible.

if someone really regards 'the times they are a?changin' or 'blowin in the wind' as objects that transformed whole generations etc, i am puzzled, because i think they're just woolly and boring. but say they did. that could have had nothing to do with the profundity of the lyrics, the quality of the melodies, the quality of the singing or playing. it had to do only with the response, or the moment, or the effectiveness of his promotional team, or something. i think even as an emblem of that moment, there were twenty better choices. but for god's sake let that recede into history: 'mr. tambourine man' sucks, dude: all day every day, and it really doesn't mean anything about liberation or peace or equality (or, indeed, anything else), does it? it very nearly sucks so hard that it comes out the other end as humor or self-parody. waitin only for my bootheels to be wanderin indeed. patti page and the bee gees were emblems of their eras too: that doesn't mean you should listen to their records all day.

Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun
It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin'

And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're seein'
That he's chasing

whatever, dude. wait! i thought you were ready for to fade. any time you're ready for to. suppose that the answer to the question of how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a man really were blowin in the wind; and suppose further that the wind, when not sighing 'mary', informed you in its windy way that a man must walk down 3.735 roads before you can call him a man. what then? finding the moments that are not just random pretentious nonsense is really very difficult, and the idea that you'd treat dylan as a literary figure refutes you because it can't improve him. so stop writing 500-page books on the man and find something else. you'd be better off having the very essence of your generation expressed by robert goulet.

god bless you, william h. pauley the 17th

as usual, the american spirit is strong. our best days are before us. we are fierce lovers of being subordinated, in all dimensions every day, and ultimately we always realize that american dream. as francis scott key remarked, we are a nation of masochists. we originated among proud men who only wanted to be tied up and spanked, like the great william h. pauley iii, and it was their wish that every american be the same. if the 4th amendment is not compatible with door-to-door retail sadism, then we need to amend further. really, we just want to be watched: americans citizens are the cast in a 'please please do me' sex show aimed at entertaing the powerful. we are an optimistic people; we have a dream: we always see more groveling, dependency, and security ahead. we are a people who lick the ass of the powerful; we are a people who only want to be told what to do; we are a people who definitely do not want to know what powerful people are doing to us or anyone else: for we are a people who love being disempowered, and love those who abuse and ridicule us; and we are a people who last thought for ourselves around 1913. it hurt, so we quit. being a nation under god wasn't good enough: we want to be a nation under men: mediocre, repulsive, power-hungry men, to be sure, but it hardly matters as long as someone tells us who we are and what to do.

accomplished

snowden, as he says, has accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. now what is that? very precisely, he has shown that the government of united states has been usurped, in a coup by the security forces. he has shown general keith b. alexander and his ilk to be traitors: i mean that seriously and literally: traitors to the constitutional form of government, traitors to the american way of life. they are aiding and abetting america's enemies insofar as they are aiding and abetting one another. i'm not a lawyer, so i don't know what the penalties for treason might be, but the maximum sanction (perhaps it is house arrest or community service?) should be applied summarily and with extreme prejudice to anyone who participated in the takeover.

the world, as keith and all the other groveling cowards - oh, mike rogers and dianne feinstein, for example - remind us every few seconds, is a dangerous place. that's certainly true, and now we know where the real threat comes from. i mean, what would you rather deal with day by day: a ragtag group of fanatics on the other side of the world, or a blank, dishuman, implacable bureaucracy of oppression right here in the homeland? which is more inside your life? which is actually more likely to fuck you up? to which are you more vulnerable? well, snowden proved that you are vulnerable right now, that you're being violated right now in your basic citizenship rights, that you are under profound threat from an apparently irresistible force. soldiers of the usurping power are quartered right there in your living room, on your hands, on your screen, in your head. soldiers of the occupying army are quartered in your relationships, in your purchases, in your music, at your doctor's office, at your job. dude. there are soldiers quartered in your very ass. usurpations. abuses. despotism. and not a george washington in sight, just when one would be useful.

rogers or mcain or obama might keep trying to frame it as freedom vs. security, but obviously no one is secure in the face of a govenment that possesses overwhelming force, unlimited resources, and an omnivoracious hunger for power. freedom and security stand or fall together, and they have fallen together to the military junta that now rules our country.

it could not be more obvious that the government of the united states as it currently stands is an arbitrary tyranny. if the legitimacy of the government is based, as on its own now evidently absurd account it claims to be, on the consent of the people, then a state of secret universal surveillance and overwhelming force is a government which according to its own deepest commitments has no legitimacy whatever. samuel adams or tom paine looked at a much milder set of abuses and concluded that the thing that faced them wasn't a government at all, but a band of criminals. that's what mencius taught. thoreau. john locke. john stuart mill. so, now that we're clear that we're dealing with criminals, we have to figure out some sort of legal system to feed them into. 

Bad Craziness...Russia!

 

Seriously, how can Crusader AXE take those people any more seriously than Margaret Thatcher or Ted Cruz?

 

crispy hates folk music

crispy hates folk music, even or especially the early sixties in greenwich village. but why? well, partly for the same reason that a lot of people despised the thing back then; i was too young but soon i would be an even a bigger authenticity brat than they were. i think anyone choosing to hear some nyu student play the blues was making a terrible mistake when actual masters of the blues were everywhere, for example. the nyu student might have been semi-competent, but his blues were at best a simulation without the oomph, without the context, without the knowledge that gave the music urgency, without the thirty years of intense playing. the folkies simulated passion and they hardly even bothered at times to simulate competence: in fact, they were advocates and avatars of ineptitude. they eventually learned to simulate incompetence, which is why dylan still sounds the way he does. they understood the blues or country music as rough-hewn spontaneous outpourings of the uneducated: blues or country artists were allegedly naive, unspoiled by the corrrupt civilization that produced the folkies; the folkies yearned to recover a sort of innocence or ignorance that they associated with american traditonal musics. that is the precise way that they were 'counter-cultural'. the theme wasn't black music or rural music; it was a critique of growing up in suburban jersey or whatever, and that is the only level on which it still works.

but actually the blues was a decades-long tradition of extremely excellent and sophisticated professional musicians. so, you could listen to the great virtuoso blind blake, say, or you could listen to van ronk or whomever struggle like a very white dork through material that blake nailed perfectly. if you viewed jimmie rodgers or robert johnson or the louvin brothers or flatt and scruggs as naive hicks - american primitives, noble savage natural phenomena - and loved them because of precisely that, you were making multiple fundamental errors, including horrendous political/racial/class errors. not to grind this axe again, but allen ginsberg thought that charlie parker was a sheer spontaneous genius who never had to practice or whatever; it just came out of his tribal negro head. it is a mistake literally impossible to make if you can hear the music at all. thank god ginsberg never released an album of bop saxophone: it'd have been to jazz what dylan was to country: nothing at all, really, but nevertheless entirely unlistenable and greeted among kids who grew up just off the sixth hole at the golf club as the work of a god. either way, our god is a jealous god, a loutish god, a fuckwad god, a god who never quite rose to mediocrity.

 

 

(i am personally offended by the approach to the harmonica; it's as though he's ridiculing my instrument. little walter and sonny boy were still around at the time, and i hope they just rolled their eyes. maybe dylan can't play the harmonica. maybe he's pretending he can't. either way he has no business playing out.)

 

now i described myself as an 'authenticity brat' earlier. but say you look at dylan's outfit, his woody guthrie demeanor, the black and white, and listen to the simulated rural grittiness, and think that that's very much more authentic than big lapels, electric guitars, etc. (and cf. george and tammy or buck owens, making the actual music of the actual volk of that period). you have got the whole thing obviously reversed, and you are responding to little signs that are intentionally constructed to convey the impression of authenticity - like dylan ran a focus group on what sorts of gestures make people think a person is honest - as opposed to watching a living musical form being actually inhabited from the inside at a certain moment of its development. it's embarassing even to ask who is the better musician between zimmerman and king, but in case you watched those and are still confused, it's freddie, exponentially. (oh and just to throw the jab: freddie's got better lyrics). when dylan electrified, everyone was all upset because he'd compromised his enactment of pseudo-authenticity. but muddy waters' incomparable band had electrified the living blues fifteen years before. the authentic blues sounded like bobby bland by the time dylan betrayed the folkies etc. it all had to do with privileged northern white people's simultaneous romanticizartion of and complete incomprehension about rural or african-american communities. 

so: here's my actual objection: due to all these circumstances and others, the music sucked, specifically compared to the music that the figures themselves venerated. the urgency and passion were essentially simulated by people who needed to borrow and reflect other people's actual passion. they misconstrued the power of their sources. some were better than others; joan baez could sing or whatever: always it was a deracinated, dare i say back at them, extremely bourgeois music. they took the approach of lou reed or john waters or allen ginsberg or willem de kooning: the worse this sucks, the more authentic and important it is: look how technically incompetent we are; that is a sign of our moral and emotional urgency. to say that is an insult to mississippi john hurt is an understatement. i assume hurt was thrilled to get some recognition and some money, to make records and have large audiences. i would like to have overheard his actual assessment of the quality of the musicians he was playing with on the folk circuit.

 

the idea that you'd pick up a dave van ronk or bob dylan album of real and simulated incompetence in preference to a fun and amazingly proficient and also urgent and eloquent hurt is a colossal failure of taste. 

on the other hand, they  did venerate a lot of good artists and revived careers at folk festivals, and got old blues guys making records again before it was too late. they did bring many people to the heart of american music eventually. but insofar as they themselves played gigs and recorded albums: you always had better choices, and rarely had worse ones.

if you want to pay tribute to these sources, you should do what, say, eric clapton or paul butterfield or duane allman or bonnie raitt tried to do: master the thing technically and then find a voice within it. 

 

vagina or anus?

this duck dynasty thing is ridiculous. neither phil nor anyone else should permit the mind-numbing second golden age of pc to keep them from saying whatever they please. one 'offensive' bit: he compared the anus unfavorably to the vagina as a sex organ. now, that is some funny stuff, and a question that in some form or some occasions is liable to face us all, as it were. indeed, it is a or perhaps the fundamental human dilemma. i wonder how the polling looks on that these days.

but look: you've got these redneck reality shows. i like them too. but the basic premise of course is: look at these crazy hicks! there are wild people like this in our own country! it has, if you'll permit me to say so, a bit of a minstrel-show quality, and condesenscion is one of the elements of the entertainment. so now you are going to penalize the guy for talking like a (highly witty) redneck? you are? you hired him to be precisely this, and now you're suspending him for it? people: i'm trying to figure out whether to think of you as vaginas or as anuses.

 

 

 

let's pretend: government by blackmail

in light of the commission report, i want to assert that the nsa surveillance regime cannot be stopped by anyone, including the president, and i assert that it is a permanent feature of american life. one asks oneself why, as obama took office, he just continued or redoubled the bush/cheney project for the entire vitiation of the constitution or the transition to a post-democracy america. obama has presumably, for example, read the constitution etc. welllll, gues what? when alexander or whomever briefed him on the program, he also conveyed, without necessarily having to say anything, that the nsa had the last x years of obama's communications in a storage facility. we are in a position where no one's enthusiatic endorsement of the program should be taken at face value, and no one's opposition will be effective. there can be no oversight, for the nsa is the overseer. all they're actually trying to do is re-secretize the whole thing, or re-institute the 'let's pretend to be a democracy' approach.

net aesthetic loss

as per usual, critics etc were blown away this year by kanye west, who's on everyone's top ten. i say no matter what's on that album he is a net moral, spiritual, and aesthetic loss to the universe, and i propose to go on ignoring him forever. p.s. beyonce is boring.

JJ Cale, Philosophy of Failure as Existential Triumph, Links -- what else you want?

 

"it's a devil in disguise, that ain't no lie and I'm playing in a rock and roll band..."

In which Crusader AXE discusses totally unrelated yet congruent articles in the NY Times, discovers a new philosopher and links J.J. Cale with The Seventh Seal and Costicas Bradantan with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals...what else do you want for a Monday? 

 

 

arm the children

we're in another wave of our babies vs the babies of singapore in a standardized test duel to the death. i cannot believe that twenty years later they are still thinking and talking like this. look one problem is that your kid might end up like tom friedman: a collage of buzzwords without a mind in his profoundly unpretty, hideously swollen head. i've done this so many times for so long that i can't even pause to make the goddamn arguments anymore. your picture of childhood is sick. it is abusive, enslaving. your picture of education is grotesquely false: there is no distinction on your position between knowledge and sheer idiocy. i actually have to try to teach the little mechanical minds that now emerge from american public education: all they want is to be told what to do: they want a guide to writing the essay sentence by sentence, including the actual opinions. (there are exceptions still, thank god.)

i have no idea why, but your whole thing is built on wacky economic nationalism: friedman is always like: wait til you don't understand the accent of your chinese boss. it might as well be: you don't want to be ruled by negroes or women, do you? if negroes or women do well, then 'we' do badly. if immigrants do well, then 'americans' do badly. it is the same argument, or the attempt is to pit us against them in order to drive your other agendae: your technocratic/surveillance/dependency state, e.g.  the idea is that if the finns do well economically, then we do badly. you don't even understand your own capitalism. bizarrely, friedmans actually oppose globalization, or they oppose it insofar it doesn't have the current form: a world economic hierarchy with america at the top. or maybe that's just the rhetorical strategy (threaten you with the notion that foreigners are getting uppity or getting to be better than you, so you'll accept 24 hours a day of mechanical learning labor for your children), in which case we needn't worry about it at all. if friedman is coming to study your school in singapore, you obviously should not let him in: the whole program is he wants to steal your ideas in order to beat you: it's a zero-sum game for friedman, and the whole program is to keep all the money flowing toward here, and keep it from flowing there. if you took their jive seriously, it'd be like going to study the red army, so we could eventually use their techniques to conquer china. the whole usa has devoted decades to doing nothing but improving test scores, and failed miserably. if they had succeeded, however, that would be meaningless. i hope y'all think about your own children this way: little capitalist engines competing with chinese kids: think of them as mere instruments to be devoted to the use of the american economy and the american state. and i hope your children eventually grow large and clear enough to beat you down like the pinheaded wretches you are. 

once again: if you conceive children as little economic units whose job is to drive forward the society's wealth by generating their own, then compulsory k-12 education violates child labor laws. it violates laws on the books and constitutional amendments against slavery, to which it subordinates the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society. it removes them from their families in order to serve the state and the corporation, like missionary schools kidnapping indian children. how else are they ever to become productive members of american society? i. mean. this. stuff. literally. 

i often hear it wondered: if there was something happening now like slavery in, say, the 1820s, would i recognize it as evil? would i try to do anything about it? or would i just think it's the way things are and listen to the authoritative voices of senators or newspaper editors that are telling me that it has to be this way, because of the nature of the people we are enslaving, or because of the economic necessities, the very viability of the american economy? well here is such a something.

this war between the children of america and the children of finland has gone on long enough, and i propose a final resolution, so that friedman isn't back with the same column in 2023: let's, in the traditional manner, boldly put the issue on single combat. we of america will select our champion rambo kindergartner; the finns select theirs. they can square off with machetes, maybe. whoever wins gets all the world's money. 

rear in yeview

for many years i was always doing my 'top album of the year', 'best country (or even hip hop) albums of 1988', etc: for the rs critics' polls; or i remember i did it every year for awhile for some military magazine, or in the balt city paper or the nypress. anyway, maybe i can't stop thinking this way, and actually i have tried to get caught back up with commercial country this year pretty systematically. so maybe i'll give you a top five or something.

but at the moment i'm thinking that the best country album of 2013 was brandy clark's 12 stories. clark - born in 1977 and from morton, washington - is a songwriter above all, and i would endorse kacey musgrave's follow your arrow, by clark, musgraves, and shane mcanally as the song of the year. brandy had a hit this year, among others, with 'better dig two' by band perry, also one of my favorite acts in current country.

clark is also a very fine country singer; someone like cassadee pope or ashton shepherd or carrie underwood should listen carefully to her dynamics, her emotional sincerity, her lightness of touch that makes the intensity more intense, her way of shaping a whole story. there are some truly great country songs on this album, squarely within or ingeniously re-interpreting traditional country themes. obviously, these would include d-i-v-o-r-c-e. below, please find a really brilliant reconstrual. why is it brilliant? because it's fucking true.

 

and here's a completely trad cheating song. i figure jeannie kendall might be out there somewhere looking for material. clark's publishing company should pay her to record this. but on the other hand clark's own rendition is pretty definitive.

 

 

 [ladies and gentlemen, jeannie and royce. the kendalls!]

below is the single. see this is kind of a test for the country music industry. can you recognize a great singer/writer who is not also very young and extremely modely?

 

yipes she is good. plus that dude on guitar and harmony is kicking my ass. [there is one clunker on 12 stories: 'illegitimate children' doesn't scan.]

anyway i guess here's my top five; very female for me this year. i'm trying to think what else has to be on here...

brandy clark, '12 stories'

kacey musgraves, 'same trailer, different park'

band perry, pioneer

ashley monroe, 'like a rose'

brad paisley, 'wheelhouse': well, i have some reservations. but there's no denying paisley's excellence as a musician. and he's much more interesting than average. i say 'accidental racist' is a good start. we have got to stop being so uptight about saying stuff. there are a bunch of pretty good songs on this. plus i needed a guy. this one isn't from that album:

 

 

artists who didn't release albums in 2013, but who had a positive presence, i say: taylor swift, eric church, jamey johnson, diercks bentley, jason aldean.

 

 

 

one thing to take away from all these live vids and thousands of others: these people can really sing. these people can really play. before you dismiss country music as bullshit, ask yourself this: can the artists in your chosen genre sit alone or with an accompanist in a small room and blow you the fuck away? got a bunch of guitarists who are better than brad? this is where the actual musicians are, son.

in bluegrass right now i'm listening all the time to junior sisk, who has a lot of material out there under various group names etc (blueridge, rambler's choice). the recent record with joe mullins is wonderful, and i'll take the story of the day i died as the best bluegrass album of the last five years. (that's unfair to audie blaylock and redline, whose cryin' heart blues and eponymous album i feel almost as strongly about.) sisk is really an amazingly tuneful singer, beautifully poised between the trad and the contemporary.

 

 

i was a bit obsesed with the television series nashville this year. oh, the 13-year-sober deacon falling off as the queen of country music crushes his heart once more; gunnar losing his felon brother in a hale of gunfire: really, they need to pay me royalties. guess what, they actually use nashville witers, and just speculating now, maybe not always the voices of the actors, but good voices.

 

that one ran through my head for months, and it is my sacred vow, my current marriage.

other developments worth watching in 2014: country is now the home of blues-based hard rock. eric church's 'outsiders' is only one expression, and it'll be interesting to watch the album drop. taylor swift is certainly becoming a genre, and i expect to hear more and more echoes of her themes and melodic habits in the next few years. overall, i approve of this development, and everyone should be clear that she is a transcendent talent who has revitalized country music and pushed it forward.

alexander the great

The Obama administration has decided to preserve a controversial arrangement by which a single military official is permitted to direct both the National Security Agency and the military’s cyberwarfare command, U.S. officials said.

everyone on god's earth, from obama to that guy sleeping under the bridge, will do exactly what general keith b. alexander tells them to do. he can have any appointment he wants, or all appointments simultaneously. no one has ever had more leverage, with the possible exception of god. but his double command is fully apropriate, i feel, for nsa director cyber-warfare ultra-commander four star general keith b. alexander is, at the explicit direction of the 'president' of the 'united states', waging cyber-warfare on the american people. sometimes it's hard to tell the terrorists from the terrorists.

i have thoroughly pawed through general keith b. alexander's history. did you know he's not actually an american citizen? romanian, baby. i saw his secret real birth certificate when i opened up his hard drive. his parents were, like him, stalinists, and he has fully realized their vision. not too many people know this, but his dad had the distinct honor of being official fellater to nicolae ceaușescu.

don't get me started on his mom, for once i'm on his mom, i never stop until i get off. so that'll be another post.

 

here's how you skewer someone

y'all have got to check out this hilarious parody of david bowie. with extreme precision it shows everything that was ever wrong: the tuneless dreck; the preening and self-obsession; the unmeaning lyrics; the ridiculous outfits; the cheesy personae; the basic inability to sing; the yawning void at the heart of his values and his art: it's all there and more. the dude even sort of looks like bowie. a devastating takedown.

 

Music, madness, awareness and despair...oh, and Congress

In which Crusader AXE discusses Johnny Cash, Neko Case, Sheri Miller, Congress, and Christmas in context of each other and everything. Also, some good music...

 

 

 

peasant or ph.d.?

i'd rather be ruled by illiterate peasants than by harvard j.d.'s. how do you get a harvard j.d.? by following the rules better than anyone else, by mastering, with tutorial help provided by your parents, the standardized test. i do not believe the average harvard jd is more intelligent than the average person on the street. and i am certain that overall the moral quality of the latter is superior to the former, partly because the deepest need of the average schlumph doesn't consist of dazzling worldly success achieved by total conformity. i don't believe we live in a meritocracy. i believe we live in a frozen class hierarchy. all my life, i have been hanging out, for example, with ph.d.'s and with barbers. i don't think the ph.d.'s are any smarter, but they certainly often are more conventional thinkers, sheer wielders of ideological buzzwords, geniuses of the empty phrase, etc. when you get them to politics, they all say the same sentences in the same order, and they congratulate one another for their intelligence as they do, and sneer at anyone who doesn't. they haven't reflected on their basic beliefs since they were born, and one of the functions of the institutions in which they rise is to require that and call it excellence.

attack

the problem that google, facebook, etc have, i believe, is with edward snowden, not the nsa. i think they've been satisfied to put their nsa bureaus in the basement, call them software engineers or something, and feed all of us into the state machine. the problem is, now we know about it, and they seem to think it irritates people. the only possibility they actually have of not providing all data to the state would be extreme encryption technology, which the government is going to be illegalizing. so here's what i really do suggest. larry page or zuckerberg might not completely grasp this, but they have the resources to raise an army and attack that monster facility in nevada. short of that, larry page and mark zuckerberg might as well be cia agents.

or actually: what if google really spent the next year trying to bring the nsa to its knees? imagine the effectiveness of google as a hacker, google as anonymous. google probably has as much in the way of potential blackmail equipment as does the nsa, and the world's most deserving victims to whom to apply it.  

right now, if he knows what's good for him, or how to survive, larry page is assembling all those thousands of times that four-star general keith b. alexander has searched for porn featuring lactating shemale dominatrices and english sheep dogs into a nice document. look at his texts: the 'man' is literally begging to be constrained, dominated, abused, injured, scourged. true, general alexander is likely to fire back in kind in his habitual fashion. how else does 'he' control congress? well, you know, extortion is a harsh mistress, but from the point of view of the audience it will all make for excellent entertainment. 

 in his heart, larry page knows what the right side is. he could launch viruses and cyber-attacks into the total information awareness program that would make your heart flutter, and leave our oppressors with low self-esteem, and us with a trace of freedom.they are hacking you, larry. they are using you. they are making your company an agent of state oppression, annexing you to the emerging totalitarian vision.

i have a funny feeling that google has much, much better people than does the nsa. obviously, any decent sort of person would rather be at google performing useful public services than at the nsa, continuously betraying every single principle this country was founded on, for less $$$. one assumes that google has some black ops squads, and they should no more be capitulating to the government of the united states than they should be capitulating to the basically similar government of china. both regimes are extreme information repressers, which is maximally incompatible with the, um, mission statements of these corps, who regard themselves as bastions of information freedom, openness, the communicative capacities of the internet. understand, mark, that the nsa has turned you into an agent in a scheme to monoplize world information. you will not survive as a business in that environment. it's life or death, certainly for anything that was ever your soul. so, launch. don't be evil.

nsa uses google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

classism takes a road trip

we are really two nations, or two continents. this is an example of what is now a whole genre: new yorky journalist tries to calm his nerves and drive into rural/small town america. really for years he's only read, you know, michael tomasky, jill lepore, and thomas frank or whatever: the people out here, these teabaggers, etc, are insane, stupid, and evil. other than that, though: the salt of the earth. they are entirely manipulated and have no idea what their own interests are. maybe eric lutz figures he can slip somebody a hint down at the diner.

it is very much like british explorers penetrating the dark continent in the 1830s, let's say. the savages are so fascinating and incredibly stupid. don't they understand anything? why aren't they working in textile mills? do they want to live like that? we'll have to re-educate them, under compulsion if necessary, which it definitely is. so it's odd that we speak more or less the same language with more or less the same accent, are all familiar with the same television ads and stuff. we sort of share a culture. but insofar as eric lutz shares a culture with the assholes driving trucks out here, he's no doubt consumed by self-loathing.

so really, speaking on behalf of, say, rural country fans, i want to say: you obviously do not want us in the same nation as yourselves. you despise us. you don't listen to a word we say under any circumstances. all you do is dehumanize and patrionize and insult us. cut us loose, for we are to you mere filth, and take a long warm bath in obamacare to clean yourself up. but here's what i'd like to tell you, eric lutz, and i direct this at your whole ilk: you are an elitist. you are a classist (and also, dear god, a leftist: spend the next two years engaged in withering self-reflection. then do another piece like that.) you are so full of self-righteous ignorance that you have become unmoored from reality. so i hope next time you head out here, we'll have worked out the border fencing and attack dogs.

one very possibly good effect that country music could have in a less polarized culture: it could represent something of the experience of rural americans to urban and suburban americans. (believe it or not, i think hip hop had an effect in making suburbanites sort of understand something about black ghetto-type experience. think about what it was like for a kid from the burbs to take in public enemy during the crack epidemic etc.) i think we are in a golden moment of country artists doing that in a compelling way. i would adduce kacey musgraves and her sometimes collaborator, the very fine brandy clark (about whom more later). (musgraves and clark co-wrote follow your arrow.) 

they are very critical of the experience of, say, growing up and living as a female person in economically depressed small-town america. but they represent that experience in a compelling way, in a way that might have the potential to make eric lutz see something about what it's like from inside, and register the people who have it as human beings with experiences that are comprehensible to other human beings, even across our berlin-like barrier. see, his empathy machine is broke. art is a good mechanic that way. but then he'd have to listen to the country station for a half hour, whcih would be against his religion. and i do mean religion: his sheer, wholly irrational faith.

funny but when i travel or live in rural america (whiteford, md; york springs and seven valleys, pa; batesville, va; cottondale, al, for some of the residences) people are by and large amazingly nice. i look a little off, i'm sure, and true i am myself a somewhat educated person. and yet they don't shoot me at all. i was talking to a slovenian prof at a conference in poland this summer, and he was saying, with real fear in his voice, that he was going to be spending time in rural texas. he said 'tea party' and 'guns' in a heavy accent. i'm like: dude, i'm telling you if you have never been in rural texas, you're gonna love it. amazing food. great music. and the world's friendliest people everywhere wanting to help in any way they can. and so on. chill, it's ok!

remember obama's 'clinging to their guns and religion' thing? that might actually be the moment the tea party started (or perhaps it was the point where the man who said that actually became president). it's like romney and the 47%, only obama meant a different 47. they highly overlap, however. now: here is somebody who knows, to help explain it to highly-educated sophisticates everywhere.

 

on hold

this here is an anthem.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

tabs for the pascal solo

oh let's do more philosophy, or meta-philosophy. at least it's not academic politics. i'd say in the history of the discipline, the person whose psychology i resonate with most vividly, most involuntarily, is pascal. every time i pick up the pensees - sometimes after years of trying to forget it - i have a shock of recognition: yes this is what it's like to be me, which is a somewhat dark thought, for that is a dark consciousness what wrote that. (but there are flashes of joy or even ecstasy, of course.) it would be a very long hard story to try to say why i respond that way (not that such a response is unique to me, of course: many people have found themselves in those pages), but as i say it's not something i'm in control of really: sometimes you just recognize. i want to very recommend roger ariew's translation of the pensees for hackett. it's extremely responsible in presenting the best scholarly text, which is an immense issue. but i really like the english quite a bit. it emphasizes the flatness, the plainness, the straightforwardness of pascal's formulations. this just makes the unbelievably complex layers of irony underneath seem more miraculous. i used to try to read it in french, but that was a long time ago. but it really is one of those writerly achievements that i can't quite pull apart: like, ok, how did he do that; where did he do that; could i do something like that?, so it seems kind of magical, like a hendrix solo did to a kid learning the electric in 1970.

as you may have noticed, i fancy myself an idol-smasher, a human opposite of doris kearns-goodwin, and i am particularly unhappy about cults forming around people who have actually wielded state power, which is incompatible with leadership on my account: in the best-case scenario, the inspiring yipyap is a pretty glove over a hard fist: their 'leadership' boils down to coercive force. however, i am not going to say one bad thing about mandela. sorry! one snipe from far on the periphery: his death is for us a world-historical event almost comparable to the death of michael jackson.

thingamajigs

wang yang-ming also had a fully pragmatist epistemology; really closest to peirce: knowledge is action, including experimental action. but here are a couple of passages, again staring the people who labeled him an 'idealist' in the face, expressing ontological realism about the external world and also externalism in philosophy of mind, and mind-body identity, believe it or not. now, however, because i would agree with all these positions, i am liable to be reading these passages, well, in a certain way.

If one refers only to the place it occupies, it is called body; if one refers to the matter of control it is called mind; if one refers to the activities of the mind, it is called purpose; if one refers to the intelligence of the purpose, it is called understanding; if one refers to the relations of the purpose, it is called things. Yet it is all one. The purpose is not suspended in empty space, but is placed in some thing. (Phil of WYM, 146)

now, this illustrates what i said about the translation (which is just a suspicion since i don't read chinese): this rigamarole of 'control, purpose, intelligence, understanding,' etc. results from semi-competently taking semi-technical terms in the philosophy of that period (maybe neo-kantian) to be equivalent to a series of confucian concepts. right. what is remarkable and is a note he hits again and again is that it all originates and eventuates in things, by which he really does mean real-world objects, stuffs, and so on. the circular construction of the human starts with the the physical body in external space, and it eventuates in that too or else it is purposeless or idle, or maybe just conceptually impossible. people come from things and end up in things and are things.

(oops one more trans complaint. chu hsi's basic notion (tai ch'i) is translated in fung yu-lan or wing-tsit chan as 'great ultimate' (chan) or 'supreme ultimate' (fung); or 'the superchunky funkbringer' (sartwell) which are embarassing solecisms in english. if the phrase is not an embarassing solecism in chinese, then it has been badly converyed. i'm not sure fung's rendering of 'ch'i' as 'ether' is going to help a whole lot, and what you get after a bunch of such decisions is something that threatens to descend into gobbledygook.)

the matter of 'things', or questions of fundamental ontology, came into neo-confucianism in the scholastic manner: so, in the great learning confucius had recommended 'the investigation of things', a rather characteristic thought (con was always learn learn learn and never stop, which i do recommend). so, other neo-confucians, including i believe chsu hsi, had actually suggested that this be re-interpreted as the investigation of principle (li). wang yang-ming went all lee corso: 'not so fast, my friend! no, confucius was actually talking about things.' and that was how he brought about the fall of the ming dynasty.

are flowers external to the mind?

one problem i have in teaching chinese philosophy, which i'm doing now, is the lack of good materials in english on neo-confucianism. the translations of figures like chu hsi (1130-1200) and wang yang-ming (1472-1529) are from the early twentieth century, and i'm asserting on the basis of the way they read in english that the translations are inadequate. the interpretive machinery built around these figures by people presenting them to the west, such as fung yu-lan and, especially, wing-tsit chan are ridiculously tendentious and woefully inadequate. so, they want to fit this material into western categories, and they end up calling chu hsi a 'naturalist' and wang yang-ming an 'idealist', which are completely wrong even given their own translations of the texts. also i don't think they have a clear grasp on the use of such terms in western philosophy. also, the idea of fixing these amazingly subtle thinkers in the biggest western categories is really no better than declaring hume to be a ch'an buddhist or something. 

chan (whose source book in chinese philosophy is kind of like a heavy-gravitation brick in a course like this) favors chu, who is the essence now of confucian orthodoxy, and, believe it or not, describes wang's followers as 'degenerates'. honestly, someone like that has no business editing the basic textbook, and actually i think princeton should yank it out of print after all these decades and commission a replacement. chan charitably draws the line at the apparently entertainable theory that wang caused the downfall of the ming dynasty, though. he dismisses the passage below - one of my favorites in the history of philosophy - as a hilarious superficial mistake. if you were looking for the earliest source of the 'extended mind thesis' or 'externalism' in philosophy of mind, this (in frederick henke's translation (open court, 1916, p.169), slightly and legitimately altered) might be a good candidate. look it up!

Wang Shows that Flowers are Not External to the Mind

The Teacher was taking recreation at Nanchen. One of his friends pointed to the flowers and trees in a cliff and said: 'You say that there is nothing in the world external to the mind. What relation to my mind have these flowers and trees on the high mountains, which blossom and drop of themselves?'

The Teacher said: 'When you cease regarding these flowers, they become quiet with [or cease to be in the same relation to] your mind. When you see them, their colors at once become clear. From this you can know that these flowers are not external to your mind.'

He further said: 'Perception has no structure upon which it depends: it uses the color of all things as its structure. The sense of hearing has no structure upon which it depends: it uses the sounds of things as its structure. The sense of smell has no structure: it uses the odor of things as its structure. The sense of taste has no structure: it uses the taste of things as its structure. The mind has no structure: it uses the sky, the earth, and things as structure.'

 

alright, now both henke and chan read that as a straightforward declaration of idealism: that all things that exist are mental objects. that is quite the opposite of what it says, which is that perception and consciousness are structured by the world rather than vice versa. in 1916 or whatever it may be, there just are no categories in western philosophy for understanding this position. all that shows is how far wrong the western tradition had gone in virtually every development: obsessively focused on the world as representation, caught like a fox in a trap trying to chew off its own leg while trying to maintain the idea that it doen't exist at all.

 

 

 

left behind

as you may be aware, i view the left/right spectrum as the most useless contraption ever patented. so here's the problem with tracing it to burke and paine. read 'common sense'. now consider it in the light of the politics of the contemporary left. oops no it's far right: pure classical liberal individualism. it's literally a tea party document, and is certainly much closer the ideology of the pauls than, say, the clintons. indeed, if you had to say, you'd say that burke is closer to obama than is paine. there just was nothing like the left/right spectrum in american politics or political thought until the late 19th century. the left originates if anywhere before marx in rousseau, with his intensely uneasy, or just fully incoherent combination of classical liberal conceptions of individual rights with 'general will' or collective consciousness. 

statecraft = blackmail

in the words of hdt: it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.