cheese it, the cops!

sweet home popomo

 

era-dication

i'm the stone today, declaring the dawn of the popomo era.

 

pillory clinton

i like the idea, now repeated like a nursery rhyme by pundits, that hillary 'has to articulate why she wants to be president'. that is, she has to make up some shit, or simulate some commitments. everyone understands what this means, but no one says it: her actual reasons amount to personal grandiosity (she's not alone in that motivation, of course); now she has to work out how to pretend to have other reasons = whatever excruciatingly empty commonplaces focus-group well this week. everyone obviously understands this completely. now you are not going to vote for someone like that, are you? that would be mere capitulation to a meaningless person or a monster of self-aggrandizement. that's pretty close to the essence of contempo american politics.

or the other little media chant is 'she has to show that she's authentic'. what they mean by this is that she has to simulate honesty or conviction. this is what we want, i guess, and the pundits need to think about this: their whole approach entails this: there is no difference between expressing yourself authentically and convincing people that you are, even if you are a person who couldn't even understand a concept like authenticity. so, if that's who you want telling you what to do, knock yourself out. you could roofy yourself if you want, though the difference before and after will be difficult to detect.

thousands gone

if you are not an anarchist, your are in favor of this: thousands of police killings done with impunity. killing with impunity is the very essence of state power, or a good definition of 'government'. say you cannot picture human life as possible without police. well, what you are thinking is that human life is impossible without arming some people heavily against others and authorizing them to commit what would be crimes for others or, looking at it another way, giving some people rights that others do not enjoy, including the right to control those others' bodies or damage them: that is what a policeman is. you think it's the rule of law but by your own account it is the rule of crime: these people can kidnap you and hold you for cash, for example, or tase you, or just beat the shit out of you or kill you. if you think that a total asymmetry of power like that is necessary, then just accept all its inevitable results. one thing you should absolutely expect, one thing you are practically endorsing: this asymmetry will mirror all the others: if you are a statist, you practically endorse beating those on the bottom of whatever hierarchies there are: economic, racial, etc. also, power of the sort you are enthusing about or regarding as a baseline necessity of human life is, given what human beings are, always abused. and also, given what human beings are, it is resented, and will be violently resented. admit it: this is what you want. so stop whining about it or hop off this state jive.

what it's like to be dead

amazingly, michael slager, who shot walter scott eight times in the back as he was fleeing, was listening to this beautiful song about human connections across various barriers as he pulled scott over.

 

one lesson that all sorts of people are drawing is: when the police tell you what to do, do it. black men such as mark morial and don lemon are saying that on cnn as i write. i understand why they say that, and they are trying to keep people alive. but on their own account, they are endorsing sheer capitulation to a regime they themselves regard as a regime of racist violence. lemon said: 'never run from the police. running from the police never works out.' depends on how fast and clever you are, son, and i'm telling you from my own ancient experiences that sometimes it works out just fine.

Justice and Truth are not the same thing...

The news of the guilty verdict in the Boston Marathon Bombing has elicited something like a shoulder shrug from a lot of people, including me. I wasn't paying attention, but then neither was the media. I was more than a little surprised then to read Masha Gessen's column this morning at the Times about what the unanswered questions that remain and the rather pathetic job the responsible organizations have done explaining the thing. 

That bothers me. In my journeys amongst the Conspiracy Theorist Collective, I have learned one thing about the Conspiracy Paranoid Mindset. Things that set them off down the rabbit hole occur when something doesn't make sense to them and to a lot of people. Their lack of reason comes from asking reasonable questions and getting silly answers or none at all. "We're the government, trust us" pretty much should have stopped working in 1775 but it found a new life in 1803 . Since Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination, it's continued to fester...and outliers are now getting to be mainstream. 

Missha Gessen is well worth your time and effort. Spend it and see what questions now bother you. 

slap happy

 

i'm headed to cali this weekend to do some events for the dickinson advancement office. i'll be talking about the film 'happy', which is about positive psychology (about which i am certainly skeptical). it's the item that's sort of supposed to draw the college together; the director is coming to campus etc. i will say that in my view the thing is profoundly wretched: superficial, boring, depressing, with completely incompetent or just non-existent intellectual underpinnings. amazingly, it is a series both of cliches and contradictions. one good indication of the intellectual level of this material: dan gilbert, the harvard prof who instructs you on your happiness in the film, now uses the same canned little raps to shill for prudential insurance. also, i really think that the existence of dan gilbert raises the question of what harvard university is for. 

seriously, you'd think these psychheads just discovered happiness yesterday, and though they are good at data entry, they are terrible at defining terms, leaving their research without any actual subject-matter. (on the other hand, philosophy - with which no one in the film shows any acquaintance - has been grappling with the question for 2500 years.) the research is based on reports of 'subjective satisfaction', while every single characterization of happy people (in the film, e.g.) makes happiness a matter of external relations: families, communities, objects, and so on. of course the film just goes neuro in the most useless hackneyed way, shifting to cartoon neurons: happiness is dopamine bursts, which is completely incompatible with anything anyone says about what actually makes people happy, and which also makes these guys' account of happiness identical to their account of the effects of cocaine. well, that's partly because they have absolutely no notion of what they're looking for, which makes it ridiculous when they claim to have found it. as per usual in social and in other sciences, it's the initial set of terms and concepts that does all the work. but scientists are unbelievably bad at figuring out how to elucidate these words and concepts. if you fuck that up, everything you build on top of it will collapse if someone raises an eyebrow.

 

 

Kardashian Influence on the Iranian Nuclear Framework

Crusader AXE has a new piece on the Iranian deal up over at Veterans Today and while I think it's fairly reasonable, I was initially gratified to find the comments were all written not in drool or feces. Well, it went down hill, fairly quickly...Eric Holder, the Rothschilds and the Kardashians are all tied up in the minds of some of my readers. If General Jack D. Ripper hadn't gone to his reward in Dr.Strangelove, I'm sure our precious body fluids would also have been an issue...however, some decent music and a nice sort of overview for those who feel the only response to Iran-Nuclear-Tea Pary-Republican speculation and explanation is Jack Daniels mixed with absinthe and delivered intravenously... 

updates

yes, on her hundredth, i'm incredibly grateful that billie holiday was born and recorded music.

and yes, i will be switching the party affiliation on my voter registration from independent to republican so i can vote for rand in the pa primary. i know, i know.

dead flowers

alright alright, i'll hit the religious conscience laws. as you may know, i've defended such laws many times, but let me try to describe why i regard the current situation as ridiculous. so, first off, the laws are mere provocations, or responses to getting swamped by gay marriage all of a sudden. they are an attempt to carve out a little zone of legit homophobia (and yet they trap me, for example, because i cannot not affirm the actual text of the law.) it's a manufactured issue. but then the insane outrage about it, which i've heard from a lot of people, is very silly, and i could not possibly oppose such laws until you show me that they will create great actual burdens on actual people. that someone had to switch florists one time for their wedding is not going to get it. and if that's what you're outraged about: shelve it.

charles blow appears to think a situation in which there's one pizzeria in indianapolis that won't cater a gay wedding is similar to one where people are systematically excluded from education, or voting, or basic social recognition. really it makes it a bit hard to take you seriously on other matters. if no actual significant burdens are imposed on anyone, then there can be no argument against permitting people to act according to their religious convictions. i do want to point out that, though it's easy to sort of make all oppressed groups equivalent in their oppressedness, many gay people are, for example, bourgeois white men. the chances that no one will cater the wedding of, or in general leap to provide the widest range of services to, bourgeois white people are slim and none.

capitalism might not have cured jim crow, but it's doing fine with this. the basic thing is that people want to sell you stuff, ok? the chamber of commerce and wal-mart and apple show you that this is not really going to be an actual problem. but andrew cuomo etc is grandstanding to the max, and i'm telling you that all anyone i know wants is to be enraged by the right in a self-congratulatory ecstasy. try to find an actual reason though, ok?

anyway, i'm irritated that the right is using a principle which i do regard as sacred - the right of individual conscience to secede from the demands of the state or to refrain from activities which violate it - to get me nodding along with an underlying bigotry. i'm irritated at the left for relentlessly blowing this small thing up and using it as a club. really, i'm just sick of our politics, which never asks what's true or false or good or evil, but only how people can be manipulated to join up by defining and hating an enemy. in that situation, there's no difference between symbolic and substantive issues.