cheese it, the cops!

op 2

if the nytimes editorial board had the guts to represent their own political convictions in public, they would have endorsed sanders and paul, not clinton and kasich. and why in the world, how in the world, have we reached the point at which the editorial board of the new york times doesn't have the courage to represent their actual political convictions in public? i think we've reached the pretty pass at which the editorial board of the new york times operates exactly like the politicians they cover: carefully calibrating polling, pitch, message, frame, making fine alleged differences in electability into serious reasons to keep the economy in the hands of citibank. 

first, we might ask about what the newspaper biz has become. really, the shit is sad. but second, so many people are operating on this level: so many people feel it to be impossible, for example, to vote anything like their convictions, or anything that is not directly opposed to their convictions, as though (a) voting was a terrible moral dilemma, which justifies me always in (b) making a horrendously wrong decision by my own lights.

and then, perhaps you seem to yourself to have some vague commitment to democracy. well, you might want to refresh your appreciation of what that is: oh go back to mill's on liberty or dewey's democracy and education: now feed in to that a situation in which the press and very many members of the public simply will not act in public according to their own convictions,  if they perceive those convictions as shared by only 49% of the population. or try to get that democracy thing to comport with the paradigm of strategic communications, where speaking the truth or speaking sincerely are held to be impossible or worthless projects, while controlling other people's behavior is conceived as the only goal of human communication. now we know what love is! 

 

when they asked who they should endorse among the republicans - always an afterthought, of course - they thought to themselves and one another: which of the establishment-track candidates has the best chance of consolidating support and fighting off trump? then they looked at new hampshire poll numbers, endorsements from new england papers, etc. so first off, you might wonder why the nytimes is concerned to preserve the republican establishment at all costs. and then, you might ask yourself how things like that can be more important to, like, opinion journalists, than positions on nsa, mass incarceration, race, syria. really, i want y'all to look in the mirror and understand fully what you've become. if you're comfortable with it in and on reflection, i'm comfortable blogging about it.

how safe do you actually have to play this shit? what are you actually scared of?

Manipulated

By Crispin Sartwell

Leftish commentators often picture the Republican electorate as being emotionally manipulated, responding to subtle or not-so-subtle appeals to their anger, resentment, or anxiety. At times, average middle-class or working-class Republicans are portrayed as voting against their own interests.

     There may well be something to that. But now I'd like to assert that the left side of the political spectrum has also been manipulated - we might say primarily cognitively, rather than emotionally - into voting not so much against their own interests as against their own ideals. Election after election, passionate advocates of economic justice vote, directly, for oligarchy.

   If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, they'll do that again this year: they will be egalitarians voting explicitly for extreme hierarchy, like a Muslim voting for Trump.

   For decades, under both parties, economic inequality has grown while real working-class wages have slumped. It seems an intractable problem, almost puzzling. But to explain it, perhaps we have to follow the money rather than the rhetoric, and there is no easier way to do that than by taking the case of Goldman Sachs.

   Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush appointed Goldman Sachs CEOs as Treasury secretaries, and instituted a revolving door at all levels of government economic policy-making and regulation with the investment banking industry. And through these administrations, investment bankers were among the largest contributors to candidates for both political parties.

   This trend was intensified when the Clinton Administration deregulated Wall Street in the late 1990s, including repealing the Glass-Steagall act limits on the sorts of activities in which banks and investment firms could engage. That was hardly surprising, considering who contributed Bill Clinton's campaigns and who served in his administration.

   The top contributors to Hillary Clinton's campaigns from 1996 to the present are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, DLA Piper, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. [source below] And then, according to Mother Jones, Goldman-Sachs "has donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation." According to the Wall Street Journal, "Eight firms, including Goldman Sachs and Citibank, paid the foundation between $1.6 million and $3.5 million combined for speeches by Mr. and Mrs. Clinton." Goldman Sachs' trading in derivatives and other activities helped drive the economy into crisis in 2008, and the firm received about $10 billion in TARP funds from the Obama administration.

     Such facts are familiar, though worth recalling. But the rhetorical frame constructed by such Democratic politicians as the Clintons - a vision of equal opportunity, of turning government toward the interests of middle and working-class people, of racial, gender, and sexual equality - make leftist voters feel comfortable being represented by people who are themselves emblems of privilege.

   Democratic columnists and commentators in the mainstream media mobilize the whole left side of the spectrum also by vilifying Republicans incessantly, playing in the familiar manner on fears and feelings of superiority. What Trump does to immigrants, Democratic consultants and pundits do to Republicans: portray them as dangerous, evil, and stupid: as profoundly alien. It's a sort of festival of self-congratulation, and it means 'I (and you who agree with me) are so smart and so good.' It would be more useful to think about the concrete results of electing the person you are proposing to elect.

   The compromise or contradiction is finalized by the two-party system: in the general election, if Hillary Clinton and (say) Donald Trump are the nominees, the whole left will regard themselves as forced to vote for Clinton, acting just as though they were enthusiastic advocated of oligarchy. And if the Republican nominee is Ted Cruz, the right, too, will be out of options other than a politician whose rise was funded by Goldman Sachs. Well, right and left, we appear to agree on one thing: we should be governed by investment bankers.

   As inequalities of wealth and power grow ever-more extreme and ossified in the second Clinton administration, the political left will wonder how, or why. To which the right answer will be: because you voted for this. This is what you want.

Even leftists who would diagnose the basic problem of the whole world as capitalism, and would identify capitalism or 'neo-liberalism' as the fundamental system of world oppression, vote again and again to be governed from the very top of the capitalist pyramid.

If we're going to call ourselves a democracy, people's ideals must be represented and not merely manipulated in political discourse. People must be able to pursue their wide-scale interests and visions for the future. By that rather simple standard we are failing utterly. And I must point out that to a large extent it is our own damn fault. A little more critical focus on what underlies the rhetoric, and a little courage in voting one's actual ideals might make a big difference.

If you're on the left, you can do better, but you're going to have to insist on it.

op

i finally figured out what's up with the nytimes opinion section: courageously, counter-intuitively, they always go for max boredom. their goal, every time out, is to be literally dead center of the mainstream. they have noblest ambition of all, to make no difference whatever. what guides their editorials and their selection of op-ed columnists and contributors: an extreme desire for total safety, a profound commitment to not making any mistakes, a bold flight from bold opinions. really as they meet to decide on an endorsement, for example, you can see them asking one question above all: who is the safest choice for us? their range from egan or whatever on the left to brooks or douthat on the right is about a millimeter wide.

truly, were i operating an opinion page with the prestige of the times's, i would regard that as a license to continuous free-wheeling boldness. they view it as an unprecedented opportunity to be extremely extremely careful.

 

on electability. ok when trump decided to take out jeb, or cruz, he had two or three things to tweet about (i think we're going to see that he's been successful with cruz). you know: low energy, canada, goldman-sachs. if he was up against hillary he'd have fifty things. i want you to imagine that: every news cycle, another devastating implication, another not-quite-sly innuendo, another label. she was born to be his victim, and by the end she will slink away in defeat. seriously. 

i want bernie to edge hillary in iowa, thump her in nh, get elizabeth warren's endorsement, and roll into the socialist south. i do not believe that minority communities will turn out to have any particular loyalty to hillary clinton. no reason for them to, anyway.

if trump wins iowa (and i think he will), chaos is unleashed in the republican party. first, there had better be a crazy-fast consolidation of the field. but i don't think they can really stop trump's hostile takeover, though it's still true that trump, who does take chances every day, could still disintegrate. but if he rolls to the nomination, he will be replacing the republican party hierarchy with his own management team. and then, really what are they going to do? i'm really hoping for a collapse of this two-party thing. my fave scenario would be a chaotic general signaling a realignment of american party politics: trump, bloomberg, sanders. or there could be four. i actually think that sanders should re-secede from the dem party if he doesn't make it, but perhaps he wouldn't do that. really, how about a general of trump (i), sanders (i), clinton (d), cruz (r), romney/graham (i), bloomberg ,(i) gary johnson (l). haha! well, maybe not, and maybe these pathetic, mumbling parties can re-assert party discipline; they have a million methods for keeping other candidates away. but what do you think is going on in the mind of reince priebus and debbie wasserman-schultz right now as they smile tightly?

notes 2

trump in nh, yapping as usual with no notes etc: 'well, the thing last night in iowa turned out great. you know, i was taking a chance. i didn't know how it would come out. when you're the front-runner, you need to not rock the boat, steady as she goes, do the debate, get through and don't make any mistakes. so that could have been a big mistake. but you've got to take chances. i think we did great, but even if it hurts us, i think it was the right thing.' that is really pretty remarkable, and very far outside anything i have seen in mainstream american politics in my lifetime. the straightforwardness but also the actually bold leadership style. 'people always ask me why i talk about polls all the time. why? because we're doing so great. when you've got 3% you don't want to talk about polls.' then actually reciting zogby for state after state.

so hillary's pitch now is: i can really get things done. i know how washington works. do you want the idealist or someone who can practically do something? oh my god! hillary is the most pinhead partisan in the world; there'll be nothing coming out of the white house except how to deep-six, insult, and alienate republicans and make them look bad. not only was clinton admin 1 an era of hyper-partisanship; it was an era of meaningless partisanship. really the consistent strategy was to take over republican issues, while all the time hurling insults at them; you short-circuit them by going for the defense-of-marriage act, then demonize them in the media all day as reactionaries who are out of touch with the aspirations of the american people. on the other hand, the republicans were crazed, and that impeachment was about nothing that had to do with anything; just bile and shit. they were like accusing each other of murder and crap while they did mass incarceration and welfare 'reform.' 

like i say, if hillary is elected, she starts running for re-election the moment abc declares her victorious. the white house staff will be the campaign staff. everything will be through that lens: we'll go invade syria or do immigration reform if and only if that will help her in 2020. she'll spend the whole four years raising money from wall street and somehow not accomplishing any financial reform, etc. if you vote for that, hold yourself responsible, ok? it's obvious.

oh there's definitely liable to be a partisan problem if bernie is pres. but it might be a substantive rather than an empty partisanship. 

a fave hawking ted question right now is: what surprises might we see in iowa? rubio finishes a strong third! really they have been completely hooked by their own establishment/outsider narrative and they can't envision any question except 'who emerges from the establishment track?' let's say people in iowa are under no obligation to think about it that way. if i were predicting a surprise - and it would be the sort of surprise we see in iowa in almost every cycle - it would be that someone who no one was really watching does surprisingly well. so, if i were calling a surprise right now, i'd look to paul's totals, or huckabee's. this is partly because i think the polls we're seeing are still lagging behind cruz's dip, and i'm thinking about who might benefit, and be howlin like howard dean when the night is through.

trump the magic dragon

i'd say that the trump campaign has fucked up one group above all others: political consultants. for some reason, such people are also 'pundits' on tv and stuff. for decades, they'd totter out to speak strategically about strategy. well, notice, if the trump model could generalize, all of these people's technology to allegedly manipulate your tiny mind, all their polling and focus-groups, and little-bitsy strategic phrases and carefully shifting positions to get this or that group etc would be obsolete. it's gotten to the point where you see anna navarro or donna brazile - much less the third-line people - attributing magic powers to trump. he can do no wrong! every move is brilliant! everything he touches turns to gold! how does he do it? they used to laugh; now they smile ruefully; soon their candidates will sink like lusitanias and they'll really be reaching for any kind of simulation of a smile on television they can muster.

well, one thing is, if you just say colorfully what you think, or get in and mix it up with insults cause you're irritated, etc, you end up with a sort of pass. if barack obama called someone a bimbo or whatever, you'd be all like "wait what kind of bizarre strategy is that? what is david plouffe thinking?' or it'd be 'he went off script! now he's revealed who he really is! kill!' but trump just does this all the time, so his supporters, and even the rest of us, get to the point of: yeah, that's just him. it helps that it's funny a lot. and then you expect him to do it again tomorrow: he'll find some specific little speech prohibition to violate. well, how pissed can you really be at lenny bruce or dave chapelle? and then in comparison with some borscht-belt joke-belter lenny might seem to be telling the truth instead of just muttering stock phrases. like i say, i think anyone could do this at any time, even though trump is particularly good at it. it was always only cowardice.

oar

for many years, or since shortly after i wrote it, i have avoided reading my book obscenity, anarchy, reality. this is a bit unusual because (hate to admit it) i often read my own old stuff, sometimes proudly, sometimes sheepishly. anyway, i do and do not recognize the voice of that book as my own. really, i guess i'd say i wrote that book in lieu of a breakdown, or it was itself a breakdown and an attempted self-treatment. i think it was written to fend off suicide; but desperation is not the same as inspiration. no wonder i have trouble reading it. my brother adam had just died. my marriage was falling apart. i was trying to change everything. i had a year or two sober. i was working at the university of alabama, and what i did was lock myself in my office for two hours every afternoon; i knocked the thing off in five weeks, affirming all that is; even death, even betrayal, even addiction, etc. i gave myself permission to write any way i wanted, and i do feel that, despite all its drawbacks, it begins to mix autobiography and philosophy in ways i've been trying to do ever since.

it was definitely a rebellion of prose style as well, and in the same period i was producing very academic journal articles, albeit i hope with a bit of flair. ever since i first got to college, though, i had chafed at every constraint or arbitrary convention in academic writing, and i let myself just go for it. i wanted to write like it mattered, and i wanted to emulate my heroes who spoke so boldly and nothing like academics: emerson, kierkegaard, nietzsche. i had some moments and some good aphorisms (which no one really noticed), but also the philosophy was derivative, and my voice was not fully independent whatever i thought; i sort of sounded like an american bataille channeling nietzsche or some shit. in some ways i wasn't actually ready to write a book, even though maybe i'd written a couple before that. but it does have a nervy energy i couldn't reproduce now. i hadn't really developed my philosophical picture historically or conceptually, and a lot of it does strike me as derivative juvenilia. i was in my 30s, but for me anyway, philosophy has been a long thing to learn. other things too. i wanted to be a prodigy but it was already late for that, and actually i was a slow developer.

even as i wrote it i was in great conflict in my head about its 'immoralism' and through a later series of blows and overcompensations (oh, like the part where i was engaged to high-end call girl who was a genuine masochist, etc), i came out of the '90s as a screeching puritanical moralist in my own way. i'd just like to apologize to me-1994 for that.

oh a couple of decent lines:

"If the next century is also a century obsessed by language, I for one am going to catch up on some much-needed shuteye."

"We retreat to concepts because no one has ever been bitten by a concept."

"Living in the world is like being impaled on a huge spike."

[possibly i am reading the thing now because i hurt my back shoveling and am spending days sitting or lying with heating pad, etc.]

 

go for it.

i think the flint water crisis, and in general environmental injustice, is what one should expect in a squishy, totalitarian situation. what we have in the usa is a mating of economic and political power which is in effect at every level: one would be forgiven for thinking that everything from zoning laws to education to incarcertation to housing projects to toxic waste dumping is administered on explicitly oligarchical terms. this has been the case for a very long time: watch robert moses bulldoze your neighborhood, etc. but anyway, i guess i'd like to see a leftist wave kind of try to break state and corporate interests into two. at a minimum, i'd like to see leftists stop voting straight-up for the oligarchy every time out. on the other hand, i think that political and economic power - and whatever other sorts of power there are  (e.g. 'knowledge') - tend to coincide in all societies. (i call this the principle of hierarchical coincidence, or little crispy's big law.) ultimately i do not believe that beefing up the state sector extremely (which is what we practically mean by 'socialism') is likely to have the intended effect, and that we're going to need to dismantle all hierarchies simultaneously. but still, go for it.

max

i think when people try to explain trump, they miss the positive side; they focus on anger, resentment, anxiety, etc. i'm reading carlin romano's america the philosophical, which i very much recommend and admire. he quotes max lerner, from the late 1950s, characterizing 'the american character' as "a sharp aggressiveness, coupled with organizing capacity, a genius for technology, a sense of bigness and power." when trump says 'make america great again' he really is the embodiment of what he means. the whole thing has its drawbacks, and is partly based on a nostalgia for what was in many ways an intolerable situation, but really he's quite future-oriented, and he sort of embodies a certain kind of american self-image, seemingly over but still very powerful.

notes

if i was advising bernie right now, i'd tell him not to run toward obama. run against a rigged system etc, which, to put it mildly, obama did nothing about. run toward the disappointment with obama instead.

wolf: 'you say the republican establishment is against you; why do you say that?" trump: 'honestly, they're coming around, looking at cruz.' ok that's true. is he thinking: oh no if i answer the wrong way i'll lose my anti-establishment positioning? no, he's just answering the damn question. this would have been so easy. so easy for gore or kerry, so easy for mccain, even obama, etc. the thing is: he is killing at the box office with an anti-strategy strategy. i'm tempted to vote for him just so i don't have to listen to that fucking bullshit anymore.

it's amazing to see talking heads grapple with trump. ok 'i could shoot someone on fifth avenue and not lose any votes,' etc. that's what, let's say, jonathan capehart has been saying for months, except that trump's hyperbolic formulation is sharper, funnier, and because it's him, self-aware. but capehart: 'i don't understand how he can possibly say that!' he's offended. then: 'it's true, you know.' hey jonathan: think about how you yourself are thinking about truth in politics. truth for jonathan capehart is what you can't possibly say. actually, i'll take that as a definition: truth is whatever jonathan capehart would not permit you to say.

supposedly hillary has a 'firewall' among minority voters starting in sc. well, someone may in a very superficial gesture have said that bill was an honorary black person, and he could actually preach in a black church. hillary is nobody's wigger. i see that as melting faster than you can say 'criminal justice' and recall bill's contribution to mass incarceration. why was bill prosecuting the war on drugs (=race internment)? it was polling well, the only answer to why either of them does anything. in clinton 2 you better hope your continued existence polls out.

bloomberg is freaking out at the prospect that wall street might lose control of the democratic party. that really would be a deep reconfiguration of american politics.

cruz is on his dip; bad or fatal timing.

i always thought hillary was a pretty good-looking person. lately her face looks like a mask of exhaustion and worry.

mend

last week jane irish and i went arthopping in nyc, cutting it a bit short on account of the storm. i finally saw the whitney 2; i see why architecture critics have rolled over for it. however, the frank stella retrospective left me (trying to keep it positive here) indifferent. i'll just skip the polemic and say people are really going to have to take some time to explain to me what is actually worthwhile about stella, especially everything after the '50s. jed perl (in nyrb) and others have entered into an alleged issue that allegedly arises because stella insists that items like this are paintings.

first off, who cares? but second: no, man, words don't mean whatever you want them to mean. that's a sculpture; look it up in the dictionary. fortunately nothing turns on this: the work is what it is whether we call it a painting, a sculpture, a relief, an installation, a watchamacallit, a thingummy, mistah charlie, etc. oh stella, like maybe serra, is in the grand gigantic swaggering dicky ego phase, kind of the last gasp of modernism: he still dares to be meaningless! if that's a painting, it's manspreading like a motherfucker.

but we also saw an amazing exhibition in chelsea of a person who i think is one of the most underrated artists of the last many decades: yoko ono. many still know her as the woman who broke up the beatles or whatever, but i think that if she did, that was a service to the world. but artistically, it is unfair to associate her with 'glass onion'. anyway, the thing reproduces a truly lovely and decent and radical 'conceptual' work from 1966 (in general, yoko is among the earliest and the very best of the conceptualists). in one room there are river pebbles, cushions, and a network of string dangling from wall to wall, something like an eva hesse or faith wilding string piece (i've been thinking about fiber arts).

[eva hesse, from 1969-70]

 

but people are encouraged to mess with the string, and even though chelsea was pretty darn dead on a mid-jan wednesday, a number of people were ducking around the string like limbo, or retying knots, or tacking string designs to the walls, or writing on the walls, where the penciled lines appeared as extensions of the string. 

in the back room was 'mend piece' which is a table with shattered crockery, string, tape and glue.

you sit around with people mending - and people were - then set your mended assemblage on a shelf on the wall. this is first of all a critique of a million aspects of modernism and western art, and also the whole thing was beautiful and poetic and decent, and the gallery spaces so active and spirited and conversational.

a lot of conceptualism is clever or even intellectually deep, though rafts of it are not. i still remember living for decades (no wait, it just seemed like decades) near bruce nauman's neon sign on the baltimore museum, flashing "violence, violins, silence'; conceptual art as hyper-familiar and trivial pun, way up there on top of that building.

 

 

that is some lame-ass shit. but yoko's best stuff is not only really very intellectually deep (there is a much more sophisticated critique of the artworld in yoko than in nauman), but it also actually means something, and what it means is something good, something wholesome, something that changes the way you feel in a good way. that itself makes it suspicious as art i suppose. but heavens what are you doing to yourself if you reflexively, much less reflectively, respond to decency with suspicion?

 

 

victory for york springs

The highest tallies from the midstate were reported in Pine Grove Furnace in Adams County and in York Springs in Adams County. Both areas saw 34 inches of snow, if not more.

working for a living

once again, all the world's call girls and rent boys have descended on davos, switzerland. oh, and all the world's sex workers are there too, one would think. characteristically, the richest and most powerful people in the world want to be dominated and humiliated. at any given moment, no doubt, a substantial percentage of the participants is being flagellated and roundly verbally abused, possibly in their diapers. on the other hand, there are certainly plenty of rapists among them as well.  

insist

what i'd say about hillary against bernie is that, if you're going to have a democracy, then people's political principles or ideas or ideals should be represented, and not merely manipulated, in political space. and in particular the left side of the political spectrum has been manipulated into voting, over and over, straightforwardly, for oligarchy: precisely for what they most repudiate. y'all can do better, but you have to insist on it.

anti-communication

every word out of hillary clinton's mouth is 'strategic,' as in her obsessive association of herself with obama last night. obviously, she would swing completely the other way at another moment; she has before, and she will again if she's the nominee. good god, is she like that at home with the fam or whatever? anyway, i almost don't see how that happens to a person, how you become someone whose words have floated entirely free of a connection to truth or to the self of the person who utters them. it's very much like hearing someone who responds only to the voices in his head, except that has more content. maybe the right response is just pity, or some sort of diagnosis and treatment. if we were all like that, human communication would be a pointless delusion.

 

Hillary Clinton: Top 5 Contributors, 1999 - 2016 

Contributor	Total	Indivs	PACs
Citigroup Inc	$824,402	$816,402	$8,000
Goldman Sachs	$760,740	$750,740	$10,000
DLA Piper	$700,530	$673,530	$27,000
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$696,456	$693,456	$3,000
Morgan Stanley	$636,564	$631,564	$5,000

[source: https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cycle=Career&cid=N00000019]

and then, according to mother jones, goldman-sachs "has donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation."

and, according to the wall street journal, "Wall Street firms also play a prominent role on the list. Eight firms, including Goldman Sachs and Citibank, paid the foundation between $1.6 million and $3.5 million combined for speeches by Mr. and Mrs. Clinton."

some of the connections of g-s to the treasury department under clinton, bush, obama, and also some of the ways they were involved in the financial collapse of 2008, and some of the ways they benefitted from the trillion-dollar bail-out.

probably, you're going to vote for her because of your deep concern with inequality.

doing our part to make a world war

once more into the breach. one thing we are doing in the middle east is assembling a shia coalition against isis and more widely against sunni islam: here we are de facto allied with assad, russia, and iran. (pay attention to what we do and the actual effects of what we do, not to what we say. are we doing anything about assad? where does that put the turks in our coalition?) this is what we're doing when we're arming and training (and, er, commanding) the iraqi army in the field, with shia militias and iranian commanders. that's also why all these deals with iran are getting done. another thing we're doing is assembling a sunni coalition, supposedly against isis, and against shia islam. so, e.g., we're arming and re-arming the saudis in their effort to level yemen and remove all taint of iranian influence there by expunging all traces of life. we're arming both turkey and the kurds, etc. oh yes, also we're non-stop placating and arming israel. so let me ask you: what would you expect to be the result of all these policies?

we're going to look at american foreign policy of this period as a completely incoherent mess resulting in unbelievable disaster. that's certainly one thing that one might look for in a presidential candidate: some sort of coherent approach to this matter. the only constructive approach i could see to the situation is actually isoltionism with regard to it; i cannot picture a useful intervention. but almost anything is better than what we've got going.

you got berned

10:00 i think bernie is doing well this evening. you can feel that he can feel that he has big mo. hillary got 600k in speaking fees from goldman-sachs in one year. goldman-sachs just paid a $5 billion fine for violations of the law. oh let's add this: goldman-sachs funded the political rise of ted cruz. why donald hasn't just nailed that i don't understand, but it's fatal. also, it should be fatal to hillary. really; wake up, you're a leftist voting again to be governed from the very pinnacle of capitalism. have you realized that yet? seems kind of hard to miss.

o'malley's doing surprisingly decently (you couldn't help but have extremely low expectations). but there's not much distance between o'malley and clinton, and if he comes in at 10% in iowa, that could give the caucuses to sanders, or the caucasas.

 i love this album cover:

Online Radicalization and the Explanation of Violence

By Crispin Sartwell

     When Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School, many commentators fixed blame on the video game Quake and the music of Marilyn Manson. These days, we explain acts of terror by talking about 'online radicalization.'

   The online power of ISIS is often treated as a kind of supernatural force: tweets and Facebook posts that apparently amount to mind-control at a distance. Attempts to drench the net in counter-propaganda, on the other hand, have been ineffectual; whatever brainwashing the Islamic State can accomplish on Instagram seems completely out of the reach of the State Department or the CIA.

     When we grapple with difficult or overwhelming events such as the killings in Paris and San Bernadino, we reach for almost any explanation. And in some ways the most satisfying explanations assign blame to some agent or force, so that if we could control that agent or force, we could control the events.

If first-person shooter games cause school shootings, then controlling video games would allow us to control the killing; the chaos and bewilderment induced by the event are quickly resolved, and there is something to be done. That's how we ended up addressing terrifying violence with warning labels on compact discs.

   If the terror in our streets is caused by online radicalization, then we can control the terrorism by controlling social media.

     'Social media' is alternately thought of as a free creative zone, as in its role in the Arab Spring, and as an unknowably vast mysterious realm in which terrifying forces might, for all we know, be breeding. It's like a different dimension, from which monsters might suddenly appear.

     Perhaps everyone is a little uncomfortable as this realm grows so vast and intersects with events in the physical world in more and more unpredictable ways. And perhaps people who did not grow up with social media, people of the generation that now runs the government, find this realm particularly mysterious and threatening. Anyone anywhere could be saying anything about anyone. Anyone could be communicating with anybody, planning God knows what.

     It's as though there is some set of magical formulae, incantations that allow you to control people's minds with words and images. ISIS deploys them somehow, but they are inaccessible to us. However, we think of the internet in many incompatible ways, and just as notorious as online radicalization is internet 'siloing'; we only listen to people who already agree with us. Sometimes it seems that no one has ever persuaded anyone of anything on the internet, except that ISIS can transform minds with a few swift keystrokes.

   The people who blamed Quake and Marilyn Manson for Columbine were people who didn't understand video games and pop music, as people who blame hip hop for urban violence are people to whom hip hop is incomprehensible. The unknown can take on the quality of a preternatural threat, and the internet is not only unknown, it is unknowable in its vastness and its encryption.

   Right now, I would suppose that social media is undergoing massive intelligence analysis, with the long-term goal of subduing the whole thing to the needs of governments. That, not boots on the ground, is our strategy against ISIS. The point, now, is for governments to know and control social media, a vast and perhaps ultimately futile task. But already, people are being detained all over the world, including in the United States, for Facebook posts. And if the kind of free flow of communication that we have come to depend on continues, I would be very surprised.

   So we are thinking about this supernaturally, and I would like to bring it down to earth a bit. Perhaps you have a Twitter account. Now, ask yourself, can you imagine a series of tweets that would get you to shoot up your office party or a nightclub? Perhaps the powerlessness of the CIA to change hearts and minds by tweeting should suggest to them that no tweet is capable of transforming people into or away from being killing machines.

     Rather than trying to seize control of all communication, perhaps we should ask ourselves about the conditions underlying the violence, conditions that make violent jihad attractive, that bring the almost-converted to the ISIS Twitter accounts in the first place. Or, for that matter, that get white suprematists, anti-abortion fanatics, or mentally ill people to start shooting, whether or not they are on social media with like-minded folk.

     Whatever the ideological or pathological occasion, the shootings themselves take on a repetitive or almost ritualistic flavor. The driving force might not be particular ideologies or pathologies - expressed on or off the net - but a hatred of the human that runs deeper. I don't think that there is any tweet that can make a terrorist, and I don't think that deleting all tweets would cure us of anything.

   Perhaps warning labels on Instagram can save us.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is How to Escape, a collection of essays.

what's good about trump

in some ways what trump is doing is so simple. ted cruz says, 'the only reason you're bringing up the citizenship issue is because i'm doing better in the polls.' bartiromo: 'yeah, why now?' donald: 'well, because he's doing better in the polls. he wasn't a threat before.' honest, straightforward, stunningly unusual in american politics, completely disarming the question and the audience. maria: 'people say you're angry.' donald: 'i'll take that. i am angry.' what is hillary going to do, faced with an actual human being?

 

state of play

bernie is surging in the polls. i'm rooting for him, anti-socialist though i am, because i regard him as a person with content. i'd be a little worried that he is peaking a week or two too early. for one thing, the clinton operation fights dirty, and you can't tell what might break between now and iowa. but anyway, though the sanders thing is for real, i think the fundamental explanation of the most recent oscillation is actually trump's attacks on the clintons. and i'll say again that in a general election he would shatter her like a glass ceiling. 

and then i think this morning the cruz loan thing is being underplayed. i figured 'goldman-sachs' was where donald would go after 'natural-born', though for all i know trump is all wound up in goldman-sachs or in debt to it, so he might not be the right messenger. but for whomever, now it is time to whip out the whole history, for starting in the clinton admin and running through 2010 at least, there was literally no distinction between goldman-sachs and the treasury department. if you want to know why income inequality keeps increasing, start with stuff like that. you say 'robert rubin,' 'henry paulson', 'establishment,' 'corruption,' 'great recession,' 'clinton clinton clinton,' 'cruz.' that's enough to break off 10% and kill ted in the iowa caucuses, at a minimum. 

but i feel even within the story, if you start peeling back layers, where ms. cruz is taking loans at good terms from her employer, the mega-potent investment bank, many many questions arise, of influence among other things. goldman-sachs financed ted cruz's political rise. you don't know how something like this will break. i could be wrong. i think this halts the ooze. then you get either chaos in iowa, or trump trouncing the field. there is still time for a wild swing, and paul or previous winners huckabee and santorum might benefit from a cruz meltdown.

 

arguably technically nonsense

ross douthat: sanders is "arguably technically further to the left than trump is to the right." it seems to me like it would be hard to throw this shit around all day, as people do, without reflecting that you yourself have no idea what you could possibly mean. it doesn't seem to give even really smart people pause that the whole thing makes no sense, which is a real problem in this case, because it leads to unmeaning assertions. you can see that even douthat knows there's something wrong: "arguably technically": why not about seventeen other qualifiers?

not to get technical and shit, but just what sort of facts would be determinative in this matter? what would go to show that sanders is further to the left than trump is to the right? for decades, people have been arguing about who's left and right, or whether bill clinton or tony blair are on the left, etc. everyone who has a position somewhere along the spectrum (has an internally inconsistent position and) sees the whole line from their little point: everything to the left of their point is on the left, everything on the right is to the right, so it all depends on who's talking. but then, there is no line. also, even if there was, i don't really give a shit where any person is on it. those aren't the issues i'm worried about, and they concern social positioning rather than any substantive characterization of positions.

like i really, really don't see how people keep talking this way without quite becoming aware of their absolute inability to clarify the basic terms of their political structure. this inability issues not from their intellectual limitations but from the fact that the underlying concepts are inarguably technically gobbledygook.

a nice short review of *how to escape*, from the current times literary supplement, by paula niclomhair. she accuses me of making sweeping statements and crude generalizations. imagine!

*how to escape* on amazon

oops i'm thinking this is fatal for ted "the ooze" cruz. if so, that definitely opens this sucker up in a big way.

like a bullet through a blancmange

hillary clinton, over and over: "I don't pay much attention to polls." i guess polls aren't polling well. it's the completely routine dishonesty, the continual falsehood of the self-presentation, that's so annoying. meanwhile the polls are freaking the clinton people out utterly, and she's scrambling left hour by hour to short-circuit bernie. so let me ask you this, do you care what someone says about immigration raids, or what they actually believe? because what they believe is surely a better predictor of what they will actually do when in office, for example. but ever since maybe 1992, we've been well beyond that; the first problem isn't whether bill clinton, al gore, john kerry, hillary clinton honestly represent their beliefs in public space; the first question is whether they have any beliefs at all or have transcended the whole idea. (oh, just to remind you: kerry ran a pro-war campaign in 2004: "John Kerry reporting for service!" he tried to run to bush's right, the old clinton approach. al gore never talked about climate change in 2000, instead he stuck to a handful of focus-grouped phrases, such as the idea that bush had a "risky scheme" for social security: he used the phrase literally hundreds of times, like some sort of mechanical playback device or wind-up toy, a round dozen in any given debate.)

say hillary is the nominee. expect her to try to get to ted cruz's right, ok? on national security, to start with, anti-terrorist fear-mongering etc. there will be little talk of guns or immigration, and stunning inaction in all areas in the skull-crushing clinton admin #2. if there are two viable candidates in the general election (for example, trump and clinton) then in the usual manner there will be little incentive for clinton to talk about, for example, immigration, or criminal justice reform: she will have the black and latino vote locked up and will start trying to pry out moderate independents. because she has no particular commitments, she will make this shift easily, with no conscientious qualms. this is how problems in minority communities grow ever-worse under democratic administrations. and on the day she is elected - which i think is unlikely - hillary will start running for re-election. please, let's not.

1992-2015 was the era of political discourse utterly divorced from all real-world content. i always thought it would be so easy to blow that shit up: all you had to do was appear as the actual human being you are in public space, and all that required was a kind of minimal human courage, the sort we all need to muster every day. anyway, trump has blown through that slop like a bullet through a blancmange. i hope he's never president. but i hope we never return to the mind-numbing yipyap. 

the hillary idea is that you just say anything that sounds good; your only goal in communication, or in your political career, is to manipulate people to serve your little ego. in the process, paradoxically, you become a non-being: whose ego is that ego? it's like it's become its own entity, displacing the person from hillary clinton's body. i'll say this again, there has been a whole theory of communication according to which the only goal of the whole thing is to get people to do what you want them to do, a model perhaps drawn from advertising. and then there's the sort-of pomo idea that the world is whatever we can persuade each other it is, to the point where you think that saying all day that you're winning the war makes it more likely that you will win the war, even while your'e getting your ass kicked. the question is how to 'frame' reality for people, to construct for them a world. that is a real good formula for being mugged all the time, over and over, disastrously, by actuality. 

and the question of the frame and similar approaches to communication has been dedicated to nothing except destroying your enemies. it's all been for partisan advantage, to get rid of the other party. it's individually self-serving, but it's collectively self-serving: it is dedicated to extruding your enemies from your reality, making them evil, stupid, anachronistic, without regard to any actual policy goals. it is fucking pathetic, but now we can see how it might be over.

no bowie

over the years i have issued several celebrations of the genius of david bowie.  'corpse' is the latest of his protean shape-shifting personae (wait a second: maybe he did that one in '77?). the times obit says he 'transcended music, art, and fashion.' he certainly transcended music. you can see this because people really really love his music, in spite of how it sounds. 

 

it's fine with me to have musical artists where the point is not the music, but then maybe you could skip the audio retrospective? in bowie's case i don't see how the point could possibly ever have had anything to do with the music, and i will say again that 'space oddity' is the worst pop song ever recorded, without a single redeeming feature, and that that basically sets the tone for the oeuvre. the music was an afterthought, or an accessory, or just some more make-up. the words were meaningless. the tunes were boring or derivative. the values were empty and destructive. the effect on rock music was baleful. but it somehow exuded cultural something-or-other, which was enough. so anyway, celebrate him as a liberatory cultural figure if you absolutely must, but leave it there.

i guess i do want to link up to lou reed. i must hate these people's music because of my homophobia! wait, were they gay, or were they just passing in the 70s as a fashion statement? no, i hate their music because it's tuneless, meaningless dreck that reduces music to a fashion accessory. or, as someone who was less interested than most in their eye shadow, i ended up having to focus on their melodies.

i heard a young woman on cnn with a bowie painted eye saying that he gave her the courage to be who she really was, because that's what he was all about. for real? then who was david bowie, really? i realize that people responded to his various genderings, but i would think of him more as a postmodern shape-shifter; the whole point of, say, bowie or warhol is that there is no authentic person underneath, just a series of manufactured images. i think madonna, for example, did this better, even if she herself would give it up for bowie here. i think her music was a lot more fun: better hooks, better beat; i think there were always interesting gender and religious interventions, whereas i thought that bowie's forays were, even in that comparison, superficial. they were both really helped by being beautiful modely-type people, though, and really the spectacle always swamped the music.

or, maybe i'm just bitter because straight women have been subjecting me to this stuff, groaning ecstatically, since 1972, while i tried to sidle inconspicuously out the door or begged for absolute silence, pleading headache. that is the center of the audience, btw (straight, white, bourgeois females), so if you are judging the cultural meaning of these folks, you should take that into account. i love straight white bourgeois females: really; look at my track record. but they have the absolute worst taste in music of any demographic cohort that has ever existed in the history of the world, by a very long way. (haha! vengeance is mine!) let's say the response to bowie was erotic, not melodic. it's like fabian or something: no he can't sing. does that matter? or it's like marilyn monroe singing 'diamonds are a girl's best friend': oh the performance is transcendently excellent - just mesmerizing - if you're a person like me. now just imagine how excellent the music would be if marilyn started making out with jane russell right there! it gives me the courage to be myself!

anyway, ok ok he did have his moments. and if you give me no other choices, i'll put david on before lou. but, now, let me point out that the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars was issued the same year as the ann peebles song in this cluster. now, considered just as a piece of popular music - really, seriously - which is better? like who's the better singer, for example? who has the better production, band, arrangements, songs? if you have any hesitation about that, you might want to keep your tastes private; i've got no problem with what you listen to in the privacy of your own home - if you really do put that stuff on voluntarily, which i'm finding a little difficult to imagine - but you might consider the damage to your credibility were such a thing to become public. well, in 1972 ( i was 14) we faced an actual choice about which records to buy. even then, some mistakes struck as me as hard to make.

 

good god. 

looking at bowie's outfits, fright wigs, makeup, etc: surely you can't think they've aged very well? but man they looked exactly that ridiculous then. and if you thought that this was the direction that rock music should take at that moment - if you wanted this kind of rococo pseudo-opera to be what was coming out of the radio, you were on the wrong side. he was trying to end, kill rock 'n roll entirely. you know, he's connected to jagger on one end and punk on the other, but when you get right down to it, his aesthetic is the opposite of the rolling stones' or the ramones'. you'd be so much better with alice cooper, say: why wasn't he a profound gender-bending innovator, man of many personae, etc? well, he wasn't pretty, and he used horror films rather than sci-fi, but he not only wore eyeshadow; he fucking rocked, while bowie noodled about with his space-alien bullshit. 

 

retroactively, people seem to think of bowie as a unique figure. but everyone was doing gender and personae in the '70s. oh, we might ponder the village people: that was pretty hilarious and profound work on gender with its parodies of hetmale personae, and they had much better songs than bowie. or i think besides alice, you'd have done better to appoint bryan ferry, or sylvester, for example; i think the music and the costumes were better in all these cases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i wish i understood more about what happened in cologne. why and how were these men in the train station; who were they really and what did they think they were doing? i'm not seeing any good explanations, at least in the english-speaking press, but of course you can't read everything. europe could really spin in a bad direction here.

america is hurting

it's like we stubbed our gigantic toe. when you start noticing it, collective subjectivities are everywhere. 'we' always think stuff and feel stuff as one gigantic leviathanly mind, or we always talk like that. it's always worth easing back and thinking about what these consciousnesses are or who's using them how or how they are produced, if they are, or why we're picking out this one rather than that. i like it when it floats to the very outside, where we're all apparently feeling the same thing at the same time. an idiotic brand of punditry does this all day every day: americans are scared! we only want to know who can keep us safe. what explains the rise of donald trump? 'there's a lot of anger out there.' he's tapped into our anxieties, or maybe just the anxieties of white men. ask yourself how much that is really helping you understand something, or whether it's really true etc. it's like 'america is in love with kim kardashian,' maybe.

really american political discourse can be so pitiful. if you're a columnist or talking head, people ask you to 'explain the trump phenomenon.' really, you don't know, and you don't want to go out on a limb in any way, because you're not actually out there to advocate positions, but to get back on tv tomorrow, and if you say whatever everyone else is saying, you at least can't make a howling mistake, or anywaybyou can't be uniquely blamed for it. so what you do is produce the same sentences as everyone else, with an air of saying something deep: 'there's a lot of real anxiety out there that he's tapped into', etc.

it's not going to work out

i just don't think hillary and bill can make it back to the white house. you might think the sex scandals have been 'litigated' etc. first off, standards of male behavior have evolved a bit, and when that slobbering mofo corners you these days it doesn't seem all that funny, if it ever did. even 'guys' are finding it harder to wink and laugh and stuff. but anyway, it also just keeps pointing up the atmosphere of privilege, corruption, and self-serving power hunger around the clintons. the thing is, trump is willing to go there, without as it were any pussyfooting around, and he is just killing hillary right now. just the image of hillary with cosby is genius. it's an interesting strategy, and it might be enough to make hillary sag just as iowa and new hampshire kick in. people don't think it will affect democrats. i disagree; picture a general election campaign against trump. no holds barred, baby. and the way he's framing it as an issue of abuse etc actually does make it hard for progressives to give a square defense. i have this funny feeling that bernie is going to flow forward a bit anyway; why exactly is anyone going to go vote for hillary?

it's a little hard to picture bernie as the democratic nominee, much less as pres. somewhere people are thinking about elizabeth warren and joe biden. i just want to point out that mitt romney and hillary clinton are politicaly indistinguishable, whereas ted cruz and bernie sanders couldn't be more different. there should be three parties, just to begin the disintegration. 

one really clear sign that the clinton thing is going south for a bit  is the barely-suppressed anger of the old clintonistas. i was watching donna brazile on cnn just now: she is reacting in a suppressed rage, and if you think she's a bit flustered, watch james carville or something. honestly, you feel the defensive rage also underneath hillary and bill's non-responses, and now that's all anyone's asking. underneath all that is a terrible anxiety, right back to 1992, 96, etc: what other spike heels might drop?  for some reason, noone used this stuff in 2008. but here it comes, baby. and it's only one of many dimensions of clintonian secrecy, corruption, and decadence. the clinton campaign just deployed their secret weapon, bill. watch him now start canceling all public appearances, or at least all opportunities for anyone to ask him any questions whatsoever. it's not going to work out.

i really think that one effect of the trump approach is just to completely undercut or overthrow people who have no content, because people who have no content have no reply. so, it is amazing what he did to jeb; as we'd say in sprts, jeb got 'exposed'; there just wasn't anything there but mumbled catch-phrases. hillary i think withers, maybe with a bit more resilience, under that scrutiny. what the trump attacks and the responses of professional politicians do is just show you that there's nothing there underneath: no person, no commitment, just a fictional public persona, vague as possible. just, as in the jeb case, a tub a goo. but he cannot do that to bernie, exactly, right? because there is a core of belief or reality under there. so, what can debbie wasserman-schultz or whomever do now that the politics she learned and enacted robotically is collapsing around her like a cgi dc?