cheese it, the cops!

t-shirt 2

just a bit more of the sort of things i take to be obvious about the t-shirt wars (like say a student ends up on that post and is puzzled about my orientation). (i tried to comment on the original dickinsonian piece with a link to the blog post. well, been a couple of days and it hasn't made it through 'moderation'.) in my actual lifetime, colleges have banned socialist slogans on campus, alright? advocating communism could lose you your tenured job, get you expelled, get you pilloried in a congressional hearing, etc. try flying a malcolm x shirt at tcu in 1964, alright? i tell you this in absolute sincerity: if someone was proposing that, say "you can't change a corrupt system by taking its money" was hate speech (and at least, unlike 'make america great' it has some content, and so, unlike 'make america great,' it could possibly be offensive to someone), violated policy, and so on, i would try as best i could to rip them a new asshole in precisely the same way on precisely the same grounds.

the first thing i thought about doing was getting a trump hat and parading around campus. but however, i talked myself down because i agree with you that trump is terribly wrong. i would not vote for him in any possible world. (i might just add that i think socialism is terrible idea, and i wouldn't vote for sanders either.) but the rules you purport to be applying, or that you would like to see instituted, can be turned on you with remarkable swiftness. i'm not sure what sort of restrictions on speech we might be dealing with after, say, the 8-year donald presidency followed by ivanka's two terms. but whatever you say, it better not be in arabic. what is politically correct at liberty or oral roberts? what if you were an atheist or leftist? and in all these cases the restrictions are just flatly incompatible with the educational function of these institutions, and the one you are proposing or purporting to identify in existing policy, is specifically and explicitly contrary to the declared mission of dickinson college. you might ask john dickinson or benjamin rush about this. no one learns anything by only hearing a chorus of unanimous voices. we are beginning to prove that by concrete experiment.

gone in 60 seconds

the hillary clinton campaign will be used for decades as a lesson in political science classes on how not to run a campaign. of course, i've been arguing since before she declared that one prob would be that she might go down in the flames of scandal at any given minute. as the investigations wind toward possible indictments and so on, the campaign's strategy is this: just say squarely that the inspector general's office in the state department (that's kerry's state department, hill's until relatively recently) is literally working for republicans who are trying to stop hillary. never mind how. but why would they do that, especially now that they can just watch her collapse on her own? because they are scared of the real progressive change that hillary will bring to the nation, like campaign finance reform and ways to address inequality. christ i don't even know where to begin; there are just infinite layers of dishonesty: sometimes i think they're pursuing it for its own sake. even when straightforward would do them better, they just slather on the incredibly obviously false shit all day. the sheer ridiculousness of the current approach appears to give them no pause at all. right some of this crap sort of worked in the 90s, or perhaps they survived in spite of it, actually. but this has been more like a weeks-long self-assassination. they are absolutely bent on losing the last three people who when the pollsters show up describe hillary as "honest and trustworthy." i think it's gotten to the point where they're living in their own global hallucination, and they are puzzled when we aren't in there with them or something. i swear she's gonna be lucky to last a few days if this is the approach. even if they knew that an indictment would be handed down tonight during the debate, the approach that they're taking is just so obviously wrong.

the response is fully reflexive, invariable: blame the republicans. hyperintense obsessive partisanship is all they have, the fallback strategy every time, the vast conspiracy etc etc. a clinton administration - i want you to imagine this - will be far more partisan that what we've seen in the last eight years. look it has to be: the clintons have portrayed the republicans for decades as having one overarching project: destroy the clintons, personally, with insane lies so they can take and destroy the county. now if the pres thinks that, or if the pres was someone who thought she had to say that all the time, or used that to explain every failure or mistake, how well would you expect the budget negotiations to go? not only is she obviously utterly incompetent, she will never get anything but rage through congress.

bird terror

the oregon standoff is done. i had several conversations and read several op-ed columns along these lines: why aren't those people terrorists? well, hmmmm, let's see. they had many opportunities to hurt people and they didn't hurt anyone. that's because they didn't intend to hurt anyone, as they said. anyway, you're probably going to have to think about what 'terrorism' does or even could possibly mean. after that, you might could think about how you're thinking. like, is one of your goals to think true stuff? or are you perfectly happy with false, but slaps my foes? maybe i should set up shop as a credibility consultant, 'cause it wouldn't take many of those to make a semi-rational person start to dismiss you on the grounds that you yourself don't care whether what you believe or say is true. anyway, it'd be really great if all terrorists were like those guys.

Been Away Now, Haven't Seen You In A While...

 

It's entirely too spring like  in the high desert of California, damn it. I know I wanted nothing more ten years ago than to get out of Western Washington and the rain, but it's El Nino time and we're getting robbed here? I know the East Coast is getting slammed, and the midwest is getting slammed but...why are there no flash floods here? Where are the mudslides in LA? God is a real clown, isn't he? 

Good, what an amazing morning! The two favorites in the New Hampshire primary both won big...what does it mean?  I don't know, maybe Karl Rove is a lousy pollster and if you know what you're doing in a small market, you should probably be able to at least figure out 1st Place? 

 

Do Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump share an analyst? Is it a Transactional Analysis Analyst. Is there are hidden Freudian meaning in analyze-analyst-analysis?

 

Latest Piece -- Part II of This Wolf Country Now, although I'm thinking making that a brand thing. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/02/10/this-is-wolf-country-now-intermezzo/

 

The Fed has figured out that the world economy is on the brink of disaster because you can't base a world economy on the sale of cheap sex toys and Pokemon cards. Or expensive Sex Toys and High end art work...

 

Oh, and I did the Social Security/Medicare thing which means that in a couple of months, I'll be older than dirt. 

 

Ever get the feeling that maybe this is an illusion? Or that it isn't? Which would be worse?

 

Maybe we should start a Jackson Browne-Don Henley cover band? Did you know that Mike Campbell tried to give Petty "Boys of Summer" but Petty wanted the chorus redone in a minor key and Henley liked it the way it was so...

 

I think Roadkill Ghost Choir is a great idea for a restaurant chain. 

 

 

t-shirt wars

really, what's happening on college campuses is quite amazing. the editor of the dickinsonian here on my campus opposes parody t-shirts. the problem is that there is a rumor that someone sometime may have worn a shirt that said 'make dickinson great again.' she describes 'make dickinsion great again' as hate speech and says it violates college policies. 

However, adapting his most popular slogan for the ostensible purpose of fraternity recruitment makes light of a candidate who has called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” threatened to ban Muslims from entering the country and made misogynist remarks about journalists and political opponents.

so let's start here: any student who actually wanted to wear a trump 'make america great' hat around campus should surely be more than welcome to do so. if i feel like wearing a trump button to class, i will. but now, even if i would be endangering your space by saying 'make america great,' who in the world could i be imperiling by parodying or revamping that slogan? anyway, the editorial really seems to entail that anyone's actually advocating trump's candidacy on campus would be an act of violence and harassment or something. in other words, i disagree with you, so i'ma gonna ban you. now perhaps we think of our mission as including things like airing political ideas. definitely, as long as the ideas we bat around go from bernie on the left to hillary on the right; i guess that's 'political science'. we're going to take a mainstream politician who just won the new hampshire primary and shame people mercilessly even for making fun of him or whatever. we're going to go for 'he-who-must-not-be-named.'

i think what kills me most about it is that the obvious objections or the nature of education etc do not register at all. people are working themselves up into a tizzy of censorious self-righteousness about less than nothing. i can only imagine how people like that might respond to this blog. but if you want my t-shirt, you're going to have to scrape it from my cold dead torso. it's really going to be fun trying to get through the trump administration on campus; we'll have to assign a censor to each tv monitor in every room, prohibit the internet, and perhaps lapse into a safe yet utter silence.

what kills me second most is that the person saying this is the editor of the school newspaper. back when i was editing school newspapers or serving as the faculty advisor for one, we were ready to go to war for free speech, and we did several times. our job as we understood it was to create a free space for the widest possible exchange of opinions and information. and i come from a long line of newspaperpeople; they all thought about it like that, and they thought that free expression and a free press was central to even the possibility of democracy. that was their job. that was what made what they did a contribution to their city or country. that's what america had that fascist italy or communist russia didn't have. that's what we were fighting wars for, etc; because americans would never accept totalitarianism. now we are producing totalitarian personalities like an assembly line. it actually does make me a little nauseous.

overall, i blame the pointedly authoritarian mood of american k-12 education. it's a humanitarian crisis. but case by case i blame each person who makes an argument like this no matter what the history of their institutionalization. 

if all my students thought this way - and more and more of them do all the time - it would not only be impossible for me to teach, i would no longer want to teach, or even be able understand what it would mean to teach.

giving up

i'll tell you what might kill hill: citigroup giving up on her. if wasserman-schultz, biden, and obama were huddled at the naval observatory, the goldman-sachs board is meeting with bloomberg today, begging for a savior.

strategic

 

here was hillary's strategy, completely planned out, i think. (1) make the positions as close to possible, to the point of '6 of 1 half a dozen of the other.' (2) then, in the last 72 hours, break women off from bernie by getting famous women on the stump and (here's the clever part): peremptorily demanding their gonadal loyalty by a series of insults and guilt trips. they could have used inspiration; instead they tried degradation of women. they portrayed women as manipulated, slaves to their hormones, betrayers of their gender with their false consciousness.

i guess hillary could still have a bounce or two. lord knows she's got access to all the money in the world. i'm just hoping that there's not something in sanders' background that david brock can hammer effectively. but i do think, insofar as they have any strategy left, it's going to be that: some kind of personal destruction. for hillary to become president, she's going to need a wild series of collapses all around. they probably see that. but i actually think that as she thrashes around more, displays her magnificent cynicism more every time she articulates her beautiful vision of america's future, tries to get other people of all sorts to discredit or innuendize sanders and his people, she is actually going to dig herself deeper. everything she does actually confirms what bernie and the country's young people know about clinton already. 

it is way way too late, decades too late, for hillary clinton actually to display commitment, passion, sincerity, authenticity. that would only obviously be the next strategy: that is, it would undermine itself completely. but that's how political consultants think: bernie has that authenticity! how can we simulate authenticity? you have brought yourself here, hillary: you have brought yourself to the point where it is conceptually impossible to present who you are in public space, in which there is actually no you, so the idea of authenticity just has no application.

oh hillary, what happened to you? when and how did you lose yourself forever? i guess just looking at that picture kind of moves me and makes me think a little differently. she looks like all the hippie kids i grew up with, all the little eccentric idealists or intellectuals or artists who weren't going to dress like their parents or put their hair in curlers or wear a suit or sell our souls to a bank. right the survivors had to compromise. but how you start as that girl and grow up to be richard nixon...maybe i should be crying instead of attacking.

 

babe city

alright alright, even i, unexpectedly, am sort of feeling kasich. i like the look of his wife, too, although marco wins the babe contest, unless you're still trying to bend over for bill in the broom closet or whatever.

 

[heethe jutht tho...powerful!]

 

actually, qua first lady, rather than sex object, i would be all about ms. sanders, only: just too many janes! i am becoming very confused. where are the donnas?

 

sometimes i nibble, and sometimes i bite.

oops i forgot melania trump. great googly moogly! quite the crop of spouses (spice?) this year.

ladies and gentlemen, the next first lady of the united states of america!

 and you thought hillary had a problem with the regime of appearances.

 

flash mystery story

a few amazing people went out into the cold new england day/night and voted for jeb. sometimes the structure of human motivation is incomprehensible even to ourselves. ah, the mystery of the human! it is the greatest mystery of all. put the brain boys on it! it's the amygdala again or some shit. don't you hate your amygdala? or actually, you're thinking yourself around in circles to a very bad location; you're being so rational that you're really very obviously wrong. it's the pre-frontal cortex! only the amygdala can save us.

warming my hands at the various fires

i have to say that bernie is just getting better and better, both staying himself and focusing like a laser on a really coherent set of ideas. for one thing, he has captured a lot of the energy of occupy. alright, now he's got to connect to black lives matter and stuff. it is completely natural for him, completely coherent with his basic orientation. he knows that too. watch him over the next few days, and i really seriously think you're going to see that alleged minority firewall burn like a mofo. maybe she can get mexico to rebuild it. yes he's right about what comes next from the clinton campaign: the kitchen sink and then some.

self-service

the idea of clinton moving left in her lurching two-step is that then no one will have any particular motive to vote for sanders. if you're female, for example, and you have a toss-up on positions, well, you'd go hillary. the only difference is: sanders believes it and hillary doesn't, and anyone with at least one eye and ear can see and hear that every time out.. hillary is the perfect emblem of everything she is railing against in her own concession speech: campaign finance corruption, wall street, inequality, oligarchy. the insincerity is grotesque and the polling shows that everyone knows that. for a lot of people on tv, that doesn't seem to matter; they're still on the positions. hillary's whole approach has made positions completely irrelevant to her campaign. seriously, if carpetbombing and immigration restrictions were polling well in the democratic electorate, she'd be nuking syria and personally tasing dreamers. she describes her career as 'a life of public service.' it's been a life of self-service, a kind of jerkoff of a life. actually she does sound like the pain has focused her a bit. well, for her sake, let's heap on lots more. so thinking about it the other way, if they are so ideologically close and all, why would a sanders voter vote for clinton, eh? particularly now that hillary has opted for in-your-face misogyny. oh dang!

something suddenly became clear: hillary is the perfect opponent for bernie: she is everything he is running against, a perfect symbol. meanwhile i feel that hillary's lifetime quest will continue through several cycles of reincarnation: find a candidate she could actually beat.

supernatural thing

boy if we want to see a funeral, we should tune in to rubio's concession tonight. watch his amazing optimism, his resolve to go forward. he's happy with the result tonight, was expecting much worse. he's going to carry his momentum south. now wave byebye to the nice people, marco!

i do like msnbc on a night like this. how about andrea mitchell, for example? i guess chris hayes really got kicked to the curb. he was great weekend mornings, but something went wrong when he went to primetime.

hillary "is still leading in national polls." um, poll tomorrow, bro.

as i try to supernaturally control the returns as they come in, i am pushing the sanders margin toward 20 points, and jeb's total under 10.

mayday

where is debbie wasserman-schultz? speculation: watching the returns at the vice presidential manse with biden. oh yeah, barack is there too. axelrod and plouffe. they're trying to figure out how to get on the ballot here and there, assessing the practicality of write-ins and so forth. no one on tv can just say it, except on fox: the hillary clinton campaign, beginning to end except for a week in november, has been an airline disaster, like that one where the depressed pilot flew a planeful of people into an alp, not that one where the thing disappeared without a trace into the southern indian ocean, intriguing everyone. not going to be able to fix it by fixing the staff, unless you start by firing the candidate and the candidate's family. the first clear signal was when debbie performed this on ellen, under her country-music persona cam:

 

and where is rience preibus? in zimbabwe, helping mugabe with his inspiring transition to democracy. he won't be coming back.

oops axelrod is on cnn, helping to create a distraction from events at the naval observatory.

gettin old

right now bill, doing a gaggle. q: are you concerned about sanders' success among young people? a: "no. it's all part of the republicans' attempt to keep hillary tied up for a year." he's asserting now, flatly, that young idealists getting swept up in this sanders movement are being manipulated by right-wingers. first of all, what the fuck is he talking about? but second, how is this still the strategy today after they got their ass kicked for the last 48 hours for their egregious insults and miserable view of young people? their new slogan should be 'you idiots are our future?' americans always adore a message of utter despair and cynicism, and that in itself forms a perfect foil for sanders. it's the false consciousness charge: they could only disagree if someone is manipulating them (or i guess if they're being driven by their gonads toward the torturously-cute bernie boys). man oh man. if they don't lose stunningly today, i will be surprised. but i will also be extremely disappointed with the state of new hampshire. these clinton people are just gross.

they might even start to leak 'evidence' of this, courtesy david brock and his plumbers; somehow it will turn out that somewhere - oh, call it south carolina - somebody that once met the koch brothers circulated a leaflet urging hipsters to vote for sanders. really, despite all facts, bernie sanders is an agent of the vast right-wing conspiracy which the clintons have been so nobly inventing and getting victimized by since 1979. that's how they 'get things done': relentlessly vilifying their opponents while absorbing their positions, if necessary moving far to the right and far to the left simultaneously. you and i can see perfectly well, however, that sanders has an organic, energetic, idealistic following, so don't let that crap bother you. the problem with this particular move - which is pretty trad - in this particular situation, is that i cannot picture it doing anything but backfiring like a bargain-basement blunderbuss.

it's as though sanders were to get up and say this: "people over 32, you know, they like to play it safe. they live in irrational fear. they can't even make the decision to frankly advocate what they really believe in. the hillary campaign is being run from ted cruz's office in order to destroy the american dream. they're manipulating senile people!" diabolically clever. but it can't possibly be a good idea. and then what would that say about sanders?

it could be that bill is himself the strategist who came up with this. i'm hoping peyton manning retires and goes out on top. it would be so sad to see a shadow of his former self throwing interceptions for the browns, getting benched, or getting his neck broke.

also i will be disappointed with and for all concerned if rubio doesn't dissipate like a spectral morning mist. it'd be hilarious if they went back to jeb, though. it's as though these parties have a death wish.

my privilege

i take myself to be in a privileged position to draw conclusions such as the below. for one thing, i have blown up the left-right spectrum, and am neither more one than the other, so i've got that 'objective' (jaundiced) view of both. i was raised by leftists and all my family and friends and colleagues are leftists, and yet i have lived for twenty-odd years in some of the most rural and some of the most right-wing places in america. (seriously, try cottondale, alabama). 

much more to the point, i take myself (honestly) to be brighter than average and i have reflected much more on political theory than most. seriously, i'll send you the books. and don't think i'm being disingenuous here: i really have known quite well very many people whom i thought were at least my intellectual equals, and also understand that i knew richard rorty and arthur danto well, and argued several times, for example, with alasdair macintyre, stanley fish. etc. you can't do what i've done for a career and not suddenly realize that you're not the prettiest girl in the world, right? i have had my ass kicked, though maybe i have kicked some ass too. but rorty, for example, kicked me around with his politics and his erudition and his sneaky amazing facility, for years on end. i didn't necessarily think i was the smartest person in my grad programs etc. (here's an example.) really, i did not. [ack that makes it sound like i walk around all day assessing people's intelligence. really, i don't. but there are some contexts in which it comes out pretty forcibly.]

but...i disagree with absolutely everyone about politics, right? i have never met a person who agreed with me politically. i frigging literally got kicked out of the anarchists! i am a faction of 1. i developed my own system. i disagree all day with everyone i love and everyone i like, and, of course, vice versa. so, i have to think that it's possible for smart people to disagree all the way down to fundamental principles. like i have really known a lot of good or even great-souled people who were fundamentalist christians, or frigging maoists, ok? (i really draw the line at rawlsians and habermasians, though.) i think they were wrong, but i don't think they were necessarily evil and stupid.

stupid and crazy

 now i would like to teach a lesson to both sides: in order to disagree with someone, it is not necessary to regard them as being, or to declare them to be, stupid and crazy. it helps, of course, if you never expose yourself to those crazy stupid people at all; it helps if you have no idea what they're saying. you know perfectly well what they're saying, because people like you are telling one another that it's stupid and crazy. sometimes you say that you literally can't listen for a moment to the people who disagree with you: can't watch a republican debate or trump speech, for example, can't watch fox news even for a moment. otherwise you might fly off the handle, i guess. then you're probably going to preen yourself on your open-mindedness, your rationality, and the notion that your politics is based in reality, even as you enact precisely the reverse of that all day every day. seriously, are you actually afraid to watch a trump speech? how insecure are your beliefs? guess what? they think the same about y'all, with just as much information. if i point out that trump is palpably anything but stupid, or praise his self-presentation, it's like i agreed with him about muslims or something. no, i didn't. and this thing where political disagreements are framed in terms of total hostility and condescension to the people who disagree with you is not only mob irrationality, it has managed to separate the country into two epistemic/verbalabuse zones. ok, he's stupid and crazy, etc, and he's sneaking up on you to kick your damn ass. resolve to try to face and actually understand what's actually going on instead of just groveling for membership in an irrationalist cult. ok?

just start right here: people as intelligent as you, people more intelligent than you, people as informed as you, people more informed than you, people as rational as you, people more rational than you, people as decent as you, people more decent than you, may disagree with you politically. and guess what? you might still be right. argue with them, instead of spending all day playing polkas on the ad hominem harmonium, instead of spending all day in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.

on the left, it's really often presented as an iq contest, and one might spend eight years seemingly obsessed with the the intelligence quotient of a reagan or george w. watching george w and john kerry debate you notice (a) that they were both the product of the same educational institutions and (b) that they both notably struggled all day every day to express themselves clearly, much less creatively. and yet sometimes you thought that the left thought that the reason to vote for kerry was that he was smarter, demonstrated i guess by agreement with themselves. 

strange new respect

hillary is really getting an amazing amount of respect from republican candidates. christie's argument is that we can't nominate rubio because hillary will rip him to shreds on the debate stage. i just heard a jeb surrogate on fox say that 'hillary will rip the bark off our nominee'. she's a pretty good debater, but she's not going to be destroying anyone. never could she do to rubio the sort of thing that christie did, though it's true that christie could do that to her. we're not going to see that matchup though. and it is pretty funny to hear them ripping her as feckless and incompetent at one moment (benghazi!), or say they could beat her in a walk because she's such a flawed candidate or is about to be indicted, and the next use the spectre of her formidableness to motivate voters.

well, here's one dimension where hillary might be sort of formidable: she's got david brock on dark ops. on the other hand, trump has roger stone. anybody is going to be lucky to survive, and no one is going to go out without being profoundly besmirched.

waterboarding cruz

really, donald trump is very beautiful. it is so easy to play with all the thousands of little speech prohibitions we are uselessly and mindlessly imposing on ourselves. hanging out over the weekend with classic american liberals (my mom and ex-wife). they can't really even bear to watch trump, so they feel safe saying that he's an idiot, etc. seriously that is so obviously not the problem. but stuff like this is so refreshing, so liberating, so fun. the fact that he's playing and having fun is actually completely compelling, especially if you've been watching marco or hillary. you made this very necessary and almost absurdly easy with all the pc bullshit. mika etc this morning: you just don't say that word. schoolmarm feminism. like almost all half-decent comedy, it's inappropriate.

 

i've been running the same structure of joke for killing pc for decades. i've actually heard people (of course, solemn pc devotees or cultists) say they have no idea what people mean by pc, there's no such thing, and so on. well, that is hilariously disingenuous. but if you were actually wondering what pc is: it's what he's playing with here, and if it didn't exist and cast a murky meaningless pall of dishonesty over all communication, what he did would be incomprehensible. now, it might be reprehensible, but absolutely everyone everywhere understands what he's working against. just listen to that crowd. they are experiencing liberation. the restrictions made that possible.

if you're one of the people explaining trump because america is anxious and fearful and angry or something, you're definitely missing the big thing: america is tired of empty solemnity and wants to have some fun. america grew up on south park, you know? (and south park has been one of the few islands in the whole culture of actually freewheeling and reflective political discourse.) i'm telling you that you could do this from anywhere on the political spectrum: i don't know, watch russell brand or something. or even jon stewart. but it's going to be harder on the left, where at least in most segments they have made strict continual self-censorship a condition of membership. maybe re-think that, or people are just going to flee. each of us is fortunate if we have a single person to whom we can speak without hesitation, with whom we do not have to screen every sentence before it comes out of our mouths just to make sure it contains no bad word or idea.

it's so unfortunate that he's doing this in the service of waterboarding, etc. but, at least he's doing it.

don't know where trump got it, but i swiped the structure of the gag from this classic daffy duck cartoon, the bit starting at 4:20 where the ref reads elmer the rules. daffy was always my role model.

 

well, getting right down to it, it's a flip on, for example, swift's "modest proposal" etc. just nifty satirical structure. not to contradict the hyper-primitive pc conceptual structure or the scroll at the bottom of the screen, but he did not use the word 'pussy'; he mentioned it. and then he enforced the ban. he came out strongly against the use of the word 'pussy' in public discourse, taking the bold approach of singling out and criticizing his own follower. he gave the pc police exactly what they demanded. who could quibble with that? so sadly, you face the same problem that trump faced in imposing the ban. he negotiated it the only way he could. what word is it that you're banning? i have no idea what you're talking about. you're going to have to tell me explicitly what i'm not permitted to say. 'a word that starts with p' (cnn's preferred formulation this morning) isn't going to cut it; that just sends me wandering for the next twenty years through volume 2 of the compact oed. c'mon, you um scaredy cat, what word are you banning?

or...

i actually have the new hampshire state motto, 'live free or die' on a decal on my suv. (well, actually mine says 

.)

i'd tell the citizens of dixville notch and other communities to keep their motto in mind as they enter the voting booth, only then it'd just be jonestown in each precinct. say you believe that, and you and your beautiful essential americanism waddle into the booth and are confronted with the list of candidates ...

maybe we can turn it outwards. sic semper tyrranis. our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain. let me say that this is the only american political tradition in which i have the least interest as a candidate for belief, as opposed to an interesting historical development or mill run mistake, or which i do not regard as directly evil. but this is actually at the very origin and heart of the american political tradition, despite the recent revival of hamiltonian monarchism. are you really going to make me prove that, or do you remember your 5th-grade textbook? that's why it's enshrined on ancient state flags and so on. not to go all xenophobic on your socialist ass, but believing this is what it means to be an american, all it means to be an american.

true, it's polling at 2%, and -2% is well within the margin of error.

 

 

let's dispense with bubble boy

one great thing about the meaningless yipyap rubio perfectly reproduced three times straight. it starts with 'let's dispel with this fiction that...' really, you're going to have someone write something out, work it through the staff, and repeat it over and over without you or anyone else noticing that it's that...syntactically erroneous? what he actually did was issue an imperative to himself and his followers to dispel, which is actually what is going to happen. go snorkeling, marco, and forget the snorkel. on the other hand, everything out of jeb bush sounds like it's being badly translated on the fly from the malay.

thrash

if you really want to watch a couple of jive-ass mediocrities thrash about desperately, you should watch hillary and jeb right now. that's entertainment! for god's sake the thing where they're attacking young women for supporting bernie, through albright's 'special place in hell' or steinem's 'that's where the boys are' or bill's wretched idiocy about the sexism of sanders supporters: it's about the worst idea i've ever seen. they must feel down to their last card. see, you don't get a whole squad coming out like that without it being a very conscious strategy. but the form it has taken is just awful, guilt-tripping and miserably insulting people they might one day need, the very people they say they're doing all this for. the actual effect is to discredit a whole generation of baby-boomer feminists. if i were a young woman here'd be my response: time for y'all to go away now. we'll try to visit you in the home.

here's jeb's latest tweet: @realDonaldTrump, you aren’t just a loser, you are a liar and a whiner. John McCain is a hero. Over and out. um, meanwhile he's simultaneously doing interviews saying we need maturity and experience and calm in the presidency. thrashing idiotically, and if you think you can take on trump at this level, jeb, you are out of your mind. he will leave you begging for mercy. he's actually imitating and emulating trump, with complete incompetence, as he also attacks donald for doing precisely the sorts of things jeb is now aping. i think trump's initial response was just to re-tweet the bush tweet. good enough. but you are inviting an extremely frank assessment of your personal shortcomings, even as you pile up new ones. what i'd actually like to see is what the tone of jeb's tweet suggests should come next: a knife fight. i'd bet my immortal soul on trump. even without that, jeb's bleeding out.

even by their own miserable standards, the people giving jeb and hillary advice are putting up hall-of-fame numbers for incompetence. as they flamboyantly display their tin ears and lurch strategically from blunder to blunder, they are selling their competence and electability. i guess each is perfectly electable as long as they're only running against each other. if there's a third line for 'wet noodle', they're well and thoroughly fucked.

har she blows

  

the most interesting, and best, pop act i've seen emerge in several years is the duo twenty one pilots. my fifteen-year-old daughter and her set have been listening to them for a couple of years, and as she has adolesced, she has replaced me as the dj for long car rides. anyway, every time one of the pilots' songs came on i'd be all "whoa, who is that?"meanwhile they've suddenly hit with 'stressed out', which, amazingly, is #3 on the billboard chart right now (#1 and 2 are bieber). it's an eclectic and varied approach, a lot of complex play with genre and tempo and melodic changes within the same song and across songs. they'll tell you 'this is not hip hop', but they've definitely got hip hop on board. reggae. rock. synth-pop, punk, neo-folk, and, you know, that max martin current poppy thing too. just gonna assert that they have the best lyrics i have heard coming out of my various playback devices in a long time, both sort of randomly but suggestively poetic and really quite philosophically wild and potent, both intervening in the contemporary culture and pulling you into much deeper reflection. they have three albums, and i'm in the process of assimilating them, but here are a couple of pretty damned amazing examples from blurryface.

this one's for hillary and for anyone whose first question is how to be what people expect you to be.

 

 

or how about the lyrics on this one? egads!

 

 

or this (!)

 

and think how many styles you've heard already, and how well they are accomplished and synthesized. i like every single song on the whole album, of course some more than others. there's nothing i just want to skip over. there's some hope that this is the harbinger of the next phase.

or how about some straight musical pleasure?

 

 

 

 

boys 2 men

yes, christie broke rubio like a twig last night. damn, that was quite something: total destruction with consummate skill. christie's been calling rubio 'bubble boy' all week; then he proceeded to demonstrate the whole thing in the most vivid possible way. and if you cannot improvise, as rubio so obviously cannot, you can neither do what christie did to rubio and hop on the moment, nor, if you're rubio, do a damn thing about it. now, if that is reflected in the polls and the nh vote, we've either got a new round of chaos or else a trump coronation. i would imagine 'the establishment' is freaking out again; rubio was the best or even only hope. perhaps bush has a slight revival - the twitching of the corpse. but i don't think they'll possibly nominate kasich or christie. and i think it's dawning on people that cruz is repulsive.

see, when you go to media school, or hire a bunch of consultants, they will tell you that the key is 'message discipline' by which they mean, at best, endless repetition of three lame catch-phrases. then they'll tell you not to answer the question that's asked, but the question you want to answer. now, if you want to act like a lobotomized mosquito in public, i guess that's your call. don't expect people not to notice, though. if everyone out there is like this, it's like you're absolutely insisting that no one care: you're making apathy the only rational or decent response, or even the only psychologically possible response. what's good about this cycle is that finally people are shattering that. that's why basically any decent american loves what trump is doing even if they don't want him to be pres. i heard a number of pieces on different channels in which people said they were trying to decide between trump and sanders. right, if you suffer from left-right autism, that appears incoherent. it's a desperate bid for some sort of reality and humanity in our political discourse.

we could have ended this at any time, instead of not listening to al gore not talk about climate change in 2000, or john kerry take less than no position on the iraq war in 2004, or hillary clinton not mention in 2008 that she'd be the first women pres (or for that matter drive it home with a sledgehammer this time). all we have to do is make people pay for acting like that with their political careers. but then you get cornered between the dem and rep in the general election, and you affirm either way that lobotomized mosquitoes are the only creatures who could possibly be elected. it will be so sad if that happens again this time, but if you vote for it, at any time under any circumstances with any justificatory rigamarole, you're rewarding it. you're going to get much more of it, and you're going to deserve it. these people have been demanding our contempt for decades, absolutely insisting on it. proportion your contempt to their contemptibleness. give it to them in heaping helpings.

just to be clear, rand was the only candidate in either party that i could vote for in any possible world, the only candidate i could vote for without an absurd feeling of self-betrayal.. so i'm back to the libertarians, or at any rate something marginal. i'm very happy at the margins overall, as you might be able to tell. but i'll say this again: the courage needed to not to vote for everything you hate, or to vote for anyone you please, or to write in popeye the sailor man, or just sit this one out, is extremely minimal.

to the best of my reflection, my attempts to harm hillary's self-esteem are not based on sexism, though it might very well be coming from my howling anti-white racism. (one thing we can all agree on: the white race has really fucked this great nation. got to stop voting that way, too. and who's whiter than hillary? oops i forgot dick cheney and mitt romney.) you should see what i tried to do to gore.

The following essay originally appeared in the New York Press, and was written by Crispin Sartwell.

A New Refutation of the Very Possibility Of Al Gore

The question before us is this: Does Al Gore exist? Let us address this question from a phenomenological perspective, taking as a starting point the following sentence from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time : "The nothing nothings" (or "Nothingness nihilates"). That sentence is an extremely apt description of Al Gore giving a political speech. He isn't there, and he's not saying anything or, to put it differently, he is nothing and he's saying nothing. Al Gore is a kind of hole or vacuum. Let us consider Al Gore provisionally as a section of unoccupied space and time (later we will have to refine this account).

A Gore supporter might reply that while "of course" Al Gore is something or perhaps even someone, the problem is his public persona. He tries to stay safe by sticking to pure cant and revealing as little as possible of himself.

Paradoxically, however, the fact that he will not or cannot reveal himself in public is precisely his most authentic revelation of himself. As he speaks from concealment he is nothinging or nihilating: his self is the self that creates or clears the absence that he presents, and the presentation from which he is absent. His self is nothingness, the source of the nullity he embodies in public space. The nothing nothings; but more, only the nothing nothings. Nothing cannot derive from something, as if by a slow decay. Rather, the abyss lurks at the heart of each thing as a possibility. In human beings the abyss lurks as a choice, but to choose nothing (what Sartre called "bad faith") is to choose the unreality at the heart of oneself, to annihilate oneself or tumble into perfect falsehood, or rather perfect negation of truth, as the essence of oneself.

Al Gore tumbled into this infinite pit long ago and now calls upon all of us to do likewise, to annihilate ourselves entirely, to take up and become sheer empty space and time. Nothingness now beckons us from our televisions to vote for it, to endorse it, to choose it to represent us; that is, it urges and cajoles us to become sheer void.

It would not be inaccurate to think of Al Gore as a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense, as someone who by withdrawing in fear from reality seeks an annihilation of all that is into the nothingness he himself has chosen. Augustine famously proposed that evil is the absence of good. In beckoning us toward nothingness, Al Gore calls us to evil. But he calls us not only to the absence of everything but also to the absence of nothing, and thus to the absence even of evil itself. Hence Al Gore is no more evil than he is good, which is perhaps what people sense when it occurs to them that Al Gore means no harm, or even that he is not a deeply evil person. One finds oneself wishing beyond hope that Al Gore were evil. Even that much nothing would be something.

But Al Gore, in being the very principle of emptiness itself, cannot be evil, for he is also what annihilates even nothingness, what annihilates good but also the absence of good. Al Gore is the infinite series of annihilations by which the universe devours itself, devours its own devouring of itself, and then devours even that. Al Gore is the devourer of dimensions, the devourer even of time and of the possibility of time.

One can see this most clearly when one listens to Al Gore, which is a complete waste of time. It's not just that in listening to Al Gore time is disposed of nonproductively, that time is lobbed into the universal garbage pail along with the cosmological coffee grounds and orange peels. As Al Gore speaks, time is wasted as a disease wastes the human body; time slowly collapses in on itself like the body of a consumptive: time withers, time decays, time atrophies as all things cease to be, even the very ceasing-to-be itself of things. So Al Gore makes not only everything impossible, he makes nothing itself impossible too, for nothingness must be the annihilation of itself as well as of everything. Al Gore is the universe feeding on itself and then feeding on its own excrement and then feeding on its own feeding maw, until it collapses into itself like a black w/hole that consists of a single infinitesimal point. And then Al Gore is the annihilation of that infinitesimal point itself, and the annihilation of that annihilation.

To vote for Al Gore, then, is to endorse and to become the negation or abnegation of all truth and all reality; it is to take up a position as the destroyer not only of oneself, and not only of American political discourse, but of the entire fabric of the universe. Thus this election poses itself as a question: Will we trip over Al Gore's abysmal foot into the infinite void, falling eternally into dimensionless nonbeing? For when all space is unoccupied, then space itself collapses, and not only does nothing exist any longer, there is no place where anything could come to exist; the collapse of space is the collapse of all the dimensions and modalities of being; it is the destruction not only of actuality but of possibility. Consequently, a vote for Al Gore is a vote not only against the universe in which we happen to find ourselves; it is a vote against the very possibility of any universe, of even a single merely possible lepton. A vote for Al Gore is a vote for the complete annihilation of all possible worlds.

Thus there is more at stake in this election than tax policy; as you enter the polling booth you face the question of whether you yourself will cease to exist.

fight to rock

here's an example of something that a certain kind of feminist says that i think is really terribly wrong. 'the expectations' on women (in public life, but many argue everywhere all the time) are different than on men. so, for example, hillary clinton is, by universal consensus, globally inauthentic. bernie, being a dude, can appear in a rumpled suit and sincerely profess his beliefs. but no woman can do that in public life, because the expectations are so different. 

i'm sorry, but you're going to have to do something other than merely capitulate, appealing to your total involuntary passivity. each of us, i think, has an obligation to fight for some sort of authentic self-presentation in public; we all face great pressure not to. hillary clinton can dress however she pleases and say whatever she likes. really. seriously. her servitude is voluntary. she is one of the most privileged people in the world; if she changed her fashion sense or scrubbed off her makeup mask...whatever. maybe she would have to pay some kind of price; well, i think human beings have to be willing to do that. maybe 'the public' would actually respond well to that. but even if they didn't, at least she wouldn't be nothing anymore.

i remember obama said that hillary had to do what he had to do, but backwards and in heels. then he said that the experience was harder for her, because for one thing, she had to spend an hour and half every morning on her hair and makeup. define 'had to.' i hope i heard the condescension in his voice. maybe that was the advantage that propelled barack to victory, if it really did make it hard for her. chalk one up for the patriarchy. it might have also been harder for her because she had to discipline herself at every moment not to say what she meant and not to say what she thought. if women have to do that, i propose to ignore whatever any woman says from now on. fortunately i haven't noticed that women are any more like this than men, on average. hillary is doing exactly what john kerry did.

not all women who appear in public space have sprayed their hair into total discipline or whatever, whereas the ways men look presidential in their identical suits and ties is also pretty damn prescribed. if women face more pressure than men to create a false appearance, then they're going to have to insist even harder than men on manifesting themselves for real. stop whining and start fighting, y'all, or this whole feminist thing is the merest bullshit.

look, are you really going to just lay there, producing whatever appearance you suppose we demand, until we change our minds or something? if you don't like 'the regime of appearances' you need to tweak it, tease it, move it slightly, parody it, ridicule it, or simply defy it in our faces. ok? plenty of women have been doing that for a very long time. in particular, actual feminists have been doing it in a million ways since wollstonecraft. if you still 'can't', centuries later, that's on you.

i am your oppressor, i suppose. well, i'm not going to be able to free you if you won't make any effort whatever to free yourself, or if you are bent on regarding yourself as conceptually unfreeable, always questing for a set of expectations to fulfill. maybe you need to stop waiting for me to free you. y'all are going to have to teach us who you are and how you actually do want to appear, alright? many of you have, heroically or routinely. resistances, even little resistances, are educational. capitulation conveys no information, just mechanical repetition. we're going to need more, and we're going to need to understand some of the things it might mean to be a woman, or what it is like to be a woman, now. to do that, you're going to need show us who you are now, bring what's inside to the surface in whatever way you deem honest. what that takes: the minimum effective dose of human courage.

'expectations' have formed up into a pretty odd dimension; they seem to float free; they are everyone's, or all men's (?), expectations in general, no one's in particular. if we are talking about heterosexual men's expectations for the appearance of people like hillary clinton, i don't think our expectations are nearly as detailed as you seem to think they are. certainly, we could never have designed hillary's outfits or imposed on her her particular coiffure. as you may know, you're lucky if we really even notice stuff like that. in my view, these are your expectations for yourself, the expectations you are imposing on yourself. or put it like this: to some extent at least it is the us in your head, and not the us in the world, that is imposing all these disciplines of appearance on you. just taking a gander, it seems to me more like you're trying to fulfill the expectations of gay men: the sort of people who, let me speculate, might actually have helped hillary with her makeup, designed her outfit and imposed on her her particular coiffure.

we're apparently in a period of what might be termed morbid sociality, in which what people worry about most or exclusively is what they suppose other people are thinking about them and seem to regard themselves as having no choice but to behave continuously as they suppose those people expect them to. there's a whole wing of 'feminism' - oh, try jessica valenti in the guardian - and also of the social sciences as a whole, which appears to believe that this is the universal human condition, before which each of us is entirely helpless. it's just the way homo sapiens thinks. i propose to prove that false all day every day with my own body and blog.

women had to fight to rock.

 

 

they still do.

[actually i wanted this vid; 'embedding disabled on request.'] how do i expect a woman politician to appear? the more like da brat da better. 

 

who is the real stasisist?

as i tour this greatesque land on crispforce one, many hyper-intelligent and attractive voters such as yourself ask me, "senator sartwell, who is the real progressive in this race?" to which i respond 'fuck you, you fucking fuck.' but, at any rate, when i am elected, we will arrest time on the day of my inauguration. it's amazing what a pres can do by executive order, and americans are sick of aging. i think it would more than enough to pause our eternal spiral into stupidity, pain, and disaster. we'll be rounding up anyone who has 'an inspiring vision of the future' as dangerously psychotic.

the malleability of time is well known: you can change its rate of flow and direction just by giving an inspiring speech, or passing a new welfare program. should we skip more quickly into the future, or tie a bow of temporality itself and find ourselves back in 1953? those are the literally insane stakes in this election. stop it, i say.

quid pro quo

hillary is truly outraged at the ridiculous suggestion that the millions upon millions of dollars wall street investment bankers have funneled to the clintons could have any effect on what she does at all. boy i have been listening to that my whole life: prove there was a quid pro quo! seriously, it;'s the tom delay defense, alright? meanwhile hillary clinton will work passionately against citizens united. first off: why? because when billionaires give republicans money, it's corrupting, but not you? when you, hillary, argue that unlimited contributions, super pacs and so on are undermining our democracy, whom are you impugning? prove the quid pro quo! 

and then, you know, a pres has to have some priorities. i feel that one sinking to the bottom of the agenda if she's elected; her #1 priority will be raising literally a billion dollars for her own re-election. really, she has just as good a plan for reforming wall street as sanders, say various newspapers. ok. evaluate also, realistically, by what you know about her constituency, whether she is likely to make meaningful reforms, whatever the hell she says now. see? it isn't a matter of point by point comparison on policies: she's managed to shove herself toward 'progressive' positions. it's her palpable, continual insincerity in many dimensions that makes you think: it does not matter what she says.

a new argument for radical decentralization

right now, i'm teaching both the analects of confucius and the republic of plato, as i often do. i think it's worth saying that both of these texts, and the 'golden ages' of human thought in which they emerged, were characterized by extremely fragmented prolitical situations, situations of wars and struggles between small states in close proximity and quick transition. without having done any very elaborate research to try to back this up, i'm going to say it's my impression that periods like that are characterized by creativity and innovation, whereas periods of well-consolidated large nations or empires have the opposite effect. another case: renaissance italy. really, even to try to understand the political landscape of 15th and 16th century on the italian peninsula is crazy. well you get machiavelli and humanism, michelangelo and leonardo and raphael, etc etc.

the roman period in philosophy is often undervalued for its interest and even its originality, but there is no denying that in many ways they were basically ramifying greek ideas and arts. or once china consolidated into an empire, there was far less creative thought, etc. in some ways the reasons are obvious; i do think that both the greeks and the chinese of the spring and autumn and warring states periods had to grapple with different social/political/aesthetic arrangements in close proximity. and if you don't, i don't think you start asking questions like, what is the best political system? also these big nations think they should be running the arts and philosophies, and characteristically take direct measures to establish an official ideology and crush outliers.

so, i'd say, if you want to make, profess, think, create, etc, you should pursue decentralization of political power everywhere all the time. or try this: the state is a force inimical to human thought and art. the more thorough state power, the less thinking and creating takes place. i say i could show that historically. that would be an argument for anarchism, y'all. and if you are casually contemplating a worldstate as our inevitable future, just let it occur to you that that's sort of the end of philosophy and art.

according to the campaign's authorized twitter feed, this is jeb bush's official new theme, replacing bowie's 'space oddity.' he's using it as his walk-up song at every town hall, etc.

 

new slogan, in the ongoing rebrand: 'giving yourself to me can never be wrong.' or maybe it was 'thank you for your service.' desperation? either way, an intriguing development, as it were. if i had told you nine months ago, when he announced, that jeb bush would be simulating orgasm before tiny groups of voters in small-town diners and flinty new england congregational churches, you would have said yet again that i was insane. this is such an unpredictable year!

who i am

geez, when i tried to pitch a piece to the new york times with the headline what o.j. simpson taught me about being black, they rejected it, then turned around and gave it to mcwhorter. but really everything i know about being black i got from o.j.

safety first

like all americans i have one question above all: who, who will keep me safe? that's another reason the editorial board here at cheese it, the cops! endorsed jeb bush. jeb bush will keep us, the editorial board here at cheese it, the cops! safe as shit. when isis lands, we're going to hide behind jeb bush, taking shelter in the greatness of his soul. then as el-baghdadi and the boys bust in, we'll shove jeb toward the kalashnikovs and squeal 'take him!'