ICE ran fake university in Michigan. The claim that 'no one is above the law' can't endure a moment's honest scrutiny. It is impossible not to exempt the authorities from the laws they enforce. Here, it's laws against fraud. If you arrested all the ICE people involved and charged them with fraud, on what grounds other than 'We're exempt from the laws' could they claim innocence? That's a decent definition of a government: people who are to one extent or another, or in the performance of their official functions, exempt from the laws they enforce: against theft, kidnapping, killing people (in war), etc.. No advocate of the rule of law can, consistently with that position, not be an anarchist. Chew on that.
As I keep saying, people's commitment to the various arguments for and pictures of state legitimacy just steamrollers their rationality. Like you can blandly or inspiringly go 'rule of law' all day, but only by ignoring the roiling contradictions underneath, which are under your nose. It's not about what's true or what makes sense, it's about what people need to believe and what they want other people to believe, in order to control them. Before you head down this road (or down the road of social contract theory, for example), just acknowledge that the apparent appeal to reason, Enlightenment values, and so on, is not at all where this is actually coming from.
the guardian, among others, is insisting on interpreting trump's banter as a threat of assassination. but meanwhile this is a hell of a story: assange hints that murdered dnc staffer was the source of the leaks. if so, obviously the murder is an issue, though who knows? and also, if he was the leaker, what was all this crap about the russians? definitely taking on that scandal/house of cards flavor. the first thing one would wonder is whether seth rich was a sanders supporter: that would be motivation for the leak. obviously, all is speculation at this point, but it does have that might-blow-sky-high smell right now. this could be the wildest presidential campaign in us history.
people seem to think i buried the lead, even though this is not what i think is most important. so here is bunch from late in the post below, also now expanded yet again.
you know, i sat in an american society for aesthetics session and literally listened to someone, jim carney, read back a paper i wrote and sent him a couple of months before. i just talked to him outside; he purported to have a neurological disorder. you know when something like that happens, it strikes you that if you just happened to hear that there might be others. never tried to check. here's what i told myself: i've got plenty to go around, and i am opposed to intellectual property (although definitely not opposed to crediting your sources, particularly if one of those sources is the author of your paper). i think i actually emailed semi-politely with carney after that. after a couple he asked me what i was working on, would i send it along? he promised, not this time! neurological disorder! ever since then, the asa has been consistently rejecting my papers or any panel i was associated with. odd, when at least in my opinion i have done as much and as good aesthetics as anyone.
alexander nehamas was also a friend of danto's. our books on beauty have the same epigraph, i'm assuming (well, sort of hoping) that he gave it to us both. nehamas writes to revive a more erotic, desire-based conception of beauty, just precisely what i had done for routledge 5 years before, without the elitist obfuscation and excruciating taste. also infinitely less pretentiously and more beautifully. i found this out the hard way when i ordered the thing sight unseen (i think on danto's recommendation) for my beauty course. oh yeah we both published books titled the art of living. let me see if i get this right? mine was 1993 from suny after going through several publishers. his was 2000 from harvard (oops i checked it: california, as low as alexander nehamas ever sank on the publishing pecking order), ecstatically received. let me see, what is his academic position? he does read greek, though. i had concluded long before his book appeared that 'the art of living' was a lame title, so go for it, man. go try to find a single review of mine, though. wrong publisher? definitely, but thank the good lord for suny press. in mine, i actually gave a new theory of art. now it needed some refinements, but it got the spirit of what art is.
another thing i'll add to the nehamas case: the position was definitely not danto's, had hardly been part of the literature since burke. suddenly there it was twice. i am an expert on that. now i'm thinking i should take each sentence of that stanford article and put it into jstor and see what comes back. but however, i don't really care that much! i think i actually literally threw the thing away, but i don't think i was in the index, which is just insane. i do wonder whether only a promise of happiness won any awards? you could xerox them and send them on. i will whiteout his name and put my own, and comfort myself with them.
oh yes, just for the hell of it, i invented the swamping problem - which, i'm told, is one of the major problems of contemporary epistemology and also a decisive refutation of reliabilism - in cargile's epistemology seminar in 1987. the first thing i did with it was refute reliabilism. i think that one's in a box under my house. B+ dude. are you beginning to get the picture? i couldn't get the book in which i did that, which would have been my first book, published, put it on amazon decades later. at publisher after publisher they sent it to the people who had already laughingly, with such bad arguments, slapped me down. right. william lycan. that's when i quit epistemology. i tried to catch up a bit. i think the swamping problem revolutionized epistemology when linda zagzebski invented it in the late nineties. i am in the footnotes. very same paper. but not in the swamping bit.
zagzebski's discussion is remarkably close recapitulation of mine, including the very same quotes trimmed the very same way. and she does footnote my paper, almost randomly: 'one person who denies this is.' but then it is completely palpable that her own presentation is a raw recapitulation of mine. and she has gotten credit for the swamping problem for all this time. looking at it squarely, it's pretty bold, obvious academic misconduct.
i will also say this: in some sense the swamping problem was my central contribution to epistemology, one of the best ideas i ever had. it turned out to be a major contribution to epistemology. but it has been credited entirely to zagzebski. the movement to the style of theory of beauty in 6 names of beauty is certainly, in my mind, my central contribution to aesthetics. nehamas has been extremely widely celebrated for it; myself far less so. that will tick a professor off! and then to se it happen with different figures, different disciplines: it really makes you wonder what else is out there. and it really drives you to despair, actually.
by that time, i guess, i was so dead in academic philosophy that people just felt free. well, nature needs carrion feeders, too. i comfort myself with the fact that i am a much better writer than nehamas or zagzebski, which admittedly is like saying you're taller than marco rubio. not carney, though. we are equals. what happens when in an exploratory way you email alexander nehamas or linda zagzebski, both saying and not saying you are biting me. we should connect! our work is so similar! we work on the same issues! well, i'm not sure exactly what happens; i only know you will never get a reply.
the purpose of this entry was not to level accusations. but now it is. so i will begin the documentation project. to begin with i am talking about these two papers:
here is one extremely telling moment. in quite the same discussion, at quite the same point, we quote bonjour. her:
The basic role of justification is that of a means to truth, a more directly attainable mediating link between our subjective starting point and our objective goal. . . .If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. (BonJour 1985, 7–8)14
me:
If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. (ibid. p. 8)
she's quoting bonjour, not me. but this just makes it obvious, alright? i quoted the same passage in my very first published presentation in american philosophical quarterly, april 1991, making the very same argument. any philosopher will see that part. i use it almost casually to attack reliabilsm on page 162. it is a decisive refutation of reliabilism; only i have ever recognized that until zabgzebski put her name on it. i had much more, even liable to be in the unpublished book. many other resemblances will appear if you look at the papers. keep in mind publications, dates, etc.
let me address to you a question: how does a profession publish an article in arguably its top journal, then a raw plagiarism of it in metaphilosophy and no one sees it? tip of an infinite iceberg? y'all don't seem particularly attentive. how can i be discovering this a quarter century later?
these same big names who regarded my work as ridiculous regarded hers as revolutionary. take a searching and fearless moral inventory is my advice to your. scholarly too. where was robert audi? where was paul moser? where the fuck was laurence bonjour, alvin goldman? i was sure under the impression they were reading everything in this area at the time. they were trying to project that about themselves when they all gathered in a single room at the apa and put me down forever, after which this idiotic knowledge is merely true belief thing was over. they didn't even notice that i won the argument. there should be reparations, like when you wrongly condemn a man to life imprisonment. over and over and over (see entry below).
i hate to say it, i think a lot of her work rests on this argument. it is absolutely my argument. perhaps i'll let other people evaluate later papers? or even this one, more thoroughly if they need to. in a way i can hardly bear to read it. this is enough, it seems to me.
i'm taking back what i said earlier about not a clear case of plagiarism.
i took these one by one at the time, just kind of decided not to let shit like this obsess me and turn me from the next project. but looking at it all together (there might be some more questionable cases in my mind), it is rather disturbing. obviously what i'm saying about nehamas and zagzebski is right there on the surface; it hardly needs any documentation. (well, i would have to show that my paper does indeed formulate the swamping problem. best procedure: read it.) the nehamas does not constitute straightforward plagiarism. it is possible (to my mind, barely possible) that it constitutes a striking set of coincidences. the carney would be a bit harder. maybe i have old discs with the emails, or maybe there's a recording of the session. i certainly talked a lot to people about that there. i think danto? one context or another for sure. no help. i think arnold berleant? (we both eventually got purged from the asa as insufficiently kantian.) plus jim carney was never worth a big hassle in any respect.
and look i never went and tried to find out what was out there, though some things hit you between the eyes. for one reason or another, such things might make you never go to a conference again, like you don't know who you might see and how it might go from there. sadly i am no necro. there definitely are plenty of other reasons not to go to conferences, though, like that all the people hate you and despise your work.
on the other hand, i should be proud to add my talent to the collective. i have been a resource for some of the most eminent philosophers in the world; seems like they might sort of be impossible without me. it's like being kant in the 19th century. footnotes would help, though.
note to the apa. the thing that actually got me to just decide to quit academia was the anti-bullying thing. and that was what made me decide to write the entry below, which began to expand into this. i think you may see what bullying really is pretty quick.
if i were going to speculate on why murder rates fluctuate, and why they're climbing, i would focus primarily on the epidemiology of addiction, which is extremely complex ('multifactorial') and in some ways mysterious. the h is back in town, baby.
what the control-the-symbols approach to racial healing has accomplished here is more or less what it always accomplishes: it transforms the repressed symbol into a supernatural weapon. people really do think that you could assault people at a distance, perhaps hundreds of people at once, just by waving some rag around. that is, you've given your enemies super-powers.
while everyone is speculating, i'll pitch in on flight 370: it's a d.b. cooper scenario, baby. enrich and ditch, then let the plane fly on into mysterious immortality. so i'd wonder if there was something extremely valuable on that plane, and look for them hopping out as they came back over the peninsula. now as to whether you can jump out of a 777: dunno!
they're treating the 9-year-old stowaway case like it's a security crisis. i prefer to think of it as fun and amusing.
jay carney, expressing obama's disappointment that boehner would not permit his entire caucus to go to the white house: 'the president wanted to talk to the people who forced this economic crisis on the country.' look can't you stop the partisan reflex for ten goddamn seconds? why don't you at least act as though you do actually want to talk to them and not just rant at them or use them to to score points? right, false equivalences banned. but it's just amazing how autonomic the partisanship is, how impossible it for obama or his opponents to lay it aside even for a single sentence. is there anything in anyone's head at all except the desire to manipulate their listeners? it's all 'framing' and strategies born in communications programs. they focus-grouped the frame of the shutdaown as an economic crisis; now it'll be in every sentence. if i were actually sitting around with barack i'd ask him this: look back on the moment you declared your candidacy for president: what would that person say about the way barack obama conducts himself now?
miriam carey, along with the bizarre notion that the government was monitoring her communications, was subject also to the delusion that obama was talking to her. i feel like that too. lord, that dude's voice has been all over the television and radio for frigging years on end. it's coming out of the furniture or at least the appliances in my living room, and, since i installed the brackets, out of the very walls. my car talks to me every so often in barack obama's voice, when it's not tuned to the country station. i hear barack obama's voice in my dreams, singing light opera and reciting my to-do list.
they're describing the dc drivetime woman as 'delusional', on the grounds that she believed the government had her under surveillance. but i will express my appreciation of our heroic first responders, capitol police, and everyone that helps turn dc into an armed and surveiled camp, a fucking beacon of democracy. with only automatic weapons, body armor, armored vehicles, and so on, they managed eventually to stop an unarmed dental hygienist and her toddler from assaulting the government of the united states. and yet the tea partiers don't think they should be paid!
they finally took her out in front of the botanical gardens, which eventually will be getting a historical plaque as the site of my first acid trip. looking back on that event, i'm glad it didn't include any rogue luxury cars or automatic-weapons fire, though i did see some pretty weird shit.
sorry, but whether george zimmerman murdered trayvon martin does not depend on the history of race relations in america. it depends on what actually happened specifically there, that night, who jumped on whom, etc., as the correct verdict depends on what can be proven about that. also excuse me but is george zimmerman a white person? i think the whole reading of the case depends on making george zimmerman an honorary white dude or ignoring all racial complexities except a single dualism which has no place for a latino dude with a jewish surname, or whatever it may be. but surely his guilt can't float with the question of what racial group you can assign him to, if any. i heard black philosophy profs holding forth on this one time, and their view was that zimmerman 'identified' with white people, etc. i don't know: sending an actual person to jail for decades on the basis of general racial symbolism or sheer fantasies about their twisted inner life is just not the way to conduct a trial, and is no way to form actual opinions about specific events. for actually determining an individual's guilt or innocence with regard to a particular crime, it's no better than figuring someone must be guilty because he's black.
from this week's rappahannock news (from little washington, va, where i'm hanging with my ma).
To the Editor:
I would like to express my deepest gratitude and thanks to all my family members, therapist, friends, employers and supporters in the community during this difficult time. As all of you know by now by reading the Rappahannock News on a weekly basis, I made some bad decisions, for which I take full responsibility.
I am glad that the attention is focused on me, as I am sure I am the only one in this county who has ever made a mistake. As someone once said, 'There are two sides to every story.' That statement is very true, except that I have not had the opportunity to tell my side. I am very lucky to have so many people who love and support me and I can't thank you enough. Thank you for the phone calls, cards, emails to my family, books sent and money.
I have taken full responsibility for my actions, so those of you who continue to gossip at the 211 Quicke Mart, or with co-workers, etc., really need to attend to your own problems and stay out of mine! This ordeal has done nothing but make me a stronger, better person that I have ever been.
what's encouraging about this wave of terrorism is the whole slapstick quality, both of the perpetrators and the heroic first responders, the relentless all-too-human flamboyant mediocrity of it all, hedged about by a relentless hyperbolic rhetoric of earnesteness and non sequitur super-americanism. boston strong, son. next time be ready with a better writer for your sticker. that's basic preparedness.
anyway, the tsarnaev brothers, in their carjacked vehicle, improvise in collaboration with the car's owner a plan to bomb times square. later, they're chucking large exploding items of cookware out the window of the car at the cops and sort of getting away. finally, all the police in the world are searching watertown mass, overlooking for many hours the poor little wounded chump shivering in the boat two blocks away as they chase various vehicles hither and thither throughout the metro area. they pull him out of the boat in a fallujah-style fully armoured and mechanized mega-assault, disabling him with robots and percussion devices before unleashing a hail of automatic-weapons fire, somehow leaving him alive. dzokhar tsarnaev, like so many of us, no doubt owes his life to the incompetence of others, whose courage has made them heroes.
meanwhile, the ricin lame-attempt-to-assassinate-everybody case has broken down into an academic super bowl, a world chess championship of sheer white trash douchebaggery, pitting the elvis impersonator against the child molester. first they charged the elvis impersonator, which i could have told them was futile, as he was obviously framed by the envious child molester, who's also a martial arts entrepreneur and politician. the latter gentleman now appears to have absconded (?), which would be outstanding and remarkable. where is h.l. mencken in this golden age?
8:15 bolo on a dark-skinned individual in a black hoodie. if anyone sees anything like that, shoot to kill. dude. it's trayvon martin. while you're at it, intern all white male loners.
7:25 sources tell me that the winklevoss twins are under suspicion. those fuckers hate america.
6:12 or wait. of course. it's a coup by ben bernanke.
6:00 PM obviously, the obama administration staged the explosions in boston so they could declare martial law and fully implement nationalized healthcare. no doubt they justify this to themselves with the fact that they'll be able to offer treatment to the victims of their own dastardly crimes!!
be sure to listen for anagrams and codes in the president's statement.
before i do this, let me remark that i am an opponent of murder. ok: whomever is killing prosecutors in texas and possibly prison chiefs in colorado, is - despite some conspicuous moral flaws - an unprecedented badass. after you kill your first prosecutor in texas, you'll have an extreme manhunt on your ass. then if you kill the prosecutor that called you scum and promised to hunt you down - and who of course is aware, like the rest of the law enforcement community, that you might try to kill him - you're in a situation in which there are thousands of heavily armed men with unlimited resources trying to keeel you. maybe this person will be caught tomorrow. but she (i'm speculating that it's a woman, possibly a lingerie model) hasn't been caught yet. in my opinion, this might teach even texas lawmen something about extreme bluster: do it, then brag about it, not the other way round.
as you have possibly noticed, i often rag on the new york times, roughly on the grounds of the boringness and extreme safety-consciousness of the opinion pages. however, i am often impressed by and grateful for the reporting, such as the stories last year that exposed the chinese state as a mega-scale kleptocracy. the idea that they're invading the times's computers is insufferable, and i wouldn't be waiting for the american gov to do anything about it. did i have any influence on the world's hackers, i'd recommend total invasion. wikileak anything that might be interesting and defoliate the rest with mutant stuxnet. leave nothing but a smoking crater. i want to hear wen jibao wimpering like a smacked dog. i very much hope google is working secretly on this.
and of course wherever you live, remember to trust your government. chris matthews and paul krugman do!
She started a fire in a bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. When death did not come quickly enough, she went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. For extra measure, she slit her wrists.
Stereo speaker wire was her final weapon of choice. She took a length of it back upstairs, lowered an attic ladder and hanged herself from it.
most people kind of kill themselves with a whimper of sadness; she assaulted herself repeatedly in a total rage.
i speculate that the folks who knocked over that dutch museum are art-rights extremists who are trying to free all the works of art that are imprisoned in museums. how can i help? let my paintings go. we need to bring the art back into the world and stop locking it up behind layers of bulletproof glass and impregnable marble. also, while i'm at it, stop pretending to like picasso.
defacing art as itself art: well, not new, but exploring new problems in aesthetic criminality. i'd have to say that much of modernism and post-modernism has been dedicated to iconoclasm of one sort or another.even the basic move to abstraction has that element. but hostility toward art is a basic element of, say, dada, pop, conceptualism, jeff koons. or we might ponder rauschenberg's "erased de kooning":
smith & wesson executives must be mortified that their ar-15 jammed.
July 22, 2012
a tribute too all the empty instant explanations, via greatest hit, philly inquirer 2001:
I Was a Disgruntled Male Loner
"FBI believes angry male loner sent anthrax letters." When I saw that headline, I assumed that there was an actual suspect, but what they have in custody is a profile, developed by forensic specialists.
Now the FBI meant this announcement to be reassuring, to show that they're all over the case. But it had exactly the opposite effect: it made it clear that they haven't been able to do a damn thing, though I guess we can now eliminate your mom and the Dalai Lama.
FBI "behaviorist" Jim Fitzgerald said he hoped members of the public might recognize these characteristics and give the bureau some leads. But to be honest, most of the people I know are disgruntled male loners. Come to that, I am myself an disgruntled male loner. Consider that a tip, Jim.
Possibly it is time to stop interning Arabs and start interning disgruntled male loners. We'll set up a network of camps where loners can be gruntled. We'll have a bowling league and a drum circle.
The disgruntled male loner has truly become an icon of American culture. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, yet it seems that assassins and terrorists such as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Lee Harvey Oswald, Tim McVeigh and so on were all disgruntled. On the other hand, our heroes - such as the characters played by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne - are also disgruntled male loners. We love our disgruntled male loners, yet we fear them too.
It's so damn hard being a disgruntled male loner these days. We receive mixed messages from the media, which disgruntles us further. We used to be admired, even venerated, but in the post-September 11 world, our heroes aren't cowboys, but friendly, well-adjusted bureaucrats.
Profiling is an interesting business. It consists in reading character from its effects, inferring who someone is by what they do. In fact, we're all profilers. To figure out who people are, all we have to go on is what they do.
A character in a play by Moliere, asked why opium makes people sleepy, says with a grandly scientific air that it has a sleep-inducing property. To say that someone is angry isn't much of an explanation for their violent behavior: rather their violent behavior is the explanation for our attribution to them of anger.
In the FBI profile, the "male" part comes from the fact that most people who send threatening mail are men. According to these experts, the perp probably also has "some scientific background." I'm hoping that the bureau didn't actually use my tax dollars to pay someone to tell them that the person who did this was angry
When we infer a personality with as little specificity as that attributed by the FBI to the bioterrorist, it seems evident that we are dealing with a ghost, a mere abstract postulate. When you're dealing with your best friend, the ghost in the machine seems more vivid, but it's no less an artifact of imagination.
Even our sense of ourselves is more or less an inference from our own behavior, and an inference from what other people infer about our behavior.
The FBI might believe that they are piecing together "who" the perpetrator is. But all they're doing is restating the information we all have in slightly different terms. We are all skilled at this kind of paraphrase, and any of us could have done as well with less information.
Let me see: the perp is not an Al Gore supporter. He's liable to be over ten years old and to have at some time been in the state of New Jersey. He has a conflicted relationship with his Dad. He's not a tee-ball coach or a member of the Loyal Order of Moose. He isn't a very good ballroom dancer. He's resentful. He's unhappy. He's not much of a talker. He's not on anti-depressants, or if he is, he needs his medication adjusted. It's unlikely that he's a native of New Guinea; after all, most people aren't. He's not regarded as sensitive. Women have treated him badly. He probably does not like opera.
If you know this person, call your local FBI field office.
if i was a political advisor to obama, i would have advised against asserting 'executive privilege' in the face of congressional subpoena in issa's investigation into 'fast and furious.' well, i would unless the documents were extraordinarily embarrassing. and that in itself shows the problem: by saying you're willing to go all the way to a constitutional confrontation, you are indicating that there's something big there that you don't want people to know. well, it could be some quasi-legit law-enforcement info, but what the subpoena focuses on is the decisions the justice department took in investigating the matter. but this reaction makes the whole thing a much bigger story, blows it up like mad. btw, "fast and furious" and "fast five" (starring vin diesel and the rock) are really pretty great dude movies, with the intervening sequels a mixed bag.
One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.
Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano.
Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally.
Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL? The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown.
Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty.
Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!
Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it.
Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself!
Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself.
Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!
Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.
Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!
Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"
Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.
This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:
Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.
I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...
Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel.
My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad.
Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...
DENVER—A former Colorado lawman who was once named the nation's sheriff of the year was charged Friday with drug and prostitution offenses after authorities said he offered methamphetamine to a man in exchange for sex.
Patrick Sullivan Jr., 68, was being held on $500,000 bond in an isolation cell at a jail named in his honor in suburban Denver. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said current or former law enforcement officials are usually kept from the general inmate population for their safety at the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.
Prosecutors charged Sullivan with felony distribution, possession of meth as well as a misdemeanor charge of soliciting prostitution. Authorities say he offered methamphetamine in exchange for sex from a male acquaintance in a sting set up by officers with a drug task force.
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