cheese it, the cops!

unify, my people

my case should unite anarchists and tea partiers. they always should have been united. so perhaps, left anarchists, you think the advocacy of gun rights in country music is disgusting. well, over and over, the gun is wielded in country music and elsewhere in rural rightwingy culture, as a symbol of resistance to state power. maybe you favor black brigades rolling with rocks and molotov cocktail, but the damn impulse is the same, and even the motivation: the way people are being dominated and impoverished. so get over your little demographic fealty and reach across.

 

 

 

 

gun rights

honestly, i am conflicted about gun control, though of course it is incompatible with my basic political orientation. but it's hard not to take the slaughter of schoolchildren seriously, for example. however, yang li expresses the reasons i am against it with great clarity and credibility, for example on yesterday's 'the story' (a public radio show). he was an activist in china in the tiananmen square era. like, say eastern european emigres of another era, he learned and earned his suspicion of state power the hard way.

democratize the drone

i don't think the average person needs an assault weapon anymore; basically, it's useless in self-defense. but it's completely obvious that every american citizen needs access to predator drone technology. this is especially true, i feel, in the dc suburbs, where every teenager and every grandma and every small business owner needs whatever would enable her to detect and knock down incoming assassination attempts; monitor the white house, the pentagon, langley and so on; and, if necessary, put missiles through the windows of these facilities. my legal counsel, john yoo, gives me, and all of us, full legal authority under international law to act to preserve the homeland, but only if there are significant barriers to capturing and detaining the people who work at the white house, cia heaquarters, and the pentagon, and only if one determines that those people constitute an imminent threat, which on the prospective targets' own account they certainly do. i like, say, the  chris matthews approach: these insane gun nuts and survivalists think they might be attacked by our own government! have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? well yeah i read it once in a memo somewhere. cheese it, the cops! has sworn a sacred oath to protect the american people.

biden and nickel mines

even i like joe biden, and i sort of regret very strong words i've used, such as 'buffoon' and 'charlatan.' that was too much i think. and i think he makes a good contrasting pair with obama, as in eddie murphy and nick nolte in 48 hours, although here the white guy carries the burden of the comedy. however, this is completely typical. on a generous reading he's just so exhuberant and enthusiastic that he loses track of the truth part. well, that could be pretty organically connected to the what's good. only i would definitely fact-check every claim.

if we can save one life

one line that obama was pushing again today was 'if we can save one life...' now, that registers something people believe: our lives and the lives of people we love are of more or less infinite value to us: transcendent value. it gets a little less compelling when it's somebody's life somewhere sometime in the future, but even there we want to express that lives are more important than, say, tax expenditures, or a hassle. but however you just cannot use this as a reasonable principle. there are a million ways you could save a life, especially if you were permitted to achieve them through repression or to undertake any degree of expense. (repression is, in fact, always precisely the proposal.) at any rate, ban the automobile. require each person to wear kevlar. completely isolate people when they have communicable diseases. intern males universally between the ages of 15 and 35. make living wills illegal. ban farming, one of the more dangerous professions. lace the drinking water with ssri's. etc etc.

universal repression is a small price to pay

i wish there was some response to newtown that wasn't merely: suspend the constitution. repress. censor. intern. blame quentin tarantino. indeed, in our current cultural/political climate, no one has any ideas about methods for accomplishing anything at all except to make people less free. this is why, just as progressives believe, the future is unimaginable except as ever-more extreme state domination of every aspect of everyone's life. that's all y'all really want out of life, i see. and i agree, you're gonna get it. you really do understand history.

just a note: were i quentin tarantino, and my name was connected to the mass murder of schoolchildren by hundreds of commentators, for weeks on end, in virtue of the fact that i just made an excellent work of art, i would, as he is, be gettin kind of pissy.

one gambit i love about the anti-free-expression approach: 'by the time a kid turns 18, he's witnessed thousands of murders.' or: 'in these games, a kid marches through a landscape, murdering dozens of people.' well now this seems a bit confused, unless actual people are made of pixels. or: studies show that these games have an 'arousing' effect. gee really? if not, nobody would play. that's the 'entertainment' effect. i'd like to see a careful account of what 'desensitization' is or what effects it might have. now, i don't think kids playing video games are confused as between real persons and pictures of persons, but obviously the experts and commentators are. perhaps they can't imagine that everyone isn't as confused - or perhaps the word i'm looking for is 'delusional' - as they are.

call me back when you've said something

this column by charles blow is ridiculous. first of all, it's just an exercise in manipulation and propaganda. "extremist extremist extremist': it doesn't engage the opponents or characterize anything about their positions; merely hurls insults at them, in an attempt to join a bunch of people together into a gantlet to spit on, dehumanize, and degrade their enemies. it's amazing that people who, say, could endorse the occupy movement, just uncritically use words like 'revolutionary' in a completely pejorative sense. as soon as your people get power, everyone does the same thing: our noble protests have won the day, and now disagreeing with us is illegal. sentence after sentence is quotation from hundreds of other columns by hundreds of other columnists: blow can't even write his own shit, despite the fact that he has been entirely liberated from cognitive or empirical content.

this, let's say, is the difference between individualism and collectivism as applied to op-ed columns: blow's column was written by a vast committee of people whose collective identity is founded on (1) hatred of their enemies, and (2) sentences that they all chant in the same order. the first move in establishing a collective consciousness is to stop thinking or trying to formulate ideas on your own. just kind of look sideways at what the folks around you are saying, and say it too, even if you're a bit late. for us all to flow together like the waters, each of us will have to be submerged. for us all (or at least, or rather necessarily, everyone except the Enemy) to become one thing, each of us must cease to be anything. i hope charles blow's people have celebrated his annihilation/expansion, as he has become one with all that is, or at least with his portion of the political spectrum.

one slight loss connected with the emergence of collective consciousness is that the voice of all us is very non-distinctive, as it has to be. well, art is going to be impossible in these conditions. they're incompatible with any sort of stylish or distinctive prose. that is a small price to pay for the ecstasy of unity, however.

i just might say: it's amazing what people say about white guys these days. if you tried that with any other group, the pc police would tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. stereotypes, profiling, a string of sheer generalized insults hurled at the group: all acceptable in this case. there are some reasons for that, of course. that doesn't make the structure of thought plausible or decent. 'thought,' however, might be inapt: the idea is to find a slogan or a word and then recite together like maoist schoolchildren.

really, i think that the idea of collective consciousness is basically a fiction or a simulation. but it is a fiction that has to be enforced by myriad social pressures and, as its real enthusiasts have known, if not said, by pervasive coercion. and i do think that you cannot have even the simulation of a collective consciousness that does not rest fundamentally on exclusions; our unity is proportional to our hatred, and there are just no clearer examples of that than the approach of people like blow, in fact just exactly like blow or indistinguishable from him. if someday he condemns partisanship or says all americans need to pull together, just snicker.  

the favorite trope of leftists these days is condemning 'individualism,' which is self-evidently the essence of evil. but they need in the process to square up to the various dark sides of their own position, for example that solidarity is proportional to extrusion. we're all in this together, and that's why these monsters among us with the incomprehensible temerity to disagree with me must be silenced and exiled. this is completely obvious from their own expressions of their own positions: their plea for togetherness starts by attacking as evil idiots anyone who disagrees or who resists complete incorporation.

bad reactions

hate to say it, but when the admin's gun control initiative turns from study toward action, and in particular if obama proceeds in any respect by executive order, there will be a survivalist/right-wing/paranoid/ammo hoarding reaction; i would expect some scary shit. this is one reason to proceed somewhat carefully (remember, i'm leaving the gun control to you); if there is a hint of confiscation, bad reactions from pockets of rural america can be predicted. i wish i could explain the point of view of folks like that to you in a way you'd understand, if you don't feel you do. the line of thought is pretty foreign to the urban professional. and yet it is not less coherent or comprehensible than any given far-leftism.