cheese it, the cops!

I'm going to read/footnote my column for SpliceToday every week on YouTube. I might go back and grab some of my favorites from the last few years as well.

 

some sad sad shit

what this theory of communication which everyone appears to share (that communication is manipulation or propaganda in every case) has led to politically is this: a completely incoherent set of political positions on which people seem to be unanimously agreed in their demographic. so, the whole left since marx has been dedicated to achieving egalitarianism through maximum inequality of power. marxism is the most extreme and insane version of this, but no egalitarian can consistently be a statist, bro. indeed, the whole american left will end up voting straightforwardly for oligarchy, motivated essentially by vilification and dehumanization of their opponents. 

on the other hand, watch the thrashing about right now about who is really a 'conservative' etc. now, is right-wing foreign policy militarist or isolationist? trump will run 'to hillary's left' on military interventions, etc. that doesn't mean anything, because 'right' and 'left' don't mean anything. do right-wingers want minimal government, or do they want laws telling people what bathroom to use (next: laws telling them how to poop, etc)? no idea bro, because 'the right' makes no sense.

every day i watch and am just stunned that people are throwing around these terms (left, right, progressive, conservative, etc) when they obviously have no idea of what they mean whatsoever. they don't even notice. that's because they are not trying to say or advocate the truth, but only to form up groups against one another. nothing could be more obvious, all the damn time. that is some sad sad shit.

another sentence we all say together

we are constantly barraged by information. more and more all the time. who can make sense of it all? 

this is one of those cliches that everyone spouts together for a few years. then they move on to something else. i sort of don't see how you utter sentences like that without being aware of your redundancy, or boring yourself to death. personally, i don't feel barraged by information. i like information, overall. and if i'm not in a mood to be informed, i just turn the thing off or stop reading or something. really, 700 channels is better than 3, but there's still nothing on. do you think people really experience this as a crisis of some sort? i'm trying to figure out how this might mess me up or even annoy me, really.

and actually, the world has always barraged each of us with infinitely more information, or things that might be experienced, than we can possibly take in. if the information doubles every week - somewhere in hard drives or on the net - how does that damage or bewilder or even affect me? i can't take in any more than i did last week, but i might possibly find something interesting by rummaging around if i'm in the mood. somehow instagram has to turn out to be a moral crisis, i guess.

spread your legs; here come da genius!

pico iyer in the times book review, arguing once again that geniuses are above the little moral rules or everyday decency that of course ought to govern others. the revival of this really quite stupid modernist hoohah is disturbing in a minor way, and you'd have to think that underlying it is iyer's justification for being an asshole to his kids tonight or whatever. one thing to notice: all the geniuses who transcend the petty irriatations of treating people decently in iyer's thing are men. also, let me just mention that in some cases the assholery may well be one of the main reasons we're thinking that someone is a genius: iyer obviously expects geniuses to be assholes, and it is but a slight shift to start regarding assholes as geniuses. so in virtue of what was steve jobs a genius? maybe writing all that great code and designing all those sleek devices? no that wasn't his role. his role was to be an asshole. oh, lucian freud was a disgusting human being who made disgusting and mindlessly overrated art. but he was a late-breaking modernist genius-asshole so it almost doesn't mater what the paintings look like as long as he was abusing people all day.

"All of us know — we almost expect — that an artist will use up everyone he meets in the hope that the payoff in the public sphere will make up for casualties in the private." wait, all of us know what? i almost fucking expect, excuse me? oh you know i've known some very good artists, writers, thinkers and stuff: do i figure they should be as vicious as they are good or something? i am dating a very good painter, for example. do i expect - or, like iyer's happy victims - want, to be used up, along with everyone else? christ why would i expect that? art is supposed to require casualties, like barrel bombs cause collateral damage, only why that should be is rather mysterious. but then you'll be able to recognize the geniuses by the scorched corpses in their wake. that makes it easier because, um, sometimes it's hard to tell from the work.

the moral impunity of artists is something we added circa 1860 and deleted circa 1960, but which people still yearn for: the genius as sadist, audience as masochist. it is a devastating reflection on the people who think this way, incompatible with even rudimentary good taste, for example. really, i do believe it has led to extreme critical mistakes, as when you fall in love with the persona of a picasso, a joyce, or a wittgenstein, and feel the glow of the morally exempt superhuman who lies behind it. then the objects take on a sadistic aura and you prostrate yourself before them (think of the women who had to be sacrificed to make hemingway's novels, or get picasso past the blue period! the casualties were worth it, though, because if picasso hadn't made women suffer, there would be no art. really this is the way this line of thought tends). this i believe makes it difficult to see the work clearly and place it plausibly into a normal human context which we might co-inhabit. the work, i have to say, is almost unbelievably disappointing relative to the standard, but even if it wasn't....

the worse you are, the better you write. i would like iyer to reflect on whether that is actually borne out in his experience, and i would suggest that he reflect on why he would want to believe something like that. according to iyer, the question of why great artists are fuckwads was already ancient when yeats asked it. i would like to see some evidence of that. in fact show me a clear example of anything of that sort before 1800 and i will be momentarily chastened.

this genius crap needs to be over, and iyer's piece is as good an argument for shooting geniuses on sight as for celebrating them as transhuman god-monsters. actual human beings produced these items, and no argument gets them out of the demand to treat people kindly, or try to keep their promises, or to not rape people, etc. i think you had better paint a lot lot better than freud to justify being freud, or really it doesn't matter how you paint. and insofar as iyer is saying  'i am exempt from decency because i am working on a novel', he is making an argument for pistol-whipping literary novelists, as if we needed another argument.

maybe other professions should take the philip roth-v.s.naipul approach: being an ethics professor isn't an ethics contest! i just had a good theory, but that required abusing 17 people. oops, sorry sweetie but i was out last night with two call girls and an ounce of blow, again. it is the demand of my work! but you will be happy to be a casualty. 

 

 

degenerations

oh perhaps i've done this a time or two before, but it strikes me that people may forget my stunning insights over time, or a new little knot of readers might have gathered. but anyway, this thing about generations - boomers, xers, yers, millennials, or whatever - is just slop. people reproduce continuously, not all at once every twenty years (though we might think about a law enforcing the latter, in order to help columnists write cultural trend pieces imitating other columnists' cultural trend pieces). you could start and stop generations anywhere you like, and we should try a re-jigger if only to get people to stop using these unmeaning yet profoundly annoying terms.

terrorism

more terrifying words have never been uttered than these: "produced by stephen spielberg and oprah winfrey". one thing such a collaboration is likely to achieve: a higher density of gaseous pseudo-wisdom and hyper-emotional cliches than was considered possible in such a small space. there's likely to be an explosion of banal proportions. i have no idea what the thing is about, but one thing i do know: it will teach each of us important moral lessons, touch us to the very depths of our superficial souls, and uplift us all for the umpteenth time into the very ether of Yacketysmackety.

English Comedian Awakens Me from Dogmatic Slumbers

 

Not so long ago, a buddy of mine named Eric Garland tweeted that he didn't think most of Thomas Piketty's critics had read the book. I responded by asking if he had just learned about the nonexistence of Santa Claus. Eric, a somewhat anarchical economic analyst and bass player responded with "No Santa? Next you'll say no confidence fariy." 

But, his ironic comment about the critics and Piketty makes a great point. If you're reading this blog, you probably recognize the name, and have an idea about what the guy has established as a position. Accrued wealth accrues more wealth faster than labor...or, rich people get rich faster than workers.This results in imbalance and is not a positive factor. But, sheesh, it's a thick book and most of it is review of research and a lot of it is boring stuff about calvados and cheese production in Normandy or something -- is there a Powerpoint adaptation? 

Last weekend, John Oliver ranted for 13 hilarious minutes on his new TV show, Last Week Tonight about the problem of boredom. We have the collective attention span of gerbils. So, if you want to sneak something by us, do so in the most boring possible way. In the Senate and the House, they can use their rules to safely put those of us not working n the capital to sleep-deprived fever dreams in no time. With bureaucratic things like Net Neutrality, they can do it with discussions of rules. 

I have Oliver's piece and my thoughts on the mess available here. Short form, they want us to trust the broadband industry to take care of our interests. Sure, trust the bureaucrats (did you know the guy running the FCC is the former chief lobbyist for the Cable industry??) and the lobbyists because...Benghazi? 

eeek!

more and more, i'm grooving on the way governments use the word 'terroriist'. e.g. the government of the ukraine, such as it is, is calling their largely hypothetical actions against russian separatists 'anti-terror operations'. oh, bashar assad is another who calls any disagreement with himself terrorism. i assume vlad putin is calling the gov of ukraine terrorists; he calls everyone a terrorist. i get the propaganda value, i suppose, though surely that is fading fast as the word loses all meaning, in the manner of words in the mouths of government officials from time immemorial. what they are showing, however, is that they regard any disagreement with themselves as terrifying, the little pussies. 

an inspiring leader

relentless tributes by all great americans to lyndon baines johnson. well, i do remember when he was president. voting rights are good. now, there were some little drawbacks: e.g. hundreds of thousands of people killed in vietnam; oh all the regions defoliated with agent orange, the napalmed villages, the utterly indiscriminate bombing, the constant lies lies lies about what was happening, indeed the big lie to get us in in the first place. how many black guys killed or wounded in a war fought for no discernible reason, which ended in complete defeat? maybe he should have fought for the voting rights of corpses. 

 

somewhat wrong, very wrong, and extremely wrong

i watched a bunch of the last day of cpac. now i want to consider this "nuanced analysis", attributed by dan balz to henry olsen, who distinguishes four factions of the republican party: somewhat conservative, very conservative, moderates, and liberals. i say this is a perfect example of what i call "spectrum blindness": you can't see anything about anything if it has to fall on the left-right spectrum. so, rand paul, who killed the straw poll, is a severe peacenik, screamingly anti-nsa, and more or less sympathetic to gay marriage and marijuana legalization. but he's anti-welfare-state in a big way, and will start by savaging government spending. sarah palin who finished the whole thing up with a masterful if substanceless stand-up routine howled small government throughout, except for the part where she was extremely about increasing military and intelligence spending. rather a silly juxtaposition. there was a lot of anti-immigrant talk, and jesus and "pro-family" (=anti-gay) stuff came from a number of speakers. then you have heldover bushy national-security state pure huge gov hawks. now when you try to range these extremely incompatible positions by which is very and which is somewhat conservative it obviously makes no sense, and these factions are more incompatible with one another than with the obama they all hate. so, you've got to go: libertarians; neo-cons or military-security hawks; religious/social reactionairies; and chimerae such as palin. it's amazing that people can keep going 'sorta right, right, very right' when it just obviously has nothing to do with reality. who's further right: palin or paul? dan balz has no more idea than anyone else, really.

blurbological bravery

here's a blurb (from an ad in the times literary supplement).

George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America - written in a language that mimics the speech of the time - can hold the attention of 21st century readers.

---Paul Auster

george minkoff could have jumped on a grenade or something, but instead he sat with a computer on his lap, typing. if only he'd chosen the grenade. i'm not too impressed with the searing honesty and transcendent courage of memoirists revealing their promiscuity, drug abuse, and low self-esteem either; it's a thin line between unbelievable physical courage and compulsive exhibitionism, and maybe after the millionth person does it in a herd the risks have been reduced. it takes supernatural courage to compose a sestina, in this day and age, or a bold new cookbook. 'like diana nyad paddling about among the sharks, hayley mchale wrote semi-sweet sex and hot chocolate without securing an advance'.

lies lies lies

also, if you have any tendency to be satisfied with obama etc's reassurances about all the limits and warrants that are supposedly in place, you have really lost your mind. how many times do people have to lie, evade, distort, before you stop believing them? it's their job to lie: it's their sworn oath to lie by their own account; by their own definitions, it is treason not to lie. they're currently lying about the fact that they were lying to you before. and yet you take them seriously.

i think one thing everyone in our society needs to reflect on: you're going to take james clapper or barack obama seriously because they're wearing suits and have positions of great authority. it doesn't matter, for example, that they have excruciatingly obvious motivations to lie. then you have snowden, and people just hammer: 29! all alone! high school dropout! but no one has seriously doubted the truth of what he's revealing. he has some sort of principles or commitment to freedom; they have no commitment to anything but power. snowden's commitment is incredibly obvious: he is saying the things he's saying at tremendous cost to himself. obama etc are lying to an ever-self-aggrandizing effect, to preserve and conceal their own power. barack obama - this is completely obvious to anyone with a shred of rationality - has no credibility whatever on anything when speaking qua pres; the only things the words of someone like that are intended to do is manipulate you; seriously, obviously, sentence by sentence. in your heart, you know this to be true. obama's access to truth is corrupted entirely by power. snowden has as much credibility as a human being can reasonably have.

officials from the dmv to the pres do not even really purport to be speaking as or for themselves; they are spokesmen for organizations. so severe is the situation that the question of sincerity does not even arise; you're simply representing what you take to be the position of a bureaucracy; you would even excuse yourself for lying or for saying things that are deeply opposed to your own beliefs. indeed, you might take it to be your duty to express whatever it is you're expressing as fake-sincerely as possible, all the while believing it to be false. well, that's your job. but what is truly shocking is that people believe you anyway; people think you have more credibility than a person who speaks passionately for himself. 

29 and all alone actually does confer some credibility; eminent head of a bureaucracy: no credibility whatever: every sentence a mere strategy. 

this is an example of an extreme problem: most people think power confers credibility. this is a mindless capitulation and extreme expression of irrationality. it sort of hints at the direction our species will take to extinction. milllions upon millions of people have already died because we tend to give epistemic authority to people who operate coercive power, because they operate coercive power. it's a straight-up epistemic illness.