cheese it, the cops!

no future for you

this is a recurring nightmare. tom frigging friedman is still insisting that you compare your toddler to finnish and chinese toddlers, as though that means anything. and now you can! in the technocratic dystopia manufactured by, say, al gore, or friedman, or arne duncan, children are the merest commodities, manufactured by and for global capitalism. the only question is: how can they - and here this means every single child anywhere in the world - be manufactured as uniform product, and rendered maximally profitable to people with economic and political power?  i've certainly whined about this many times, but let me point out a couple of things: if you are a parent, and you think it's relevant to your relationship with your child, or relevant to your child's life, that her school compares poorly on standardized tests with some school in helsinki or sichuan, i think your child should be removed from your custody and given to a human parent. these ass-monkeys seem to be internationalists, but they are screeching economic nationalists: all that matters in the argument is the american economy in comparison with that of other nations, which we have to out-compete. and their vision of anyone's economy is a nightmare. they seriously, literally are intent on enslaving children to the vision of multi-national corporations and nation-states. the collision of extreme nationalism and internationalism is just one of many dimensions in which the position is riddled with demented contradictions. the bland reasonableness is a millimeter-thick surface over the real roiling evil. their vision of the world, and their vision of childhood, is a horror, and to some extent they have succeeded in implementing it. their envisioned totalitarian future of capitalist automatism is worse than no future at all, worse than species annihilation.

loving and hating new orleans

greetings from nola. here's a column i wrote last time i was down here, the mardi gras after katrina. with regard to the writer who declared that this is where she forgot the best moments of her life, i said that 'forgetting must always make you wonder whether regret is in order': that was perhaps too optimistic, because some folks are incapable of regret. one drawback of such people is that they are dangerous to themselves and others, because they will never undergo any moral development, or be better than they are now, which i would say it's obvious that they need to be. regret is a necessary condition of conscience, and not having any is really a kind or symptom or a mild case of psychopathy; the whole idea is to release yourself to do wrong or be disgusting or stupid, forever. i was negotiating my way back to the hotel through such people last night as they stumbled about swallowing ever-more alcohol and bellowing, or passed out in the alley puking, or tried to make out with strangers. these are, no doubt, the best moments of their lives.

on the other hand i had an amazing meal yesterday, and passed dr. john moving around with a cane on the outskirts of the quarter. everybody calls you 'baby' and makes you feel good just for being alive. the art that came and comes out of this place has changed the world. there is no doubt that these things are connected in certain ways, but not, i would say, by logical necessity or something, and even if the art is in part a transcendence of the degradation, it is also a self-reflection and something more than any particular source or experience can explain. honestly, the vice tourism isn't helping the quality of the art now, even if louis played the brothels in 1915 or whatever. it just freezes it into a kind of parody of itself and peddles it to these amazingly gross people from elsewhere.

if i sound puritanical, it's because puritanism is more or less the way i stay alive. i fail by its standards of course. but i am definitely opposed to these zones of moral impunity or moral vacation, and there is a catholic/protestant kind of split on this: mardi gras or the rio carnival are excellent examples, and occasionally people assert that these things are archetypal and necessary. but one problem is that these zones expand. every city has such zones. pretty soon, every saturday night is such a zone. but i do aspire to some sort of moral consistency. you have priests exempting themselves here or there from the values they profess, for example, and maybe confessing it later. that's a good way to become a monster.

ask yourself: you just married someone. they pledged monogamy. do you think as you pledge the same that they mean: except in vegas, except in new orleans, except saturday night, unless i'm really drunk? i've known people who actually became two people by this technique: the values they profess with total passion they violate in special zones or special occasions, when they have a completely different and incompatible set of values; they're like two moral agents, neither of whom appears even to know what the other is doing; personality b's acts don't count against personality c. it's a moral derangement, a form of dissociative personality disorder.

and then think about what actually happens to so many people in your zones of impunity. the hot young call girls, strippers, trade, who slowly decline into blank-eyed, broke, and broken victims. the addicts strewn around right there, under your very feet, leading lives of complete tortured misery and then dying. i guess the corpses stay in vegas. the people losing everything, including every shred of pride or decency, at the casinos. it seems like a happy harmless celebration. only if you are fucking blind, which is of course what you're trying to be.

party like it's 1848

my amazing aesthetic manifesto is in the los angeles time today. free your senses, folks.

now, i think the first question that will arise for anyone is whether i can really defend my view that fast five is better than lincoln, obviously and by a long way. both films have stylish cinematography and good editing, but i think what made the difference for me with fast five were the really profound lesssons in leadership. watching vin diesel take a ragtag group of body-builders, hip hop artists, comedians, and models, and forge them into a unit capable of destroying rio...well, it was inspiring. as doris kerns-goodwin, on whose book fast five was based, has so often said with a groan of ecstasy, we need our president to be a lot more like vin diesel.

more

people like jill filipovic are spearheading a revival of classic second-wave feminism; she's amazingly appealing in a way just by being foursquare where ms. was in '72. but she definitely is writing in a different era; she has to deal now with her own love of fashion, which when you feed it through second-wave feminism just comes out as false consciousness. she takes a traditional line: women have to care about their appearance so much and engage in these consumption patterns and so on because the expectations on women's appearance by the patriarchy are so throrough and extreme; you can't survive an office job without carefully calibrating, etc.

this is a complete misunderstanding of where we are as a culture, i think. the fashion world is an aesthetic coalition of straight women and gay men that has developed autonomously for decades and which surely cannot, at this point, be plausibly regarded as sub-altern. (you have to think about these identities as combinations of privileged and deprivileged elements: gay, but male (and also, er, white); female, but straight (and white, etc.). they are not exactly only oppressed minorities.) we heterosexual guys for the most part have no idea what is happening or why and we don't care. perhaps straight women theorize that we have very fine-grained expectations about their appearance. not by their standards, we don't. so look, let's take the common obsession with shoes. if you think your 60-year-old het male boss at the real estate company is evaluating your shoes every day, or has any idea what the styles or brands or prices may be, or can distinguish a manohla or whatever it is from a target store brand, you're just wrong. 'aren't those boots from last year?' or 'i wonder whether those are knock-offs,' say, are sentences that simply cannot appear in the idiolect of people like me.

maybe straight women just stopped being subordinate to straight guys and started being subordinate to gay guys. if so, i think that was your call, not ours, though perhaps you were sheltering together against the storm of us. on antm or on the pages of vogue or seventeen: who is taking the pictures, designing the clothes, working the images over in photoshop, selecting the models, judging or training the contestants, doing the make-up? you might compare the images there to those in maxim, for example. the images that come from the het-wo/gay-man side are much more relentless, much more processed, and the models are skinnier. what the readers of maxim want is pretty straightforward: pretty girls in lingerie. on the other side is a gigantic fantasy world of images and identities that we just didn't build for you, that we could not possibly have imagined. 

 

it would be worth exploring how far one could go with the speculation that the way the images look has less to do with what straight men want to do than with what gay men want to be. they are hard to explain on any other terms, i believe. that might be the overriding source of the repertoire. this could plausibly be extended way backwards to when fashion designers and people who were dressing movie stars were still at least nominally in the closet. people like camille paglia or david halperin have looked back for the slightly-concealed gay sources of all sorts of arts and culture; what they say is plausible. but, it has got to be plausible for better and worse. finding the impetus in gay men probably gives straight women too little agency in the whole thing (as little as second-wave feminism attributed to them with regard to the hetmale gaze), and whatever the source, the images obviously work very powerfully on many straight women. one thing to consider: gay men are men, and straight women are women. the exercise of patriarchal power is possible, or indeed structurally inevitable, between the two groups in patriarchy, even if the story gets complicated after that. the gaze of a gay man is the gaze of a man.

at any rate, i'll tell you this: straight guys could not possibly have invented this repertoire; it corresponds to nothing we ever knew or envisioned. maybe it wasn't straight men who conveyed the message that you should stop eating and disappear, after all. (really, we never did want you to disappear. we needed your bodies with us, even if we didn't always want to have every piece of the subjectivity.) then think about the inextricably intertwined fantasy and shame that a gay man might have experienced in 1970 or whenever, and think about how images of what gay men wanted to be might really have come out. that is a rather brutal diagnosis. but...is it clearly false? that would need showing in the details of the history.

so first of all, maybe you shouldn't feel bad or wrong or anti-feminist for literally buying into that world. one thing it actually is is a sphere in which oppressed minorities have found power and self-determination (others have found there only prejudice and exclusion, however). but if you do feel funky about it, for god's sake you can't blame us (though we have plenty of actual oppression to answer for); the whole thing is internal to a culture that is closed to folks like us or is explicitly designed to extrude us and that we basically find incomprehensible. the standards of beauty it enforces really have very little to do with anything we ever thought or wanted. take some responsibility. 

The Mediocre Inflection

god after all these years i hope that it's finally dawning on people that tom friedman is a mere mannerism: a quasi-master of the technocratic catch-phrase that i guess gives some people the sensation that they understand something. i have a feeling that The Great Inflection isn't going to take off, and i'm dqing 'pq.' so you just write the same column and you say: wow the world is really connecting through the internet. right then it strikes you that this isn't anything anyone ever doubted, also that it's something you more than fully exploited a decade ago etc. so you start trying to re-name your insights, to kind of disguise the fact that you're just trafficking in commonplaces. what underlies the whole vision, of course, is precisely what i've been calling squishy totalitarianism: or as he puts it, 'the public-private partnership that makes America great.' i wonder if he still thinks they're rioting in egypt for more standardized testing. "The old average is over," writes friedman. "Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives." it's gotten to where we can read sentences like this smoothly even though they're not in english. but it hasn't gotten to the point where they mean anything. he needs to go beyond 'hyper-connected,' which he's been using to denote this period for, say, 8 years, and dramatically unveil a new era of connectivity well beyond that. he may need to start inventing his own prefixes, because i'm not sure where you go from 'hyper'. possibly to sleep.

what it's for

so, most op-ed columnists, radio hosts, and so on (start, say, with charles blow or gene robinson, either of whom could and sometimes does do much better), have moved off any attempt, say, to defend their policy positions, and on to sheer attempts to manipulate people, by calling other people, even the milquetoastiest, such as obama and romney, extreme or weird. the op-ed column, for example, has fully merged with the advertising industry, via political parties and campaigns and consultants; op-ed writers are more like political consultants every day; opinion journalism is now a wing of 'strategic' 'communications'. (an egregious example is the frank rich columns from 2008; week by week they mirrored the obama campaign's talking points, very often word for word.) it has repudiated truth or sincerity as anachronistic or impossible. one pitiful feature of this approach is that it cannot persuade anyone who doesn't already agree; it is explicitly designed to alienate and irritate anyone who doesn't agree. so the only idea is to manipulate people who already agree with you to agree with you.

seriously, you know 90% of the nyt's opinion readers or so are left of center, and yet it's written as though projected at their opponents; it's apparently intended to devastate them and make them feel bad for being on the wrong side. but of course everyone knows they're not there. they're insulting or in the best case arguing against them to each other, for their own edification. well, obviously let's say right-wing radio or sectors of fox and msnbc are the same. that is a very useless exercise. or what i'd say is that every column or rant is devoted to enhancing the self-esteem of the columnist or host and his audience: you're so great, so normal, so reasonable, because you're not like them. that this embroils the whole country in an ever-growing partisan divide that is ever-more contentless is neither here nor there i guess, compared to how rational and righteous you can persuade yourself you are, even by means that with complete clarity demonstrate the opposite.

cretins in heat

as i have been saying (and saying, etc), this kind of jive is a tribute to the industriousness of cretins. i gave you a chance to reform; now i'm launchin. zachary goldfarb argues that obama's inaugural wasn't liberal, on the grounds that most people agree with it. one entailment, of course, is that no view that most people agree with is liberal. now to determine whether zachary goldfarb is himself the sort of person who might consider himself a liberal, or that other people might consider a liberal, would require reading more zachary goldfarb, which would be indefensible. but if zachary goldfarb is a liberal, then on his own account he ought to oppose regulating greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, support cutting spending on medicaid, oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, support cuts in education and transportation funding, and oppose same-sex marriage. for the contradictory positions, goldfarb flatly asserts, are not liberal. or another obvious implication: it is conceptually impossible to have a liberal majority, you doink.

but really, you see this everywhere every day: these are examples of the fact that our political discourse is dominated by meta-level 'analysis' that has no connection to any sorts of policy, or any practical matters of any sort, whatsoever. even the mere labeling (of a policy as 'liberal' or 'conservative, much less 'extreme'), even if someone were doing it coherently, is without any practical weight in the sense of reasons to do or believe anything about the issues of the sort goldfarb suspends in it, like mini-marshmallows in a bowl of turd-flavored jello. what turns on whether more education funding is a liberal policy or not? does that help you figure out whether it's a good idea? aw just spitballing here but you might want to look at the effects and costs of the policy and stuff like that. but at any rate, it cannot possibly be a liberal policy, according to zachary goldfarb. so, if you you are, sadly, the sort of person who evaluates policies according to whether they are or are not liberal, and tends to endorse those that are, you should oppose increased education funding with every piece of your big liberal heart. and you should not engage your mind at all.  

but really, merely giving ideological labels to particular policies etc is the least of it, though zachary goldfarb cannot manage to do even that with even superficial coherence. the meta-discourse consists entirely of deciding who counts and who doesn't, who's extreme and who's not, according to who is doing well in the polling this week. same sex maririage, goldfarb points out, is polling at a bare majority. the moment it got to 50.1 was the moment it ceased to be a liberal policy. should that poll have a margin of error, or oscillate slightly, then it will, day by day and hour by hour, cease to be and then become again a liberal policy. so another lovely entailment here is that you are a liberal only if you are constantly changing your mind about this. the polling isn't used to lend weight to the actual positions, as 'ultra-brite is the best-selling toothpaste in toronto' might be held vaguely to provide some reason to buy it. all it says is: most people agree with me, hence, my opponents are wrong. ponder that inference. the polling is used to develop the ridicule, and none of it has a damned thing to do with anything even in competent versions. 

just an absolutely minimal standard of consistency: if polling shifts, you've got to own your own crazy, anti-american, evil extremism. when jim crow segregation or anti-communist witch hunts or screeching homophobia were polling well, then of course all of your basic ideals were the views of extremists. that, by your own account, is what you yourself were the day before yesterday, and what you'll be again the day after tomorrow, and it is on your account a fundamentally important way to evaluate how plausible or morally good an opinion is. a decent person would just say 'so what?', which is precisely what martin luther king or harvey milk did say when people said (which they did) that they were extremists.

however, zachary goldfarb does provide a stunning argument that educational funding ought to be cut, or perhaps elminated entirely. the people who are basting the world with irreason on this scale are people who emerge from our educational system with advanced degrees. (right i am speculating that zachary goldfarb has undergone this sort of training; finding out for sure would require googling 'zachary goldfarb,' which would be wrong.) we like to think of education as imparting knowledge or something, but we probably ought to regard it as a systematic, intentional corruption of possibly-promising minds. evidently, the better your training in statistics or whatever it may be, the more ignorant you become, or the more boldly you endorse glaring fallacies or contradictions. it appears that whatever institutions zachary goldfarb emerged from pursued a policy of systematic neurological damage, which is a liberal policy, because it is not polling well. certainly it suggests that the whole educational structure from which goldfarbs emerge is entirely counter-productive. folks like this would be better and wiser people, they would have more reasoned positions - or at least they might have positions - if they were, for example, illiterate.

as on all such occasions, i feel that the best revenge against zachary goldfarb would be to take his 'arguments' at face value. don't assume that he is deploying them as clever manipulative strategies. that is particularly plausible in this case because goldfarb so signally fails to be clever in any dimension. if you take goldfarb to be sincere, or to mean what he says, the piece provides a devastating reflection on himself and his like. (on the other hand, if you assume that he is not sincere - and also on the plausible assumption that he is not some sort of master of irony - that is also a devastating reflection.) we should assume until shown otherwise that folks who put these sort of items forth are sincere, or would be sincere if they had said something. treat them as being precisely (as roget, consulting his excellent thesaurus, would put it) the sort of blockheads, dimwits, dolts, dullards, dunces, ignoramuses, imbeciles, and morons who would believe that they just made a good and important argument. assume that they believe that they are saying something and assume that this is the best they can do, until they actually display competence. then see that what they're saying is both completely empty and obviously incoherent, a stunning combination.

but i'm not at all angry! like jesus, i love your stupid ass.

wake me up when woody allen is over

i would definitely support any two 'scantily clad cocktail waitresses' who want to make woody allen's dream come true by stomping him to death. indeed, anyone, cocktail waitress or not, has my unconditional support in their efforts to stomp woody allen. at least there wouldn't be any more woody allen movies, of which there are way too many. actually, i could do without anything woody allen ever made, not to speak of his basic persona, which makes me ashamed to be a human being. you know really i don't see anything by woody allen unless some woman drags me, so i missed his cult-of-the-artiste francophile jivefest midnight in paris. so perhaps i shouldn't express an opinion. ok, keep buying tickets and wake me up when he's over.

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.

what's the big idea?

the very spirit of america! remember, america is an idea. that tree that just fell on your car? that was a tiny bit of that idea crushing another tiny bit. from sea-idea to shining sea-idea. oops no blather consists of ideas, as does yapyap and hooha, but america consists of stuff. your ass is an idea, roger, but america is a thing. ok ok america consists of ideas. mine, though, roger; not yours.

you're an animal

somehow, the new york times op-ed page has become the journal of empty brain research.

The part of the brain where the instinctive “fight or flight” signal is first triggered — the amygdala — is situated such that it receives incoming stimuli before the parts of the brain that think things over. Then, in our ongoing response to potential peril, the way the brain is built and operates assures that we are likely to feel more and think less. As Professor LeDoux puts it in “The Emotional Brain”: “the wiring of the brain at this point in our evolutionary history is such that connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.”

look you've just imported the most primitive old-time dualisms into your interpretation of the imagery. human beings are torn between rationality and animality, between reason and passion. it might as well be spirit and flesh. 'the part of the brain that thinks things over': are you sure this is the clearest way to espress what you're saying? i am telling you that 'emotional' and 'cognitive' systems are just not going to turn out to be distinct. try to persuade me that you didn't just presume this dualism as a completely unjustified conceptual structure within which you conducted your resarch.  

now you want to know why rational animals like ourselves believe and behave so irrationally. does it strike you that 'the irrational part is stronger than the rational part' is just a restatement of the problem, not any sort of solution? it's exactly as though i explained why people fail to be rational by pointing out that it's because they are seized by irrationality. why is michael jordan so good at basketball? because the good-at-basketball part of him is stronger than the sucks-at-basketball part.

the fact that you call the animal in us 'amygdala' only gives a slight patina of obscurantist authority for your entire augustine-style picture of human psychology, complete with original sin. you want to account for the fact that people behave irrationally. the answer: it is the beast within. even aristotle had a more sophisticated moral psychology. but what i love about it is that no work at all is devoted to questions like: is rationality distinct from the emotions? is that distinction where we want to start, as opposed to a bunch of other possible distinctions? if you don't start by really working through the definitional questions, you'll have no idea whether you're seeing the irrational bit or not. i don't doubt that y'all are pretty sophisticated in generating data. what i doubt is that you have any ability even to become aware of your own most obvious assumptions. possibly your higher cognitive module is being seduced by your amygdala.

as hume put it, the pre-frontal lobe is and ought only to be the slave of the amygdala. or kant's theory was that we could be motivated by pure application of the executive region, which should subdue the amygdala entirely. robert louis stephenson illustrated the brain research in his novella dr. pre-frontal cortex and mr. amygdala.

new strategies in reasoning

evidently, the key reasoning strategy of nobel-prize winners is amazingly direct: from any premises whatever, your pet conclusion follows. no matter what the data, it always shows that government should be larger and more active. krugman, i have to say, is merely obsessed: he just desperately wants to be subordinated: he thinks about nothing else day or night: nothing else actually matters.

so as i understand the argument, it's that if you agree that consumption drives the economy, and if you agree that certain governmental activities increase consumption, then you are rationally obliged to agree that such activities should go forward in a slump like this one. er. look: the inference is wildly fallacious. here's a parallel argument: consumption drives economic activity. requiring every american citizen to spend 50% of their savings on amazon this weeekend would increase consumption. so you're rationally obliged etc.

possibly any measures you take will have other effects than sheer stimlation. well assessing those effects - oh, you know, doubling the deficit - might be sort of important i assessing what you want to do.

innovate, asshole!

a typical phrase of today: 'sustainable innovation.' maybe you find that inspiring. well, the nonsense verse of edward lear was inspiring. tourette's syndrome is inspiring. but tom friedman is just excruciatingly dull, still talking meaningless algorese. it was random grand-sounding manipulative yapyap fifteen years ago; now it sounds like elizabethan english when elizabethan english sucks. have to admit, though, that producing op-ed columns by random bureaucratic phrase-generation is a newish or newesque development.

please stop

well, i'm grateful to the times's stone blog, just for throwing philosophy into the popular press. and unlikely as this seems, one fermin debrabander seems to occupy a position that i once did at mica. however, this, i feel, is not the stone's best moment. the freud stuff with which he starts is a useless argument for general determinism: the worst sort of argument because you'd have to accept freudianism to agree with it. and if you think anti-individualism follows from sheer determinism, you are not a competent philosopher. of course the basic opinion is just this week's leftist whinge: he's just lifting his little voice in chorus. one should expect no better from a collectivist, i suppose; on his own view, no better is possible. debrabander makes the argument that none of us actually think for ourselves, then illustrates it as well as he can. just one more time: when such people say 'the interdependence of us all,' they mean 'coercion.' i mean, the interdependence of us all is both sort of a reality and what could be an inspiring aspiration, but judt etc just effortlessly use it synonymously with increasingly comprehensive state power. that's why the vision is chilling and the argument extremely insincere or self-deluded as well as demonstrably dangerous. it would be more dangerous if it were more plausible; it's just a tissue of elisions.

the reason that the argument is so bad is because the group is so unanimous; everyone loves the conclusion, so they're not too particular about the premises. it may be that debrabander has hardly interacted with anyone, or been edited by anyone, who might disagree. each time someone says it, it becomes more autonomic for everyone to say it. like i say, the argument is not only an example of that, it is an argument for it.

me too!

'now the election is no longer a referendum on obama, but a contest between two visions': it's amazing that every single pundit on all cable networks as well as a variety of op-ed columnists have all produced the very same 'idea' in the very same words for days, each with a flourish, as though pulling a rabbit out of a hat. how can a professional opinion-expresser not do better than that?

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.

 

individualism again

i meant to respond to this piece by kurt anderson.

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.

From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal.

not surprisingly, i want to stick up for individualism in what i hold to be the traditional american sense, and i point out that anderson, reflecting the conventional rhetoric of his demographic, conflates individualism, selfishness, hedonism, and laissez-faire capitalism into a single enemy, which is about as ham-handed as could be imagined. i do think that hedonism killed the sixties, by the way, or showed that there was little seriousness in the hippie/peace movement. really the people who represented sex and drugs as the essence of human liberation - oh you know abbie hoffman, timothy leary, even the dead and airplane - have a lot to answer for. and of course many of them did directly answer for it with addiction and death.

but i just want to say that 'individualism' in the way i use the term and certainly as connected with 'america's founding,' or the american character circa 1840, etc. is something else again. now the sixties at its best did recommend it, even reviving thoreau. there was an iconoclastic, skeptical, anti-authoritarian streak of 'non-conformism' in the sixties. there were marxists, of course, striving for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but those were sad chumps. i think of a more 'existentialist' sixties politics. in my book, for example, bradley manning and i.f. stone are american individualists: not rah-rah capitalists, but profoundly concerned with freedom of expression and the articulation of subversive and idiosyncratic viewpoints and the honest expression of the self. 

individualism in this sense is not to be opposed to social cooperation; indeed the mutual respect  for differences that it embodies would seem to me to be a precondition of actual collaboration. and the meaning of none of the terms anderson tosses about should be conflated with any of the others without a long conceptual and historical argument, which would not work out.

if you really want to make the left/right spectrum a matter of individualism as against collectivism in this sense - in the sense that we engage in collective action because we all [ought to] agree or all believe together or act as a social class, then i'll just float right. individualism in this sense is not selfishness or rah-rah capitalism, not sheer self-indulgent hedonism or narcissism: it is a willingness to think against the common wisdom of your age, and to develop and articulate your own point of view, or to realize in external action your own person with all its eccentricities. and there are other, better, leftist traditions, many of them rooted in american soil and in individualism.

our problem now is not that we are too individualistic, as say tony judt argued (and anderson is doing virtually nothing but recapitulating judt), but that we think in herds. that's what turns our politics into meaningless opposed catch-phrases that everyone mutters in unson like automata. or like kurt anderson.

 

 

say what?

this newly-faddish notion that the problem is that americans don't trust their institutions is, i must say, completely bizarre. only an idiot trusts an institution, and americans as a rule never have. today maureen dowd discusses the jerry sandusky nightmare, the catholic church's man-boy love support group, and the ways the institutions mobilized to help the rapists. from that she generates the following rhetorical question.

Have our materialism, narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society — schools, sports, religion, politics, banking — dulled our sense of right and wrong?

wait. what? cynicism about these institutions is richly warranted, and the only possible thing that can prevent their becoming secret worlds of abuse. cynicism is the right response, surely, and it is itself an expression of moral values, a trace of idealism in the face of the grotesque. what she actually portrays is people venerating institutions - and hence destroying individual lives through lies and concealment - that in fact deserve to be leveled with explosives. there was never a time when such institutions were trustworthy, or were actually approached with trust. i think perhaps what dowd or chris hayes are remembering is not the history of american atitudes to institutions but their own small childhood, when they regarded the institutions in which they were embedded with with uncritical veneration. that speaks badly for their raising, of course, but surely it's time to put away childish things.

now i'm sure hayes and dowd want trustworthy institutions. but the structure of their thoughts is actually precisely what leads to secrecy, lies, and abuse. remember nixon's basic stance on the watergate investigation? my god you're impugning the 'institution of the presidency.' the whole catholic hierarchy participated in a cover-up that was essentially a pr manouver; well, if people lose their mindless faith in the church, their souls will face an eternity of torment. the whole idea is to preserve public trust by ever-increasing untrustworthiness. there are two ways, of course, of dealing with the problem of 'the apearance of impropriety': (1) eliminate the impropriety. (2) make sure no one finds out. because the issue arises when it's too late for (1), the actual strategy is always (2). when we lose our suspicion and cynicism about institutions, we will all be victims.

also, when did the american left become the defender of vicious traditional institutions, yearning for unthinking trust? sometimes it's hard to tell the radicals from the reactionaries. looking squarely at the history of american leftism (a few bad stalinist moments aside) people like this are outrageously betraying it.

oh shit i know i left it around here somewhere: songs of indolence and expedience

anytime someone identifies the moment when america lost its innocence, just snicker. it's absurd. and if what they mean by 'innocence' is that americans used to 'trust their institutions,' or love the authority exercised over them, or whatever, then just figure the person who's saying that for an oppression-enthusiast with no acquaintance whatever with american history. perhaps we can recover our innocence as we recover our subservience, or perhaps they meant the same thing right up til 1973. it's very biblical or edenic: innocence = enthusiastic self-subordination to arbitrary authority. and no one questioned that until march 3, 1989 or something.

look, did samuel adams and thomas jefferson trust their institutions? how about the whiskey rebels? did nat turner, william lloyd garrison, and john brown trust their institutions? how about victoria woodhull and emma goldman? did ambrose bierce, mark twain, and h.l. mencken trust their institutions? thoreau, emerson, and fuller? what do you think about tecumseh and crazy horse? john l. and sinclair lewis? richard weaver, milton friedman, and murray rothbard? w.e.b. dubois and malcolm x? anyone who ever testified before the house unamerican activities committee? and ask yourself this: should they have? dude, whatever.

yes to the milbank

here's the kind of political writing i admire. i have probably ragged on dana milbank from time to time. but this is the sort of thing that actually gives people credibility: i believe he will vote for obama. but he can see - and more, actually write - that obama is not at all serious about debt reduction. this is obvious, and maybe you think he shouldn't be. on the other hand, he throws it in all the time. he even sold his healthcare package as a deficit-reduction program, which i don't believe was plausible or sincere. what is good about milbank's piece is that he doesn't let the factual beliefs flow effortlesslessly from the political ideology. no fact has ever failed to conform to the ideology of krugman or frank rich; e.g. when you're in a prosperous stage, then you can afford to increase the scope and size of government programs. and when you're in a slowdown, the only solution is to increase the scope and size of government, etc,

dimestore thoreau

true, i'm in the nytimes.

god bites

yesterday, e.j. dionne was all over (e.g. npr and msnbc) calling paul ryan a 'radical'. (as i've said a hundred times, if you're an op-ed columnist and you're simply appropriating the soundbit rhetoric of someone's political campaign - simply mirroring this week's 'talking points' - you should just slink off in disgrace and find another career.) today dana milbank calls ryan a 'fanatic.' look if this is your approach, surely you oughtn't to object if allen west calls you a commie. milbank enthusiastically endorses catholic bishops' condemnation of ryan's budget ("The rebuke of Ryan is a credit to the Catholic leaders"). from that, he draws this bizarre conclusion: "However much Ryan may wish it, God does not take sides in politics." er, i haven't heard ryan wishing along those lines, but the bishops surely do, and milbank praises them for doing so in the surrounding sentences. well, applying our own most deeply-held beliefs to ourselves is not one of the great strengths of our species.

eat me

mark bittman: The government regulates tobacco and alcohol. Why not diet? and while we're at it, there are a lot of harmful books out there. why not? at any rate, the idea of prohibiting people from buying x, y, and z with food stamps (of course that's already in place in some respects) shows very precisely that dependency and liberty are inversely related, that a dependent population is an abject population, that a welfare state is an authoritarian state. a government that provides your food owns your body.

excellence

i don't think any better op-ed columnist than ross douthat is working today. that one's thoughtful, more measured than i would be on a similar theme (perhaps that's not saying much), and right.

testicular atrophy

you'd think that the volatility of the situation would give even dan balz pause. but no.

A week ago there were six candidates still standing in the GOP race. Now, though technically there are four — the others being former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) — the Republican race is now the two-person contest that many once anticipated. 

look ten minutes ago these people were saying that it was all over and romney was the nominee. i guess they just sit around their hotel rooms nodding at each other as they declare the winner in advance etc. believe it or not, i think there is some possibility that santorum could still be the nominee. more rich-boy slop from romney and you can stick the fork, and of course newt can self-immolate at any moment. the evangelical community is still crystallizing around santorum; they are not going to find romney or gingrich congenial at all, ultimately.

you know on espn they always focus on 'predictions'; their experts always have to declare who is going to win each game, right up to gametime. almost always, they just predict that the fave will win. i love, say, dick vitale predicting the final four; at any given moment he just takes the top four teams in the poll and then reveals dramatically that they're the best teams in america. see, that's 'expertise': mumbling or yelling what everyone else is saying: the safety dance

so, balz, what say we wait and see what happens?

all together now

a couple of highlights from today's nytimes op-ed page. 

krugman demonstrates again why you shouldn't send an economist to do a writer's job: '“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire.' if you know that a sentence (by which i mean krugman's whole sentence, not king's per se) has already been written a thousand times, or is has been a cliche among assistant principals for decades, you should give it a miss in your column and resolve to write your own material instead of plucking it from the cloud of socially-approved yapyap. and you know what? it's really an excellent refutation of itself: a nice demonstration that king is now just a cliche whose words we recite like automata.

egan argues that the tea party was a fraud because they never really wanted to 'govern.' cf. proudhon:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. 

only a 'daft, grandfatherly skinflint' like ron paul wouldn't want all of that for everyone.

 

the non-romney

you'd think that 'pundits,' people who are professional expounders of their own opinions, would reach for something original. some do: most assure their position by repeating 'the common wisdom': you'll hear or read twenty all using the same sentence on any given matter. this reveals their overweening insecurity and that of the publications or broadcast outlets that host them. the reasoning is that the common wisdom might be wrong, but no one can really blame you any more than anyone else for expressing it, so you're safe. one piece of the cw i like over the last few months is 'the non-romney,' who's the person republican voters can't settle on. (e.j. dionne leads with it today, but you can hardly blame him in that he's just saying what everyone else is saying; on the other hand, there's no point in reading him, for the same reason; this is why someone like hitchens is of great value; he dared to say something, which of course risks being individually responsible for saying something wrong, as he often did.)

anyway, the non-romney motif is a completely manufactured artificial creature of the media coverage itself. the only reason the cw pundits think of everyone else in the field as non-romneys is because they themselves assumed that romney would be the nominee, with very little reason. and they were comfortable with romney; they understood him because he was like themselves: a non-entity. treating everone else as non-romneys just puts romney at the center of the caucus/primary process by a priori stipulation. 

i think of them all as non-pauls, which is a useful frame because they actually disagree with paul (it is not possible to disagree with romney). and it truly astonishes me that paul is atop the polls in iowa: i.e. that he is the non-bachmann. really, even this much is an amazing moment in american politics, one i never thought i'd live to see, one in which the power of the state - growing all over the world for centuries - is actually coming in for doubt, in which it is possible to raise fundamental questions again.

there are very few ways in which people might express their disgust for our politicians, for our political process, and for our government. but this disgust is well-nigh universal, as well it should be, as it must be because of the way these people and institutions actually behave. well, voting for ron paul is an actual way to express that, and also at once to affirm the fundamental american political tradition of small state and individual liberty. every cw pundit in the country is still saying hardy har he can't win. the 'republican establishment' must be absolutely shitting bricks, trying to design a non-paul. but we actually do have a chance to teach all of these folks a lesson.

if i were you, i'd be me

here is an amazingly ignorant, yet excruciatingly conventional, piece of claptrap, courtesy of forbes: if i were a poor black kid. all it shows is that gene marks is utterly white, white as a ream of copy paper: if he were a poor black kid, he'd be a bourgeois white kid. get good grades. that's his advice. if i were a poor black kid, i'd kick your lily-white ass.

now i want to be your dog

the redoubtable douthat smacks jfk, the most overrated single individual in species history, with the possible exceptions of pablo picasso and james joyce. what people remember so intensely is the 'charisma.' whatever in the world that might be (perhaps a kind of supernatural sweat). i guess we just want someone sexy to tell us what to do: political leadership as s&m.

pleasure center

you can see that this light-up-the-x-region-of-the-brain sort of approach makes people happy; it keeps giving nyt op-ed columnists the sense that they're talking about Science. i just want to make one remark about the 'pleasure center': obviously, pleasure (for example) is a hyper-primitive psychological term, and it is the psychology you bring into the experiment that determines the sort of result you're looking for, or what would count as a result, or what sorts of things we test. same with 'addiction,' and the idea that every problematic behavior or every habit of a human being is an addiction (kristof's position here, more or less) was an utter stampede before and completely outside the brainscan fad, which here is more or less an attempt to freeze a momentary paradigm or cultural formation as an eternal truth. as you may know, i would myself resist as extremely wrong the idea that addiction is a matter of pleasure. you'd be better off regarding it as a pursuit of pain, and i think the idea that addiction is the pursuit of pleasure is a view developed by non-addicts. but in any case the idea that, for example, you run marathons for the pleasure is extremely counter-intuitive, and it would occur to someone who was already in the grip of a 'theory' of human motivation (one which turns out non-explanatory, or is very dormitive-virtuey).  'pleasure' is the worst sort of psychological butchery or philistinism: there just is no such thing, really, and it stands in for anything that motivates anyone or anything that anyone pursues. we get it as a universal explanation from, you know, british utilitarianism, where it is the acme of all value etc. it was going to make human motivation comprehensible - or even, quantifiable - on a single principle. well now 'scientists' can pay off on bentham's hedonic calculus with their little light-ups. that a warm bath, kinky sex, a good burrito, cocaine, the sistine ceiling, money, and a five-mile run all cause the same sort of feeling is just false, and if you didn't already suppose that they must, somehow (because there is one thing in common to everything we pursue, and it's in the head of the pursuer), you wouldn't have 'found' these alleged structural similarities. that all these things must somehow be the same is something you brought to, not something you discovered in, the observations. indeed, none of these things are actually located (only) in the brain, and the whole thing presupposes an internalist theory of mind: what is real for you is what happens in your own little brain, which i want to to say is a bizarre picture. but don't worry. there will be a next paradigm.