cheese it, the cops!

150-year flood of mistakes

there's a real simple reason that poor folks get smashed more than rich folks by natural and unnatural disasters, as in texas right now: because political power coincides with economic power, everywhere, through all of human history, and history has given us no more obvious, consistent lesson. people can only be blinded to it by ideology. that's why some people get levees, but a million other things too. and that is why the whole history of leftism since marx, which with the exception of brief fizzings of left anarchism, is really really wrong: using the state as a mechanism for equality is just counter-productive overall and in the long haul. it is what it purports to cure: hierarchy, political and economic. and it really, really has not worked out, in public education, housing programs and a thousand other projects. this is just obvious, but is evidently non-reconsiderable.

 

against mason

for such an unprepossessing person, michael hayden's resume is really something, as is his testimony. four-star general and director of military intelligence. nsa director as the program of universal surveillance was established and of cia as, let's speculate, most of the records of the bush-era programs were cleaned up in anticipation of the transition. lord knows how he's contracted into the security state through the chertoff group, while like all such careers today, his makes it clear that the corporate boardroom, the surveillance state, and the torture chamber are located in the same compound. he is the primary spokesman for the pro-torture cabal currently invading the media in a years-in-the-making attempt to avoid trial for crimes against humanity.

what an academic might find disconcerting, though, is that he is also a distinguished professor at george mason university. this is the sort of problem i pointed to with regard to the gruber scandal. so perhaps your tendency there was to think there's nothing so wrong about the same professor helping write obamacare and being hired to sell it and also providing mit-stamped objective research showing that it would have good effects. but, if so, you might also be the sort of person who'd be disconcerted by a pattern of contributions to a university coupled with appointements that do not have even a vague academic justification. at many academic institutions, you are a distinguished professor just merely in virtue of raw power you wield, and also you have next to no academic duties. what a miserable excuse for a university george mason is, an object-lesson in academic boot-licking, like the philosophy department at moscow u under yuri andopov or something. but at any rate, in setting out the whole squishy totalitarian thang, i should have included the professoriate along with the corporation and the state. all forms of prestige and wealth gather around power, wait in line to shower it with accolades and cash.

authoritarian education

i was at a faculty meeting today discussing a possibly wide-ranging change in our curriculum. one theme was how in the world to deal with, or as one of my colleagues put it, 'treat' the kids who are coming out of k-12 education. everyone nodded as people said things like, "they just want to be told what to do, all the time in every respect". "they think education is just jumping through hoops". "they have no intrinsic interest in the material; they don't even know what that would be like.' it was not me, believe it or not, who described k-12 education in this period as 'profoundly authoritarian'. 'they regard teachers as mechanical information-delivery systems.' 'when you really look at the common core, it's all designed to take the last shreds of autonomy from teachers'. and so on. 

at one point, someone said, "well, i guess we all agree that these kids are being abused. the question is, what can we do to treat them or cure them of what they came in with, or of what our culture is now?"

you should really understand: this is a consensus in a faculty that is also more or less 100% left, people who to a person except me, might describe themselves as great proponents of public education, and who as a default position probably support most things the obama admin does. but look, we are all college teachers and there are certain things you just cannot see, every day. so what i wonder is: what in the world can be done about this? like universal surveillance - to which it is related in various ways - it flows on indifferently through democratic and republican adminstrations. well, both parties have deeply authoritarian basic orientations. and also, if you like, this approach is being driven by a particular economic vision, a particular version of technocratic capitalism, in which children are cogs. the personalities they are with some success attempting to manufacture cannot be and will not be citizens of a democracy, but of a squishy totalitarianism. 

mmmm, squishy

so, mumbai is a horrendous mess, driven by the 'politician-builder complex' which is destroying all neighborhoods and dominating all space and charging out the wazoo, etc. some form of this has torn apart many or most major modern cities: robert moses's projects in nyc come to mind. now: what is the left's solution to this problem? more government regulation of the space? you are being very silly. okay how about the right's: well, we need to give more scope and autonomy to the builders. don't y'all see how stuck you are? and also: don't you see that you are on the same side? you are recommending the same thing under different names, and that has led to what we actually have.

state and climate

it's obvious to naomi klein and to many others that capitalism is to blame for climate change; that's why it is a very convenient problem: because it obviously makes socialism ever-more urgent. but let me ask you this: how good were stalinist russia or romania, or maoist china, on greenhouse gas emissions, or environment in general? say you socialize all industry or something and prohibit people from driving cars or cooking hot dogs. what you would be doing is turning the economy over entirely to precisely the sort of people who run the government now. do you think, for example, that they'll be less concerned with economic growth than titans of industry are now? you want to put every center of power in the same hands. that is a realistic formula only for making every aspect of the problem worse.

we do not live in a capitalist world. we live in a squishy totalitarian world in which state and capital are interlocked at every location. they are pretty much equally implicated in climate change. handing more and more power to the state does not reduce the economic pressures toward expansion, etc; it just puts everything in the hands of a sclerotic bureaucracy. say you think fracking isn't the best idea we ever had. well who is responsible for fracking up pennsylvania? private companies operating in tandem with government agencies. correct? why do you think making the state the lone fracker would improve matters? 

think seriously, in general, about the nature of the 20th-century fossil-fuel economy. who developed these resources where? interlocked state/private concerns. who controlled and exploited middle east oil, for example, and who does that now? who developed the world infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy, the interstate highway system, e.g.? to recommend nationalizing or internationalizing extraction  or consumption is to recommend an even more rigid, uninterruptable, world-bestriding hierarchy. this won't even ameliorate the problem it is supposedly designed to address. as to its other effects: they don't bear thinking about.

putting all resources in the hands of the state is, if history shows anything, the very formula of corruption, and if you really do want your richest people and your bureaucrats and political flaks to be exactly the same people, this is the correct formula. on the other hand, if you want to reduce the exploitation of resources, etc, it's ridiculous.

shut up with the shutting up, already

every newsworthy event these days seems to be a reason to hang people for saying the wrong thing.

"How does she marry him after that? How does she go in front of (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell? That's pathetic to me," Robinson said during the radio segment, according to CBS Sports.

he was suspended. or how about the atlanta hawks owner talking about the economic implications of the racial makeup of the crowds at hawks games, in a way almost anyone might in that position? he had to sell out the day it was reported. just make up your mind to this: speech is not assault. and for god's sake, stop becoming outraged at people for saying even things that you are yourself, or that very many people, are thinking. there's no percentage in that. people do not want there to be any public actual discussion of anything, in particular race and gender. they want everyone chanting the same pc cliches in unison.

the baseline is that anyone gets to say whatever they like, and what you are doing is forcing dishonesty on everyone, even yourself. after that, you're going to wonder why no one appears to be a racist or sexist in a society that is structurally racist and sexist. my basic explanation of this always-apparently-mysterious fact is that it's one of the effects of of the overwhelming social sanctions against using certain words or expressing certain thoughts in public space. i think people really are or were confused between racism and the vocabulary of racism, sexism and the vocabulary of sexism: people seriously held the view that it would be a substantive improvement in the condition of women if no one ever used 'chick' or even 'girl', ever again. 

pretty soon, not only is everyone policing every word out of their own mouths, they are editing their own thoughts, or trying to, because they themselves believe that the basic thing that makes you a racist is that the word 'nigger' crosses your mind. that is, the general theory that drives the policing of speech - the idea that reality is the result of our simultaneous incantations - itself becomes widely accepted and applied. then if you do kind of edit that stuff out of your own internal monologue, you believe of yourself that you cannot be a racist. that would actually be true if the 'words-have-power' magick theory of reality were true. the ever-more thorough and effective censorship regimes around racism and sexism combined with the mysterious persistence of the hierarchies themselves actually show that words are shit. or proverbially: talk is cheap. surely anyone who has lived among humans has learned this lesson, and no one can have better data on that than members of oppressed groups.

please, tell me what to do and take all my stuff

when juxtaposed, two stories from today beautifully illustrate the concept of squishy totalitarianism, as well as providing an example of a system of government extremely typical of the 20th century: the marxist kleptocracy. or they give you a perfect crystallization of the essence of the state: the collectivist, unifying rhetoric - the government is all of us together! - and the swiss bank accounts into which the people producing that rhetoric are depositing more or less the entire nation. people want more more more of this or see no alternative whatsoever, so i predict that they'll be getting heaping helpings of what they're begging for: to be told what to do by the people who are robbing them. it's the social contract.

alibaba's ipo a bonanza for scions of chinese leaders

ruling communist party says firm belief in marxism will help halt moral decline

subversive blimp

now here's an extremely good idea: flying a blimp over that nsa installation in utah. it's whimsical, and yet it shows that there is resistance. also, it has the funny flavor of spying on the spies. it sort of suggests vulnerabilities, but in a harmless way.  it's the kind of thing you do when you can't really do anything. it's especially right that it's greenpeace and the tenth amendment center. nsa and the atmosphere of total digital surveillance shows why left and right don't matter anymore.

pikkety pikkety

this pikkety thing is rather amazing, but i don't think you can really claim something to be a classic of economic or political theory if the solutions are so primitive: a world tax on wealth. right, we're always taking every opportunity (climate change, say), to work toward a world state. why? because we are a nightmare species engaged in endless self-devourment. it might seem obvious that if wealth inequality is a problem, you need a power sufficient to redistribute. but this is just an abstraction: you are only beefing up the hierarchy you are trying to address. so really, say you put angela merkel or hillary clinton in charge of redistributing the world's wealth. here is who hillary is redistributing it on behalf of: goldman sachs. when we're not happy with her, we can turn it over to paul ryan and the oil industry. what would it take to teach you that constituting ever more intense hierarchies of political power is just a version of the very same problem you are using it to address? de blasio, warren, etc: you just can't be coming with that shit again. for real?

if there were a world redistribution scheme, it would be run by, say, dominique strauss-kahn, dedicated to blowing the rich and fucking the poor. or you could put it into the hands of a maoist, i guess, and start opening camps. anyway, it will be in the hands of someone(s), around whom a new or the old world power/money hiearchy will configure. just picture the staff/vehicles/offices/prestige of the world cash distribution institution. we'll all be put to tribute, and we'll all have to live all day with the insanely empty, self-serving jive that the institution will emit. all the children of privilege will want to do is enter this hierarchy and climb, etc.

insincere

when democrats talk about income inequality, all they want is political hierarchy. when republicans talk about individual rights, all they want is economic hierarchy. neither party's ideology is compatible with even a vaguely sincere egalitarianism. 

etiology of the future

so apparently rand is going to remark this evening that it is not clear who is running the government of the united states. it is a united states senator, hinting at the awful truth: intelligence coup. the brennan-feinstein conflagration is where this pinches immediately on the senate. got a little prediction for you, though. in the next few weeks, some sort of scandal will bloom around rand paul. if it does, here is the likeliest etiology: leaked by intelligence sources through several insulating layers to rachel maddow or chris hayes. they're going to want msnbc doing to him what it did to christie: day after day of relentless coverage. or honestly, fox is almost as hostile, and that's where you'd want to destroy him for the republican nomination. they will want him to understand who did it, so they will convey their own responsibility one way or another.

the gravest threat

so here's an argument that one might hear at some point from putin, which i feel even angela merkel might receive with a certain sympathy: the greatest threat of totalitarianism, everywhere in the world, is presented by the government of the united states. the government of the united states is engaged in a new imperialism on a new terrain. these are capacities that should be interpreted by everyone, starting with the citizens of the united states, as presenting an extreme threat: i want you to really think about the access to power that this world-wide surveillance/control provides. any country in the world can and should represent this thing as an invasion of sovereignty. the blackmail possibilities alone - on ceo's, political leaders (including the domestic congress and supreme court), military people - are crushing. they have all the passwords, hence access to infrastructure systems, missile systems, everyone's accounts, etc. in this light, that putin has sheltered snowden makes him plausibly a brave fighter for freedom in the face of an emerging world totalitarian state. this is, putting mildly, ironic.

venezuela, ukraine, and us

venezuela, ukraine: there they have pride. there they want freedom. here, we face one of the most effective exercises of totalitarian power ever created: a universal system of continual surveillance. why aren't we out in the streets, filling molotov cocktails and erecting barriers against storm troopers? because americans of our time hate and fear liberty, and love and respond sexually to their own subordination. all we want is to be raped by repulsive idiots such as james ("fucking") clapper. 

russia is capable of producing pussy riots. we are capable only of producing squads of hillary clintons: currently focus-grouping her positions and indeed her entire personality. 

pee tardy

i just want to say this up top: no doubt the tea party consisted of ignorant rednecks operating out of racial resentment. their opinions were manipulated by fox and rush, rather than by the harvard j.d.s manipulating the opinions of decent people from portland. however, they were so, so right about obama, and about the nature of the american government now, and about the fact that the american political tradition of freedom, as enshrined in the constitution, is over, betrayed. so absorb that. pardon my 'you' but i can't help it: they were right and you were wrong. they were true and you were false. they were clear and you were muddy. they were zoysia and you were astroturf. they were oppressed and you were oppressors. they said something and you said nothing. birtherism turned out to be a nice false symbol of the truth, which is perhaps why it has a bizarre power and immunity to evidence. right the man was born in america. but he is not an american as i would understand what that means.

misunderstood ideologies

speaking of marx, etc. it's true, capitalism has had its bad moments. but you show me where adam smith or milton friedman were all like: people should be brutally exploited! there should be chronic systemic poverty for most people! or anything like that at all. have you even read friedman? capitalism is a beautiful, harmless vision of human freedom, though of course every attempt to realize it in fact has been a horrendous moral disaster. that's just been kind of random, really; sometimes we ideologies just have a run of bad luck out there in the 'real world'. we get misinterpreted by assholes. sometimes it's nothing but assholes and their victims for centuries, really, but you gotta believe! real capitalism has never been tried. that's why i'm calling for immediate deregulation in every respect.

disrespectrum

as you may know, i reject the left/right spectrum as a way to describe anything, though sometimes i slip and use the locutions because everyone else is working with it. so the nyt or guardian, say, while in every sentence using 'crazy', also in every sentence go 'far right.' is cruz to the right of john mccain? in virtue of what? what does that mean? think of the set of positions you yourself associate with 'the american right': cheney's poisitions, say, and also rand paul's. really we need a taxonomy and not this bullshit anymore.

also i want to say this to the american left: you are outraged that someone would try to stop obamacare or whatever it may be; you want government running smoothly (and you regard protest movements as insane). now, i want you to understand what you are supporting when you support the democratic party, obama, and so on: among other things wall street in a huge way, and a total surveillance state. you are supporting the most intensely bourgeois vision of america ever articulated: government by lawyers, professors, bankers, google, and standardized-testing experts. are you comfortable with that? are you aware of that in yourself? i have this funny feeling that by your own ideals you are endorsing something terribly wrong. and you and many others are being pushed into taking a set of randomly grouped or flatly incoherent positions, or positions poised exquisitely opposite your professed principles, because you are flummoxed by this left-right bullshit.

at his discretion

obviously, the administration can keep open whatever bits of the government it pleases. e.g. chuck hagel recalled the defense department. and though they have suspended many programs that help people, they have preserved all oppressive mechanisms: the military, fbi, our amazing structure of universal surveillance. so let me ask you this: does or does not the budget of the us government have to originate in and spending be authorized by the house of representatives? i propose not at all, and if congress went on strike, the whole thing would just keep right on. obama seems to be shutting down bits in the order in which it makes for the best propaganda, but i don't detect the limits: what can he not spend without authorization, etc? anyway, if you think the constitution has any connection to the way this sucker is actually governed, i say you're wrong. it's like, you know, the soviet constitution: a beautiful model of reason and freedom that had nothing to do with anything in the actual world.

truth is a cascade of diamonds

bombazine on manning's dignified statement, made just before they re-gagged him. her!

what is our actual form of government?

an obvious entailment of the nsa situation is that, in fact, we have no idea who is running our government and hence, more or less, our lives. indeed, we have no idea what our actual form of government is or who holds the real power, like egyptians who were under the delusion that they'd elected their president. this should please liberals, for example, who regard the constitution as a ridiculous anachronism that keeps us from helping everyone through universal coercion. well, the constitution and the form of government it prescribes has been a joke for a long time, as anyone can now see thanks to snowden; certainly it has no resemblance whatever to the Thing currently running our lives: they leave some little institutions and phrases in place as a kind of show or historical re-enactment: that capitol, white house, supreme court in dc: it might as well be colonial williamsburg.

anyone who in fact controls a system of universal surveillance - i mean who has day-by-day management of the thing - can control anyone they please and make them do what they like. if keith anderson is in the mood, he's riding obama as in a performance of dressage. he controls who is in or out in the joint chiefs, the state department, justice, congress. he's in control of what limitations other branches of government impose on him. whoever or whatever the fisa rubber-stamp system is, it will end up doing precisely what he tells it to do. i'd recommend violent insurrection if it didn't seem entirely hopeless. so what i'd say is: just go limp, cultivate radical passivity: give up. this america thing was never going to work out anyway. people don't want to be free. and even if they do, they definitely don't want anyone else to be.

if you think the item below (skipping one) is fantastical, i want to point out that someone last year was reading the cia director's email, and they used it to end him. now you might just speculate that there might have been a little inter-agency rivalry going on. but the point is: put a bureaucracy in charge of universal secret surveillance and you have constituted a secret power that runs the country.

dangle

if you ever considered yourself a journalist, and your position is that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance all the time is a legitimate state secret in the american system of government and that revealing it to the people against whom it is conducted is an act of treason or espionage, you should tie an extension cord to a beam and dangle yourself by the neck. do it right now. any official who believes that that is constitutional or compatible with even a vague commitment to government by the people has no business anywhere in this country and has no place in our tradition. we'll re-admit you to citizenship, though not to office, if you crawl from the capital to the jefferson memorial on your hands and knees and beg forgiveness, stopping at the archives to read the constitution and the declaration and sob uncontrollably.

this has been extremely clarifying as to who's who.

after espionage

they've charged snowden. what i hope is that he has a doomsday device set to go off on his apprehension or unnatural death : every senator's calls to their gay escort services, coke dealers, or whatever it may be in a particular public servant/power-monster's case. or it could be insanely secret operations that would utterly compromise our diplomacy. this whole thing is a decisive demonstration that we do not live in a democracy; you can't have a democracy in which the government spies on everyone all the time, and in which that is itself a secret which it is treason to reveal. i very much think - i mean this completely seriously -  that this would justify a second war of independence; it is a far better justification than the arbitrary oppressions that led to the first. however, one now faces force so overwhelmingly annihilating that that seems futile. any form of resistance we can mount is required, however.

safety second

it's hard to evaluate the claim that the nsa surveillance program has prevented attacks, and it's the sort of case where people have such obvious and powerful motivations to lie, distort, etc. that you'd be silly believe them without evidence. now on the other hand, the complete assurance of greenwald, snowden and others that the program isn't effective against terorism at all is at least equally hard to assess. but here's my view: i think we're at that choice point. i would take somewhat more terrorism in preference to universal oppression of the sort created by the nsa.

it's often said that the first duty of an american president is to keep americans safe. no, you sweet little kindergartner, that's the first duty of your mommy. the first duty of the american president is to keep americans free.

killin em dronestyle

fbi chief says we'll get him. people like mike rogers and diane feinstein think we ought to be trying snowden - and, what the hell, greenwald - for treason, espionage, etc. they wanna strip him naked and torture him in a cell for awile, a la bradley manning. at any rate, i don't know why he went hong kong. but he seems to be alive and free so he's doing something right.

socrates and snowden

whatever you do, don't let the debate come down to whether snowden is a 'whistle-blower' or rather a 'traitor.' the worst is just to say 'he committed a crime; it's just that simple.' really you can't get moral decisions out of definitions of terms like this, and it's a merely bullying set of moves. well, i blame socrates for the technique, the old shyster.

snowden contd

the quality of the arguments shows something about the intelligence of our leaders in various walks of life. but i do particularly like the portrayal of snowden as 'solitary' by brooks and others. this has a variety of rhetorical functions, even though it has no logical force. it's a typical bit of 'mere' rhetoric: the idea is a kind of ersatz peer pressure. even if it were real peer pressure, of course, it wouldn't be a reason. so, first off, if snowden were standing as a solitary sentinel against injustice - all alone at tremendous cost - that would be even more admirable, because even more courageous. but he's not alone. even these polls that people are trumpeting show 40% support or something. there are plenty of people who accept every word of the argument he made and who would have made it themselves. for all you know, he had a little group of libertarian friends. 

he's 'solitary' only insofar as the state is the social in its entirety: the same old saw about the state being all of us all together. anyone who doesn't agree with that is a howling savage, beyond the pale, an isolate. no, actually, such a person might have plenty of real community. there are many ways to make connections, and many ways that dissent or revelation contributes to the social fabric. the unity you're recommending is false because coerced, but you're identifying it with the possibility of human community per se. the actual means that you're using to form all of us up into one community is a secret program to watch everyone all the time. really, time to face up to it: you are a person who could make an argument like that for a conclusion like that. but even the mainstream community depends on its defectors and subversives and truth-tellers for whatever decency and truth it possesses.

i do think that being in an elite and in particular exercising authority has an epistemically distorting effect. it's really like these people have lost their reason. what you do instead of giving easons when you have authority is just keep repeating yourself more loudly, or start to rant and screech at individual victims in your proximity.

an important moment

more notes: of course, anarchists are not the biggest fans of 'the rule of law' and the question of who's a criminal is not what interests me. but just for the hell of it, the constitution including the 4th amendment is the supreme law of the land, and hence snowden has exposed a vast criminal conspiracy.

so one of the people the administration is standing up there to threaten snowden and present a completely incoherent defense of this massive volation of our sacred way of life is james clapper, the director of national intelligence.

 

Over the last decade, much of the company’s growth has come from selling expertise, technology and manpower to the National Security Agency and other federal intelligence agencies. Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.

The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.

Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.

As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

from wikipedia, summarizing clapper's resume omitting booz hamilton.

James Robert Clapper, Jr. (born March 14, 1941)^[2][3] is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and is currently the Director of National Intelligence. He was previously dual-hatted as the first Director of Defense Intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence alongside the position of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.^[4] Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency(NGA) from September 2001 until June 2006. Previously, he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 until 1995.

 

the state/corporate interface is the very center of this total info regime: google, apple, verizon, booz hamilton and entire defense-contracting infrastructure, intelligence agencies with facilties all over the country and all over the world, integrated with drone targeting and a thousand other aspects. they are developing databases for all global locations and all individuals at all times.

The gargantuan $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City features 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet.

The Utah Data Center is a data farm that will begin harvesting emails, phone records, text messages and other electronic data in September.

talking to a leftish friend last week, he was doing a common theme: i don't pay enough taxes. i want us to help each other... we're paying for the power that subordinates us. some of us are happy about it!

 

 

 

 

glenns and eds

also thank god for glenn greenwald. this is a test of basic decency or where you decided whether or not to support slavery. anyone who spends any time considering whether it might be alright to keep these programs secret, for example by focusing outrage on ed snowden,  is a mere lover of tyranny. don't let anyone obscure even the trivial question of legality; read the 4th amendment. 

i myself went at first with 'oh we figured that.' but it's one thing to vaguely understand that you might be under surveillance, and another to show in detail that and how this is possible. one thing is that a world in which some of the things they are describing are happening, they might get to the point of info control at which edward snowdens become impossible. but right now, they are still possible. practical measures of all sorts, legal and illegal, to keep them possible, are essential. 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

 

safety first

well, you sort of figured they were scooping everything. really, obviously, most of us only depend for the non-detection of our crimes on the fact that there's too much information to actually read, though i'm sure the algorithims get better here as in china. but however: understand that anyone is arrestable at any time, in virtue of their tax posture, drug consumption, possessions of one sort or another, associations. that is really the squishy totalitarian sine qua non or some shit. yo y'all want this. you need to be safe! neo-cons and safetynetters agree. you have already been searched.

remember last week, when you were arguing that the government is all of us, working together, our agent of collective identity, our collective justice? funny what it takes to make that shit happen.

one thing you see immediately: the government regulates these communications companies, and these communications companies maintain an oligopoly, and they  and it are all one big sprawling machine when it comes to processing your information. also health-care, benefits, taxes are all worked in; you are never not embroiled. but you just just try to chill and there's no real reason you should particularly come to anyone's attention. can't intern everybody! but we could intern anybody.

where is russ feingold? paging russ feingold!

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Iran, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or 'safety-net' programs that enhance consumption and give large parts of the population a sense of dependency and security; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance;  overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.  

 

i love the way you love

Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Sung and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Alain Badiou and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did, or have been represented as saying they did, even if they acted entriely incompatibly with it: the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, or anarchist point of view, this spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth. And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Massively, quite obviously false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political progam; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and incoherent.

 

as anselm argued, that is a vocal performance than which no greater can be conceived in soul music, proof of the existence of god. it's dynamic, baby.

 

that's - yes! - little beaver and willie clarke doing everything from b.b. to shaft.