cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

people who regard themselves as journalists came out of this weekend thinking that the main news story on charlottesville is what the president didn't say. this obsession with the presidency and cult of leadership is so stupid on so many levels, but it's also really quite evil. it is a devastating reflection on the personalities of those it holds in its thrall. that's my splicetoday column this week.

New Post

Odd how things fall apart as the center folds in on itself and the falcon shits on your scrap of paper. The hell with Yeats. 

I remember these many decades later listening like a good little Catholic boy as my 8th Grade teacher and the school principal, Sister Mary Louis, read Dulce et Decorum to us in class. An Irish immigrant Franciscan nun, she had lost an uncle at the Somme, a cousin at the GPO, and a second cousin to the Black and Tans. Gave her an odd attitude toward it all...which I guess I caught. She also made me read Aristotle. This was an odd punishment at 13. 

 

So, I blame myself on the mixed influence of Kaiser Wilhelm, Winston Churchill, Michael Collins and Padraic Pearse. 

 

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/07/29/dispatches-from-wolf-country-dulce-et-decorum/

america's heroes

the police response in fort lauderdale appeared deranged and incompetent, even more than usual: one poor sucker, already in custody, and a military invasion of the entire region: armored vehicles rolling in; squads of armored men with automatic weapons dashing here and there. there were hours of absurd panic long after the situation was resolved, as people would suddenly start running, usually because some squad of swat started stampeding somewhere as they chased phantom shooters. as always, one shooter multiplies to three. and i just want to remark: you bring overwhelming bulletproof force to the whole region, and still, you panic. that you have panicked is one reason that the response is absurdly disproportionate. they'd like to praise the courageous police response. i'd like to condemn it as an expression of cowardice and incompetence. one of these days, the response is going to be worse than the event.

the other thing i want to point out is that many of these shooters have been armed and trained with weapons by the u.s. military. yeah we can talk guns and we can talk mental illness. but perhaps we should also talk about who is training whom to kill. 

a feature of the 'war on terror' is that it engulfs 'the homeland': it has led to a militarization of our society in myriad aspects. really, we're all supposed to be soldiers. but every town has an occupation force that can quickly invade that town itself with massive military force. (oh, also the 'wot' has imposed universal surveillance.) it's extremely disturbing when brought to bear on protesters; it is embarrassing when it is brought to bear on some mentally ill person with a gun. they want overwhelming annihilating force to deal with everything. they lurch with incredible incompetence into a dangerously or absurdly assymmetric response. then they want credit for their service and physical courage. one thing i'd credit them with: the end of american liberty.

paradoxically but obviously, these huge and panicky systems are extremely vulnerable. i'm telling you any chump could stop any major city with a few lumpy backpacks. anyone who chooses to can essentially freeze aviation over the whole country. law-enforcement consultants seem grim and implacable on television; they preside over systems that are way too big to be smart or fast; they're jammed in a million procedures. every attempt to make themselves so huge and so armored and so armed that they are irresistible makes them more vulnerable to the pinprick and more liable to make a terrible mistake somewhere.

the three-body problem

every lone shooter these days becomes three shooters (as in munich, dallas, baton rouge), wearing black and armed with long guns, terrorizing the city until they collapse back into a single unimpressive corpse. there must be something symbolic about this, for the whole multiplying shooter phenomenon takes place in the mind of authorities. they respond as though they were dealing with a supernatural being or a wild psychological projection: the father shooter, the son shooter, and the holy ghost shooter; the id shooter, the the ego shooter, and the super-ego shooter. they often insist on multiple shooters long after there can be any reason to; it's sort of a yearning or syndrome or something. it's definitely a symptom of panic, when psychological complexes emerge unfiltered.

the western tradition is just obsessed with tripartite distinctions, as in plato, catholicism, hegel, marx, freud, etc. i have no idea why. but it has nothing at all to do with the way the world is.

the sci-fi army of occupation is here to protect you.

we're supposed to look at an image like the one below and sympathize with the police because they are so vulnerable. they are amazingly armored head to foot, however: zoom in on that footwear; i have no idea what that is. but you better hope they don't start rodneykinging you in that stuff. it sure as hell looks like a sci-fi army of occupation, doesn't it? they were there to protect iesha evans, thank god, and her first-amendment rights. they did arrest her, though. no doubt they felt that she put them in jeopardy, or failed to listen as they barked orders at her. one thing about the recent encounters: people - in particular black women (diamond reynolds) - are maintaining amazing composure as police freak out: that image has that too.

if y'all keep dressing up in darth vader drag and coming downtown with your arsenal it's going to be hard to hold on to the idea that we're on the same side. i'd pull together with a lot of different people, but not if you're just doing a pantomime of total evil, violence, and oppression all day. you're occupying the neighborhood with storm troopers, then whining that you're on our side. it's obvious, in particular with blm protests, that the police are in a completely oppositional stance, bringing an ever-more annihilating arsenal to bear on the american people. that is not going to turn out well; it already hasn't.

you gonna come down here like that and then complain that you're not getting enough support, that we don't "have your back'? that line of killer robots behind you has your back; i guess you'll have to be satisfied with that. 

just a wee bit hard not to feel the totalitarianism these days, is it not? this is where american democracy fetched up.

you see what i mean.

(jonathan bachman/reuters)

i'm spliced, asserting again that the basic reason there are police at a black lives matter demo is not to protect the demonstrators. one thing to ask yourself: which way are they facing?

trying to step back a bit, while also blogging.

just a few remarks, while i register the fact again that i don't know what to say. i'm glad i'm not a tv instant pundit.

it's amazing how wrong the news accounts have been, partly coming straight from the police. that 'triangulated' ambush just wasn't, and also wasn't that likely.

aren't the instant calls for healing beginning to sound a bit ersatz or useless? feel for a while in other dimensions. there might be healing some day some way. not today or for some time for anyone for real, i believe. all the cliches are so fucking empty: time for an honest dialogue! if that's what you've got, remember that silence is an option. come back if you ever have something real to say.

i'm just going to say that the idea that you have a hundred heavily armed police at the protest against police violence specifically to 'protect' protestors (which everyone is saying all the time) is really very not honest, though the police gathering was itself not violent, one supposes. but bristling with the tools of violence. they are there to control and intimidate protestors, and out of fear. and if you're in that march and the body armor, long guns (and eventually, robot bombs) etc are there too, and they're saying they're there to protect you, your question is going to be 'protect us from what?'

don't misunderstand me to be saying that shooting is a good idea whatsoever. it's worth keeping in mind who trained micah johnson for combat.

i don't know what to think or how to feel

i'm spliced today, trying to figure out what to think and what to feel after orlando. it's a moment of reverse-punditry: i am trying to register the bewilderment, the numbness, the conflicting emotions, my own incoherent ideas, my attempt to believe in something. what i'm hoping is that this expresses other peoples' experience too. (correction: i've argued that the government shouldn't control all the weapons.)

trump was horrible today, and i wish in general politicians and everyone else would pause for a human, confused, self-reflective response rather than just dropping an event into whatever bucket they've got. but that too is human: we want to comprehend. but we are satisfied with ersatz comprehension, instant categorization. this is a way the intelligence with which we continuously congratulate ourselves, our great adaptation, the miracle of consciousness, and so on, go terribly wrong. it's what might extinguish us eventually. it's the intellectual form that is part of what leads us to war, bigotry, slavery, and, in short, killing.

on mass killings

we're in a patch where people are trying to kill as many people as possible, very frequently in very many places, in the name of many different ideologies, or because of many different pathologies: for any reason or none. the question begins to occur, whether people are engaging in mass killings because of their beliefs, or whether they're cultivating beliefs in order to justify engaging in slaughter. the pattern of behavior is similar, whether it's islamist radicalism, white suprematism, a disgruntled employee, a fundamentalist christian going after planned parenthood, a bullied student, a schizophrenic, or whatever it may be. perhaps people look for a way in, something to justify their radical break with the species. or at least, the causation - the interaction between beliefs or illnesses and actions - might be complicated, for while the motivations or causes for the killings are various, the patterns of behavior are relatively repetitive, stylized, salient. it is the act of mass killing and the technologies that make it possible or articulate its forms, rather than the reasons or psychology of the killers, that is characteristic of our time.

it may be that you informally suppose that human beings are social creatures, that there's nothing worse than isolation, and that pulling together for unity is the very essence of human goodness, where we should go or even are going in the slow victory of progress. but, on the other hand, 'the social' is dark, dark. other people all around you, at the office, on the strip, in trains and planes and automobiles, can be extremely difficult in a million ways: this is truer of the people close to you than others. really both are true: we feel the urge to unify, and our unifications are incredibly problematic and oppressive.

some people love a crowd. and some people feel profoundly claustrophobic in a crowd. some people are happy to agree with their friends; some people constantly feel constrained by the epistemic and a thousand other social constraints. this is the reality of us. from cradle to grave, people might nurture and assist you; they might break you down or oppress or destroy you pointedly, or they might spend your whole life pretending you don't exist at all. i do think a lot of these people have reached the point where they were negating the whole species, in all of us and in themselves, where they reached the (bent?) judgment that we, all of us, homo sapiens, are better off not existing than existing. whether we deserve to exist: i think that is an open question, myself. but once you become certain that we don't, you may have released yourself to attempt maximum destruction. (actually i think that the right response is a hearty yet despairing belly-laugh.) then you might be asking yourself: ok, where's an opportunity, or what's a justification, etc?

how we are

the response to mass shootings long ago became routinized, mechanical; with apparently renewed passion, the nytimes calls for sensible gun laws, if you can imagine that. you feed it from whatever angle into your political machine. this is one of many ways to try to grapple with the apparent incomprehensibility, the excess, the extremity, the inhuman howling from within the human. 

i do think the 'incomprehensibility' is important; it's scary not to understand it, but it's even scarier to understand it. to say it's incomprehensible is to say, among other things, 'i would never do that.' and yet i too feel the incomprehensibility; i don't usually write about mass shootings anymore because i don't know what to say.

nevertheless, an observation: we suck. i really do believe that in many dimensions human beings - and by this i mean myself as well as you - are irremediably flawed. i feel the power in the doctrine of original sin, and the mystery of why a good god would create fundamentally depraved creatures or suffer them to exist is another way of saying that our hearts are incomprehensible to ourselves. we don't even know what we ourselves might do.

you know, i'd owe a naturalistic exploration, though it'd be half-assed. but evolution produced, for examples, creatures with allergies or like without eyes in the back of our heads. it's compatible with a lot of what might be thought of as mistakes. anyway, the historical form of demented or wholly counter-productive or gratuitous violence and rage varies in its objects, its forms. it might be a giant bureaucracy organized for genocide or a cult of human sacrifice or take-a-ride-in-the-suv-and-shoot-up-the-holiday-party. we ain't gettin no better, putting it mildly.

anyway, that's no explanation. more of a feeling. but what i do want to say is: this is us.

narratives of redemption

i don't know whether ben carson's account of his own violent childhood will hold up or not. but i do know the shape of his story, which is the classic narrative of redemption a la augustine or malcolm x. one makes one's own life into a parable of one's teachings, or crystallizes them in one's own body. indeed, you might hear a narrative of this shape at any given church service or twelve-step meeting. now, with regard to both augustine and malcolm, people have asserted or speculated that the sinfulness and degradation were exaggerated in order to heighten the redemption, but again i am not in a position to evaluate their factual truth. if you want to see the wrong version of this - the self-aggrandizing, self-authorizing slime side - recall the case of james frey. nevertheless, such narratives are necessary to hope if you are really suffering from yourself and often they are more or less factually true.

purely symbolic

i think people may be tiring of purely symbolic responses to substantive questions. charles blow is still spending all day complaining about what words we use to describe root, in a situation in which literally everyone is competing to condemn him most vociferously, in which the gov is calling for his death, etc. and most of the debate seems to have moved to the confederate battle flag. this is beacuse symbols and signs are more easy to adjust than real objects and attitudes. don't let people like that tell you that they also want to have a substantive conversation about race: all they want is euphemisms: all they want is unconscious racism. then again, obama talked about the word 'nigger' today, and he didn't go all 'n-word' superstitious. i've seen some black commentators here and there rolling their eyes. the symbolic stuff just takes the media down a miserable conetentless road of distraction, quite as though none of them want to do or say anything.

executed in self-defense

 

i saw the end of the judge's presentation in the brelo case in cleveland. now, maybe there is a point to the idea that, in a situation where 12 officers are riddling a car with bullets, you can't tell which shot was fatal. i would think that's a good argument for prosecuting them all, actually. but judge john p. o'donnell quite gratuitously exonerated all the officers (though only one was on trial) by the end, saying that they all had an objectively reasonable belief that they were in immediate danger. offhand, that seems ridiculous to me: they were no more in danger than any other firing squad engaging in an execution. then again, it doesn't take much to make cowards feel endangered.

 

wholesome slaughter

there's something almost wholesome in america today about the sort of slaughter you get from a war of biker gangs. a battle between cossacks and bandidos at a 'bikini bar' seems relatively comprehensible or traditional, as opposed to just arming up and mowing down schoolchildren or moviegoers for no reason at all. 

the coalition of outside agitators assembling in ferguson is the best ever:

But the perception that they are among the visitors has shifted some scrutiny from police to the eclectic clusters of civil rights activists, anarchists, nihilists, socialists, hipsters, artists, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists.

nihilists! say what you like about national socialism, at least it was an ethos. i've also heard talk of 'maoists'. we welcome all to our coalition of destruction! even hipsters! ultra-violent hipsters only, please. statement by ron johnson: "fucking artists shouldn't come here to our city, but if they do, they leave us no choice but an overwhelming military response. we will splatter the streets with their blood like neo-expressionists." it's ok, man! the destruction will ebb when the semester gets going at risd.

and get your buddhist ass back to boulder. fuck.

i've been out of pocket but obsessively following ferguson, too. the authorities certainly are behaving as though they are in an armed insurrection. i am not impressed so far with the 'outside agitators' theme, which sounds familiar from arkansas circa '63. also, i am not as convinced as the msm about who may be shooting whom.

as i understood the chief of police in ferguson in his press conference an hour ago, he was asserting that protestors fired on the police last night, that they were taking 'gunfire'. i have not heard anyone else say that or seen any evidence for it at all. but even as he was calling for peace, he was describing war, and justifying more crackdown. obviously, if people are firing on the police...

ferguson

been trying to think of what to say about ferguson. maybe i've got nothing fresh, but (prodded by adam) i'll at least utter some sentences. i am on michael brown's side and the side of the folks who are resisting. one thing that the resistance has exposed clearly: what race and class mean there, and here, now: they've been militarized. there's an occupying army in missouri, trying among other things to keep people from reporting on what they're doing. good luck with that. obviously, this case is emblematic of things that are happening on the streets of america all the time. we've got to identify with the people being victimized and the people fighting back: this is happening to us, do you understand? to our children. whatever distance we might feel or even want to feel, from that neighborhood, that family, etc, we should work to collapse that distance. this cannot be tolerated in our society.

i was more mystified than most and more ambiguous than many on the trayvon martin situation. that wasn't exactly a cop, or even exactly a white man. this, i think, is already a far clearer case, though of course there's plenty to find out. the police response has done nothing but confirm everyone's awful misgivings or awful knowledge.

Back in the highlife again...

I have a new piece up on the Defeatists. It will surface eventually over at Veterans Today but this one doesn't have the musical pieces just linked but embedded. As well as John Oliver's piece last night on our version of the great leap forward, the Nuclear Program. Did you know our Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has been in charge while we decommissioned fewer nuclear missiles than were done under Bush? Either one? Amazing. 

 

I'm fairly irate over a lot of things involving the various wars we're not fighting but are definitely invested in. What the hell? The one way to guarantee Sunni-Shiite peace is through blowing up Christian and Shiite shrines...this is obviously a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded al Queida (just never stopped sending the checks they sent the Muhajadeen, I suppose) and are probably funding the current loonies. Malaki is the classic American puppet who really turns into a bad boy as soon as he can. Unfortunately, the bad guys were perfectly ready to smash his ass; so, blood bath. 

And so it goes. Gaza is horrifying; both Jon Stewart and John Oliver have laid out how insane that mess is becoming. When you can arrange to give the moral high ground away for generations to a bunch of missile firing terrorists, you've done something pretty amazing. Ukarine is dumbfounding. We're cowering behind our fence wondering what to do about 50000 children fleeing terror, hatred, violence, oppression and slavery, and we're questioning whether or not they deserve asylum? They deserve fucking medals; give them 40 acres and a mule, and Mom and kids will make that desert bloom...

Except we're out of water....

 

turned out to be sacha baron cohen after all. this time i think the reality film-making has gone too far.

the obvious explanation

8:15 bolo on a dark-skinned individual in a black hoodie. if anyone sees anything like that, shoot to kill. dude. it's trayvon martin. while you're at it, intern all white male loners.

7:25 sources tell me that the winklevoss twins are under suspicion. those fuckers hate america.

6:12 or wait. of course. it's a coup by ben bernanke.

6:00 PM obviously, the obama administration staged the explosions in boston so they could declare martial law and fully implement nationalized healthcare. no doubt they justify this to themselves with the fact that they'll be able to offer treatment to the victims of their own dastardly crimes!!

be sure to listen for anagrams and codes in the president's statement.

 

new york state of mind

msnbc reporter at the empire state building: 'you know, there's a big police presence at all these tourist centers: the empire state building, grand central, the statue of liberty. and that's how police were able to apprehend oops i mean kill the suspect.' it's also why there was a chaotic exchange of gunfire on a crowded street, in which perhaps everyone who got shot except the initial victim (11ish people) was shot by police.