tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53920982024-03-07T16:46:56.029-06:00elementropyConstructive NihilismRETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.comBlogger843125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-58437348033566548042015-12-20T06:12:00.002-06:002015-12-20T06:12:46.147-06:00New SiteI guess I've started doing this pointless blogging thing again now that almost everyone else has quit it.
The new site is <a href="http://elementropy.com">elementropy.com</a>. The same sort of low-quality ranting and ill-written, ponderous digressions but newer and with a prettier background.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-5495033995753546412013-04-10T02:57:00.001-05:002013-04-10T02:59:37.353-05:00"A Goddamned Murder Incorporated!"*<i>The New York Times</i>, 4/6/2013, <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/world/asia/origins-of-cias-not-so-secret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html?pagewanted=3&_r=3&>A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood</a>:
<blockquote> The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, <b>having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct</b>.
The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Mr. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.
John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.
“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. <b>But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.</b> </blockquote>
<i>The American Prospect</i>, 11/5/2001, <a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20020705173926/http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/19/mooney-c.html>"Back to Church"</a>
<blockquote> In the wake of September 11.....The hawks have flung blame all around for the massive intelligence failure that permitted the September attacks, targeting Bill Clinton, CIA Director George Tenet, and the defenseless Frank Church. September 11 was Church's fault, these critics explain, because his bipartisan committee--which probed not just CIA assassination plots but covert operations, domestic-mail-intercept programs, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's hounding of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other abuses--broke the spirit of the nation's intelligence community by exposing its embarrassing missteps.
<b>The Church bashing began the day of the World Trade Center massacre on ABC, when former Secretary of State James Baker said that Church's hearings had caused us to "unilaterally disarm in terms of our intelligence capabilities."</b> The allegation was soon repeated by Republican Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri and numerous conservative commentators. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called the opening of Church's public hearings "the moment that our nation moved from an intelligence to anti-intelligence footing." And the spy-mongering novelist Tom Clancy attacked Church on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor: "The CIA was gutted by people on the political left who don't like intelligence operations," he said. "And as a result of that, as an indirect result of that, we've lost 5,000 citizens last week." </blockquote>
It was James Baker's performance, which I caught live that day, that snapped me out of stupor and back into an even deeper cynicism of the Bush administration than I'd held after the stolen 2000 election. I knew then that whatever they did post 9/11 in military retaliation (and political retaliation at home) would be in massive bad faith. I'm not saying I'm awesome or especially prescient; I didn't predict an invasion of Iraq, didn't predict Skynet flying over Pakistan, nor, indeed, did I predict a Democratic successor running with the same bullshit into the next decade.
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9/11 allowed a relatively easy repeal of every post-Watergate protection against unhinged executive power, plus some. Torture, assassination, flying robotic death squads are a result of Power winning the pot; Baker's little comment was the first 'tell' of what sort of cards Power would be playing.
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*Supposedly uttered by a dumbfounded LBJ when informed of the Kennedy boys' many cloak-and-dagger operations in Latin America.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-50590894437629525762013-03-02T22:27:00.000-06:002013-03-02T22:35:32.599-06:00Ammo For GlennzillaGlenn Greenwald <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/24/glenn-greenwald-reader-q-and-a">sez</a>:
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<blockquote>
I'm currently writing a book on how media outlets constrict the range of political debate, using (in part) the marginalization of Chomsky as a window into how that works.</blockquote>
MOAR like an <a href="http://www.correntewire.com/overton_window_illustrated"><i>Overton</i> Window</a> into how that works, amirite? A semi-revealing <a href="http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2005/08/your-technocrat-liberal-post-du-jour.html">quote</a> from Howie the Putz's self-serving, wingnut-petting tome <i>Hot Air: All Talk, All The Time</i>:
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<blockquote>
"Mike looks absurd saying 'from the left' every night," says Christopher Hitchens. "It's hypocritical on the part of both him and the network."
Kinsley concedes that he does not uphold the liberal banner the way [Pat] Buchanan champions conservatism. In fact, he calls himself "a wishy-washy moderate." But he insists it's not necessarily bad for liberalism that he is less ideological than his right-wing counterpart.
"Certainly real hard-core, left-wing opinions don't get on Crossfire, just as they don't get on other shows," he says. "This is partly because a reflection of the range of American political debate, from extreme right to moderate left. And it's partly a knee-jerk reaction by television producers."</blockquote>
Further context and citation at the link; I'm not gonna paste and re-paste my own stuff lest I become a boring self-quotation machine like the inexplicably admired ex-Randroid Arthur Silber. Also, Glenn might want to check on <a href="http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/4793.html">concentration camp-enthusiast</a> Josh <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060717042323/http://pandagon.net/2006/06/29/tacitus-is-trying-to-play-us-for-chumps/">Trevino's hilarious notion</a> of what is and is not a proper representative of the left in the media or, indeed, anywhere in decent society.<br />
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<break>Also, too: <a href="http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2013/03/2002-was-neocon-sensibleliberal-hell.html">The previous post</a>.
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<break><break>Also, too, as well, cf. Chomsky: Somewhere out there on the internets is a very old interview with Chomsky by a rabidly hostile David Frum; I'll try to find it. Frum likes to affect moderation now but he used to be as frothy <strike>as Santorum</strike> as Erich von Erich, but as I recall even adjusting for era and context it was obnoxious. And who can forget what happened when Chomsky's blog at ZMag first allowed comments? At that time it was the longest comment thread I'd ever seen and it was 90% blargery -- with no small portion of antisemitism -- thanks to the "there it is, go get 'em" links posted by the allegedly philosemitic Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler and LGF. </break></break>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-70361220355698624742013-03-01T09:52:00.000-06:002013-03-01T09:52:40.810-06:002002 Was A Neocon-SensibleLiberal HellBack in the old days, TAPped posts were unsigned; the following is typical of the site and the era:
<blockquote>December 02, 2002
WHO IS THE LEFT? REDUX. We here at Tapped often complain about the way in which certain figures and groups -- World Bank protestors, Noam Chomsky, etc. -- are cast, in the debates over war, terrorism, trade and justice, as an entire side in the debate. <a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20060614042837/http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021216&s=exchange>This</a> discussion between Katha Pollitt and Christopher Hitchens, stemming from <a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20060614042837/http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021125&s=pollitt>this</a> Pollitt column calling Hitchens on doing just that, is well worth the read but also unintentionally revealing. We praised Pollitt's column at the time, but in this debate, she and Hitchens are still arguing over who gets to play the irrelevant left-liberal. Hitchens makes the same mistake as ever, citing Ramsey Clark, Alexander Cockburn, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Michael Moore and others as "the left." (This particular "left" is as small as the right suspects.) But even Pollitt, in her otherwise eloquent response, cites Tony Kushner, Patricia Williams, Marc Cooper and Ellen Willis as the real, credible liberals with whom Hitchens should be crossing swords. We don't have much of a problem with any of these folks. But if Pollitt is right, then liberal politics is indeed relegated, as conservatives insist, to a ghetto of radical academics, novelists, filmmakers and polemicists. Not to be snotty, but the men and women who shape policy and politics -- and, thus, people's lives -- in America don't care much about what Hitchens' and Politt's "left" have to say. (The fact that those who run the country don't take the left seriously is, sadly, a point of pride among too many progressives.) Yet there is a credible left -- those on "the left wing of the possible" who have engaged the political process and seek to influence real policy. Eric Alterman has a good list of them <a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20060614042837/http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021209&s=alterman>here</a>.
Posted at <a href=http://web.archive.org/web/20060614042837/http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2002/12/index.html#000271>03:25 PM</a>
</blockquote> RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-48363900853652956062010-09-10T23:06:00.008-05:002010-09-11T01:46:14.266-05:00Everything's WrongBuried within <a href=http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000>an important story</a> about the Fourth Amendment's further spiral down the toilet is this perhaps more important story -- or rather, the start of one:<br /><br /><blockquote>Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.<br /><br />Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. <em>"No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter."</em> The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." </blockquote><br /><br />Neither are any truly poor people put forth for political office, nor are any poor people likely to be journalists, professional activists, political delegates, academics, or... indeed, BLOGGERS (hence the sadly few but righteous sneers at the "creative class" in 2008, and the many hysterical reactions thereto). The power and information structure of this country -- or, more to my point, the portion of society which has historical claim to looking after the interests of the poor -- is now totally incapable of advancing the agenda of the poor and working classes. This is why the Democratic Party is hostile to populism, and the Republican Party (especially its Tea Party adjunct) is careful to use it only cynically, in thorough <a href=http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/27/krauthammer/index.html>bad faith</a>. Or <a href=http://www.slate.com/id/2263788/pagenum/all/#p2>put another way</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>The real message....is not that the rich have become liberal. It's that American liberalism itself no longer feels the need to espouse an economic agenda that is decidedly different from that espoused by conservatives. Economics has been surgically removed from the realm of politics and transplanted into a technocratic robot that is run by the Federal Reserve and its acolytes. At least for the time being, most liberal politicians don't seem to miss it.</blockquote><br /><br />Populism is boxed and the poor, working, and (now, increasingly,) middle classes will continue to be shafted by the supposed "Working Man's Party", the Obama Administration, the liberal intelligentsia [sic], the activist organizations, and the blogosphere because the Democratic base refuses to hold people accountable -- by which I mean, it refuses to fire, shun, abandon, or "purge" the very same <a href=http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2010/09/eat-it-brad-delong.html>elements</a> that have abused it for so long. <br /><br />What to do? Well, unless you're comfy class cultural elitist, emigration's probably not a possibility. But there are alternatives, no doubt futile but perhaps worth something and I don't mean for spite value: Primary Obama. Vote Green -- or whatever left third party you're able to. Divert whatever resources possible from orgs that advance social liberal agendas to those that emphasize leftwing economic solutions and the class issue, and if you catch any shit for that from the cultural elitists remind them that the first best way to solve the "isms" everyone cares about (but they monomaniacally) is to stop pissing on the poor whose "culturally retrograde" element (a minority they take care to mistake for the whole) they fear and loathe so much that they elevate it above every other concern; for instance, support unions. Complain to editors and producers about wingnut and Sensible Liberal pundits and writers. Stop advancing the careers and prestige of bloggers who have demonstrated a pattern of hostility to the left -- a rule of thumb would be anyone who supported the Iraq War and anyone who critiques populism from the right (incidentally, these are often the same people, isn't that right, Matty Yglesias?); also, anyone who reaches immediately for the fallacy of undistributed middle -- iow, who characterizes your aim of accountability as an urge for purity control, or anyone who characterizes a left-of-neoliberal economic agenda as "communist".<br /><br />And then there is <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html?_r=1>this</a>, which a desperate populist might strategically support, at least as a bluff. For years now, the politically liberal branch of Academe has made common cause with the Wealthy Criminal Class, both consciously and literally (in the sense of economics departments) and unknowingly and figuratively (in the sense of sneering at the working class's cultural tastes -- or alleged lack thereof, and in the sense of fearing and loathing the working class's social conservatism). Tenure is middle class welfare. Since so many tenured "liberals" have, for reasons of culture or reasons of economic wingnuttery, helped the right wing destroy the the social safety net, it's only fitting that the poor, who have been paying the price, should return the favor: "You supported taking away my welfare, now I'll support taking away yours."RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-74787862687765631352010-09-10T21:26:00.006-05:002010-09-10T23:03:07.329-05:00Eat It, Brad DeLong*<a href=http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/07/marxism-for-tummies.html?showComment=1279200992308#c6461548093374997300>IOZ</a> is articulate on a subject near and dear to me:<br /><br /><blockquote>Every farmer I've known, and there are a lot of them in Western PA, has loved farming and sacrificed greatly in order to keep farming despite the best efforts of state-subsidized industrial agriculture to deprive them of their vocation. The idea that families gave up their farms because "manual agricultural labor sucks" is laughable. The fact that your evidence of this is dubious publicity stunt designed to highlight the no-duh truth that people habituated to a certain level of income will refuse to work rather than accept work paying them too far below their accustomed wage is indicative that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The whole sordid history of neoliberal intervention in the "developing world" is the decimation of subsistence economies, in which peoples produce locally most of what they need (subsistence doesn't necessitate "poverty," except to Nice Liberals and World Bank officials), via economic, environmental, and actual warfare, and the subsequent forced replacement of self-provision with economies of consumtion, in which people leave "manual agricultural work" for the sweat shop and the rural farm for the urban slum. The idea that you chalk these things up to individual choice rather than appreciating how they are necessitated by political and economic context only displays that it is you who holds the romantic notions, and the fact that any fifth-grader with a half-read copy of his Steinbeck can see the glaring flaws at the heart of the notion that agriculture stinks and it's great to get people off the farm and on the road ought to embarrass you.</blockquote><br /><br />A-fucking-men.<br /><br />*By Brad DeLong I do mean the personally decent but ideologically execrable blogger/economist/free trade-enthusiast. But I also use "<a href=http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/>Brad DeLong</a>" as an ankle-biting (at least to him, I hope) synecdoche to personify the type of cultural elitist Democrat whose "libertarianism with a human face" political economy, ethnocentrism (hypocritical at that: they love to accuse non-fans of their preferred policies of bigotry to the third worlders those policies make miserable but allegedly more wealthy), relative wealth (by which I mean personal insulation to the economic stresses their preferred policies have put on their less-fortunate countrymen) and total intolerance of anyone to their political left has, due to this type's total hegemony among the Democratic Party, utterly destroyed its ability to pursue the populist agenda needed to restore this country.<br /><br />Why does the Democratic Party in general and the Obama Administration in particular suck? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why has "social democracy" been so dumbed-down that it now means little more policy-wise than a progressive income tax and increased education spending? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why does America not make anything any more? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />How did the terms "leftist" and "liberal" get so diluted that they now mean, basically, "anyone who isn't a bigot -- at least, based on gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation; beating up the lower classes is okey-dokey -- and who also agrees with the no-duh fact that Donald Luskin and Jonah Goldberg are stupid fucking idiots"? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why does the Democratic elite constantly kick the Democratic base in the teeth? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it politically kiss the collective ass of the Wealthy Criminal Class at every opportunity? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it constantly search for a "good faith" opponent on the right with whom it can compromise -- or to whom it can cave -- but at the same time demonize, stonewall, or betray <i>everyone</i> to its left? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why are desperate immigrants from Latin America pouring into our country? What happened to their countries' economies? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why are western companies moving their manufacturing base to China where goods are made in working conditions somewhere between those of 19th century Dickensian squalor, the Gulag, and some Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare? "Brad DeLong"! Have you seen the pollution in China? What kind of ecocidal nutbag would want to help export our basest model of production and consumption, the most wasteful on Earth, to a country of two billion people? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Why is 2010 gonna be a disaster for the Democrats? "Brad DeLong"! Why is the Tea Party able to gain the sympathy of so many economically-shafted Americans whose welfare it obviously will not improve? "Brad DeLong"!<br /><br />Etc. Etc.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-5785545573428684282010-08-30T18:21:00.003-05:002010-08-30T18:36:31.632-05:00A Loser's Game<blockquote><a href=http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AhV80NrF0zGMsgd_im.a_44RvLYF?slug=jp-konerko082010>Baseball players</a> deal with strife in odd – and terrifying – ways. One potential Hall of Famer told me recently that when he’s in a slump, he dreams of himself swinging a bat underwater and flailing about until he drowns. Though [Paul] Konerko’s mental anguish never reached that extreme, his nadir two years ago forced him to confront the reality so many never can: He’s going to fail 70 percent of the time, and he’d better figure out a constructive way to do it.<br /><br />“There’s so much failure in this game,” Konerko said. “Getting too high isn’t a problem for most guys. Getting too low can be. It was for me. It’s been an ongoing battle. For a good couple years, I’ve been more rational how I view the negatives, the failures, and that’s only helped me get better. You kind of get tired of beating yourself up.</blockquote><br /><br />But it's natural to do so. <br /><br />The "Fail Even When You Succeed" aspect of baseball is what gives it poetry. It's also what draws wretches -- players and spectators. It's why, as Deion Sanders shrewdly noted, there are so many alcoholics who are lifers in the sport.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-3856836043992832992010-08-22T21:38:00.014-05:002010-08-23T20:44:54.744-05:00George Soros As A Bedwetting Retard's Version Of Ernst Stavro BlofeldScott, the supposedly more sane one of the three Powertools, <a href=http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/08/027038.php>fap-blurbs</a> a spy novel written by something called Michael Walsh, who, it turns out, is one of the many wingnuts stuffed into Andrew Breitbart's internet clown car. Check out this description of the novel's villain:<br /><br /><blockquote>As in Hostile Intent, Devlin's principal opponent is the shadowy, reclusive international financier, Emanuel Skorzeny, a German-born billionaire who harbors an enormous animus against western civilization, in part occasioned by his own morally complex past. Skorzeny despises the west for what he views as its terminal cultural weakness, and believes that society is no longer worthy of the great cultural treasures earlier generations of have bequeathed it. Although he has dedicated his life to making money, riches are not an end in themselves, but a means to a larger end: the euthanization of the west. </blockquote><br /><br />Lulz!<br /><br />Naturally, the book is dedicated to the "brave...men and women...whom we put on the front lines of a shadow war that dare not even speak its name, and the enormous personal sacrifices - including the ultimate sacrifice - that they must make in order to defend us". Double lulz!<br /><br />Holding <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhdanov_Doctrine>Zhdanovian</a> hackery -- of any variety, <a href=http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-commissars.html>wing</a><a href=http://www.nndb.com/people/427/000032331/>nut</a> or "<a href=http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2009/12/27/moffs-law/>leftist</a>"* -- in absolute contempt, I totally applaud this attempt at wingnut "literature". I'm thinking: Tom Clancy, with even worse prose but less masturbatory arms-technophilia mixed with a sort of late period Dos Passos sensibility. In other words: part Get Off My Lawn, part jock-sniffing, part Liberals Are Traitors. <br /><br />A possible passage from the text: <br /><br /><blockquote>Devlin, who used to battle the enemy at freedompundit.blogspot.com, now had the very enemy at his mercy; and in a race with a <i>for real</i> ticking timebomb, heroically used a XK-7 technique to extract valuable information which he was certain was legal no matter what the filthy traitors back home said, the stupid pussies.<br /><br />"WHooo are you??" Skorzeny wailed in terror.<br /><br />"Harvey --uh, Manfred...jen..sen...<a href=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095159/quotes>den</a>," Devlin heroically replied with the quick wit he'd sharpened to a razor-edge from years of snarking at communist negroes on his blog. Then he methodically attached the electrodes to various pain-points on Skorzeny's withered body, the genitals, the hooked nose..." <br /><br />"Jesus' will be done," Devlin silently reassured himself. As an afterthought, all the while fighting the distraction, he added: "Someday, if I and fellow thankless freedom fighters do jobs like this right, I'll be able to say that outloud, in America, without a liberal persecuting me for it!" He pulled the switch...</blockquote><br /><br />Hey, <i>that's</i> entertainment!<br /><br />*Srsly. Read that link. I have never seen a more enthusiastic avowal of Aesthetic Stalinism in my fucking life. Also, too: an obvious irony in all this. The scarequotes are around "leftist" because these people wouldn't know socialism -- which, among other things, implores one to not think with one's blood (i.e. selfish or groupuscular "identity") but with one's class -- if it were somehow served to them as a chocolate gravy cheeseburger doughnut. Yet, of course, they are identical to the historically worst sort of socialists in their means, which is not due to design so much as to their stupidity and a weird sort of convergent evolution but still: isn't it weird to find self-identified liberals or leftists gleefully adopting a trait of the darkest form of socialism and it <i>not</i> be its at least theoretical advancement of the working class?<br /><br /><strong>Adding</strong>: Am I being unfair? Am I just out to hurt someone's precious feely-feels? No. Search "The Simpsons" -- as in, the TV show -- in that <a href=http://www.amptoons.com/blog/>site</a>, then gasp in awe at their consistency-in-the-Emersonian-sense. Then compare that attitude to the similarly butthurt, similarly philistine nutjobs at Bozell's NewsBusters and, discounting for ideology, get a micrometer to measure the difference. Aesthetic Stalinists, I tell you.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Added</strong>: fixed some stuff. Also, also, too: yes, <a href=http://writhesafely.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/a-word-with-you/><i>hellholes</i></a>.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-59648902421320883502010-08-22T21:19:00.003-05:002010-08-22T21:32:50.770-05:00For Later Citation[FAIR USE and that that]<br /><br />Pasting some passages from John Judis's <a href=http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/76972/obama-failure-polls-populism-recession-health-care?page=0,0&passthru=MzM1ZDQ4YmRkZTM1NDBhZDJlNDNiYjg4OTM3OTRhNTk>"The Unnecessary Fall"</a>, an excellent piece even though published by the most useless rag in all of "liberal" journalism:<br /><br /><blockquote>In the United States, politics pivots around the allegiance of the middle class, even as its identity has changed from yeoman farmers and mechanics to store clerks, office workers, x-ray technicians, and small business owners. They are, in Bill Clinton’s words, “those who work hard and play by the rules.” They are the central characters in a populist rhetoric that goes back to the early republic. It depicts the middle class as embattled and threatened either from forces below (impoverished immigrants, welfare cheaters, ghetto rioters) or above (Wall Street speculators, state bureaucrats, K Street lobbyists). Populism can be embraced by Glenn Beck or Tom Harkin. It is intrinsically neither left-wing nor right-wing.<br /><br />Politicians, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, who found a way of using populism’s appeal during downturns have enjoyed success, while those who have spurned it have suffered accordingly. If, in circumstances like the present one, you don’t develop a populist politics, your adversaries will use populism to define you as an enemy of the people. That’s what Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late ’70s. And that’s what has happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barack Obama and to the Democratic Party he leads.<br /><br />Obama took office with widespread popular support, even among Republicans, and some of his first efforts, including the $800 billion stimulus, initially enjoyed strong public favor. But that wide appeal began to dissipate by the late spring of 2009. Disillusion with Obama fueled the November defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia. By January 2010, it was a crucial factor in Republican Scott Brown’s astonishing victory over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.<br /><br />In the postmortem debate over these defeats, some Democrats have blamed Obama’s dogged pursuit of health care reform while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. That may have been a factor, but the real damage was done earlier. What doomed Obama politically was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms.</blockquote><br /><br /><more><br />[...]<br /><br /><blockquote>As Obama was delivering his inaugural address, the financial crisis was already in full swing; and it was already apparent that financial speculation, outright fraud, and irresponsible and sometimes illegal housing-loan practices had played a very large role in precipitating the crisis. The public was up in arms. But, instead of rallying the public against the “money changers,” as Roosevelt had done in his first inaugural, Obama, taking a leaf from Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, put the blame on the public as a whole. “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age,” he declared.<br /><br />Over the next month, Obama would periodically criticize bankers after embarrassing revelations–at various times calling the bonuses they gave themselves “shameful” and an “outrage”–but, after hearing complaints about his rhetoric from the bankers, he would back off. At a private meeting on March 28 with 13 Wall Street CEOs, the president, his spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “emphasized that Wall Street needs Main Street and Main Street needs Wall Street.” And, in his Georgetown speech, Obama returned to his theme of collective responsibility. The recession, Obama said, “was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”<br /><br />Obama’s policy followed the same swerving course as his rhetoric. One week, he would favor harsh restrictions on bank and insurance-company bonuses, but, the next week, he would waver; one week, he would support legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount that homeowners threatened with foreclosure owed the banks; the next week, he would fail to protest when bank lobbyists pressured the Senate to kill these provisions. But, more importantly, Obama–in sharp contrast to Roosevelt in his first months–failed to push Congress to immediately enact new financial regulations or even to set up a commission to investigate fraud. (When Congress finally appointed a commission in July 2009, Obama and his party put a milquetoast Democratic politician, former California State Treasurer Philip Angelides, in charge of it.)<br /><br />Obama’s appointments also conveyed an impression that he wanted to let Wall Street off the hook. He appointed Timothy Geithner to be treasury secretary. Geithner claimed that he was not part of Wall Street, but, in his capacity as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he had served under a board of directors headed by JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. As New York Fed president, Geithner had been partly responsible for the decision to let Lehman Brothers go under, for the unpopular tarp program, and for American International Group (AIG) paying back its Wall Street creditors with government money. Geithner chose as his chief of staff a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Retiring Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan told me, “Most Americans were reading about the massive compensations and bailouts, and the administration largely hired people from the culture of Wall Street.”<br /><br />By the spring, Obama’s apparent tilt to Wall Street had sparked a right-wing populist revolt in the country. The newly formed Tea Party movement, Beck and Fox News, and a host of right-wing bloggers were leading the charge; but, in a less extreme form, the general public shared their anger. In an early April New York Times/CBS News poll, the public disapproved of Obama’s aiding the banks by 58 percent to 33 percent. In this same poll, public approval of Obama’s handling of the economy began to fall. Pollsters who did focus groups also traced disillusionment with Obama’s economic policies to his handling of the financial crisis.<br /><br />Congressman Barney Frank, who defends Obama’s policies, acknowledges that the president’s political difficulties began with the revelation that AIG, which had received $170 billion from the government, had paid out $165 million in bonuses to the division that had brought the company down. Geithner had known about the bonuses but insisted there were no legal grounds to block them. (It then came out that Geithner had pressured Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd to insert a provision in the stimulus bill that protected the bonuses.) “The pitchforks were out. It added injury to injury,” Frank says. That’s when public opinion of Geithner plummeted. According to a Rasmussen poll, 24 percent had a favorable view of Geithner and 44 percent an unfavorable one.<br /><br />The public’s view of the bank bailout and the AIG bonuses colored its view of the auto bailout, the stimulus, and health care reform. One of the rallying cries for the populist opposition to Obama was “where’s my bailout?” (Obama himself acknowledged that it was “one of the most frequent questions” he was asked in letters.) The auto program became a bailout for the GM and Chrysler CEOs; the stimulus became a bailout of government itself; and health care reform was a bailout for the uninsured–or “reparations,” as Rush Limbaugh put it. Wrote right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, “hardworking citizens were getting sick of being played for chumps” by “moochers, big and small, corporate and individual, trampling over themselves with their hands out demanding endless bailouts.” Obama and the Democrats were successfully portrayed as aiding “the moochers,” but not the “hardworking citizens.” In American politics, that’s a recipe for political disaster. <br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Some in the White House political operation recognized in the late spring that the administration’s economic efforts were being defined by right-wing populism and tried to push Obama to take a more populist tack. A group within the White House began calling themselves the “pitchfork gang,” but they would find their attempts to convince Obama to get tough on Wall Street or on insurance companies undermined by Geithner and by National Economic Council head Larry Summers, who were worried about upsetting business confidence. “There was a continual tension in the White House,” says a person who was privy to the discussions. “One week, we would be very hot, and then, the next week, we would dial it back.” <br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Contrast Obama’s attempt to develop a politics to justify his economic program with what Reagan did in 1982. Faced with steadily rising unemployment, which went from 8.6 percent in January to 10.4 percent in November, Reagan and his political staff, which included James Baker, Mike Deaver, and Ed Rollins, forged a strategy early that year calling for voters to “stay the course” and blaming the current economic troubles on Democratic profligacy. “We are clearing away the economic wreckage that was dumped in our laps,” Reagan declared. Democrats accused them of playing “the blame game,” but the strategy, followed to the letter by the White House for ten months, worked. The Republicans were predicted to lose as many as 50 House seats, but they lost only 26 and broke even in the Senate.<br /><br />Some commentators have noted Reagan’s popularity was even lower than Obama’s. But, on key economic questions, he did much better than Obama and the Democrats are currently performing–and voters expressed far greater patience with Reagan’s program. According to polls, even as the unemployment rate climbed, a narrow plurality still expressed confidence that Reagan’s program would help the economy. On the eve of the election, with the unemployment rate at a postwar high, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 60 percent of likely voters thought Reagan’s economic program would eventually help the country. That’s a sign of a successful political operation. If Obama could command those numbers, Democrats could seriously limit their losses in November. But Obama has not been able to develop a narrative that could convince people to trust him and the Democrats.<br /><br />Why has the White House failed to convince the public that it is fighting effectively on its behalf? The principal culprit is clearly Barack Obama. He has a strange aversion to confrontational politics. His aversion is strange because he was schooled in it, working as a community organizer in the 1980s, under the tutelage of activists who subscribed to teachings of the radical Saul Alinsky. But, when Obama departed for Harvard Law School in 1988, he left Alinsky and adversarial tactics behind. <br /><br />[...]<br /><br />He was not a typical blue-collar, bread-and-butter Chicago Democrat, but the kind of good government liberal that represents the upscale districts of the city, seeing in politics a higher calling and ill at ease with (although not in open opposition to) the city’s Democratic machine. He was also a post-racial politician who eschewed the hard-edged, angry rhetoric of Jesse Jackson. (That, too, is oddly reminiscent of Carter, who partly campaigned in 1976 as the white Southern antidote to George Wallace’s angry racial populism.)<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />These efforts to elevate Obama above the hurly-burly of Washington politics have been disastrous. Obama’s image as an iconic outsider has become the screen on which Fox News, the Tea Party, radicalright bloggers, and assorted politicians have projected the image of him as a foreigner, an Islamic radical, and a socialist. He has remained “the other” that he aspired to be during the campaign, but he and his advisers no longer control how that otherness is defined.<br /><br />The White House and cabinet officials he appointed have reinforced his aversion to populism. As Jonathan Alter recounts in The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Geithner and Summers repeatedly blocked attempts to get tough on Wall Street on the grounds that doing so would threaten the recovery itself by upsetting the bankers. For most of his first year, Alter writes, “Obama bought the Geithner-Summers argument that the banks were fragile and couldn’t be confronted while they remained in peril.” Its reluctance to come down on the bankers crippled the administration politically, making it far more difficult for it to get its way with Congress on a second stimulus program that would have boosted the recovery and Democrats’ political prospects. Bad politics can trump good policy.</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-70804978434123383552010-08-18T18:41:00.001-05:002010-08-18T18:44:07.188-05:00Pantload's Gift -- Was Regifted?<a href=http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/147784/days_of_rage_--_the_noxious_transformation_of_the_conservative_movement_into_a_rabid_fringe_/?page=entire>Hmmm</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>While covering the rally, I witnessed sign after sign declaring Obama a greater danger to America's security than al-Qaida; demonstrators held images that juxtaposed Obama's face with images of evildoers from Hitler to Pol Pot to Bin Laden; others carried signs questioning Obama's status as a U.S. citizen. "We can fight al-Qaida, we can't kill Obama," said an aging demonstrator. Another told me, "Obama is the biggest Nazi in the world," pointing to placards he had fashioned depicting Obama and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in SS outfits. According to another activist, Obama's agenda was similar to Hitler's: "Hitler took over the banking industry, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police. [The community-organizing group] ACORN is an extension of that."<br /><br />The seemingly incongruous Tea Party propaganda recalled signs waved by right-wing Jewish settlers during rallies against Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his support of the peace process, portraying him as an SS officer and as the French collaborator Marshall Petain. In 1995, amid the provocative atmosphere, a young right-wing Jewish zealot assassinated Rabin. The Israeli tragedy was a cautionary example of targeted hatred leading to violence.</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-47057553767267590282010-08-16T19:00:00.004-05:002010-08-16T20:13:32.041-05:00Buffett 1, Randroids 0<blockquote>WARREN BUFFETT: Reasonable return is good enough, Charlie. I mean, <br />50 years ago, I was looking for spectacular returns, but I can’t-- I can’t <br />get them. We have-- we have eight or $10 billion to invest every year. <br />And we’re in the utility business, and it’s the same thing there. When we <br />build electric generation or something of the sort, we shouldn’t expect a <br />spectacular return. We’re building things that are essential to society, <br />and people need our services. They really don’t have any choice in the <br />case of the electric utilities, for example, and sometimes in case of rail. <br />And we should get a decent return on that. Enough to encourage us to keep <br />putting money into the business, but we’re not entitled to spectacular <br />returns.</blockquote> <br /><br /><br /><br />I'll never say that a billionaire like <a href=http://www.charlierose.com/download/transcript/10711>Warren Buffett</a> is the best guy EVAR or anything, but it would be a better America if more wealthy people were like him than like.. well, like the rotten soulless Randroid robber baron fuckfaces they are. And I don't say that because Buffett has famously pledged to bequeath his wealth to charity (a move progressives massively overrate), but because he invests the right way: long-term, and conscious of externalities and obligations. <br /><br />Even better, he doesn't pretend that people have total freewill within this system. The Big Lie upon which libertarians in general and Randroids in particular base their entire venal world-view is that everyone is "free to choose" every transaction they take. Buffett, a utility owner, understands that people have to have electricity and that this gives him monopolistic or oligopolistic power over consumers, so he'd better deliver the product dependably, and he'd better not gouge people. Longtime students of Buffett will also know that he thinks this way not because of morally (maybe there should be a "just" in there) but because his "take the long view" business sense tells him the little people can't be abused for too long because if they are they will eventually throw the big people up against the wall.<br /><br />This power structure is what Zizek <a href=http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/11/6/philosopher_and_cultural_theorist_slavoj_iek_speaks_at_cooper_union_in_new_york_city>means</a>, incidentally, when he's talking about rent, which is what the common person is effectively <i>forced</i> to buy in order to function in society: food, shelter, electricity, water, health care... and also, more and more, certain technologies like computers and televisions (by the way, the Red Cross agrees that a TV qualifies as a "necessity") that facilitate what he calls "participation." When you have to have something you're not "free to choose" that something. It's at this point that the libertarian/Randroid will splutter something like "the Amish do it!", which is so ridiculous that it proves their bad faith. In my dream social democracy people like Buffett exist, own property, make money, are taxed accordingly; meanwhile, Randroids and libertarians, who believe there is "no such thing as society" get their wish and are removed from society -- straight to the fucking gulag.<br /><br />Adding:<br /><br /><blockquote>WARREN BUFFETT: ... but we’ve got -- we’ve got almost 60 million <br />people living in households where 20 -- the top income is $21,000 or less. <br />That’s the top of the 60 million people. So we can do better. Now, we <br />have done better over time. I mean, we put in Social Security and we’ve <br />done things in the country that have worked in the direction ...<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: Medicare and Medicaid.<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: But a prosperous country should not just be <br />prosperous for the people like me who are wired in a particular way at <br />birth -- no credit to me -- but I happen to know something about capital <br />allocation. It wasn’t, you know, I could have instead -- I could have been <br />-- I could have been wired, you know, so I was, you know, I don’t know -- a <br />great ukulele player. But there’s more money ...</blockquote><br /><br />The above quote shows that Buffett understands and rejects the social Darwinist root of libertarianism; the following quote shows he understands and rejects the libertarian/Randroid denial of society infamously enunciated by Margaret Thatcher:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>WARREN BUFFETT: And you don’t want to mess up the market system that <br />works to bring out of people what their best talents are, but the market <br />system is not perfect in any kind of distribution of wealth. And taxation <br />is a way where you get to the excesses of what the market system produces <br />and where you take care of the people that get the short straws. In a <br />country as prosperous as we are, nobody should get a really short straw.<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: You know, some people are going to hear you say that <br />and they’ll say, "Warren is talking about sharing the wealth. There he <br />goes .."<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I’m talking about sharing the prosperity.<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: You’re ...<br /><br /> (CROSSTALK)<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: I’m prosperous because of the society around me. <br />Stick me down in some poor country and I’ll walk around and say I allocate <br />capital, you know, and they’ll say, so what? What we need is a guy with a <br />strong back. You know, and I don’t have a strong back.<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: But can you row a boat or something?<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Something like that.<br /><br /> CHARLIE ROSE: Right.<br /><br /> WARREN BUFFETT: So -- so society -- listen, when a couple of <br />middleweights fight it out on Pay Per View this weekend and get $49.95 from <br />me, or whatever it maybe, and I can’t remember their names two weeks later, <br />you know, they are benefiting not because of their own talent that much, <br />but because some guy invented television and then invented cable <br />television, and learned how to change a stadium of 15,000 people into a <br />stadium of 300 million. So they benefit from society. We all do. And <br />some like me benefit enormously from society, you know. I can’t do it by <br />myself. Stick me on a desert island, you know, you do not want to be on <br />the same island.<br /></blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-85572185593364789482010-08-15T00:20:00.005-05:002010-08-15T01:38:55.151-05:00The Fascist ClownFrom Zizek's "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" <a href=http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/11/6/philosopher_and_cultural_theorist_slavoj_iek_speaks_at_cooper_union_in_new_york_city>speech at Cooper Union</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>Look at Italy...you have a chief of state (de facto), who consciously ruins his own authority, makes fun of himself, it's really like -- Michel Foucault, in his late seminars, spoke about eblouissement...Groucho Marx in power, clown in power -- this is effectively approaching. For example....I can't -- I couldn't believe it... a couple of weeks ago, Berlusconi's press representative, a lawyer, said it's a filthy lie that Berlusconi is impotent: he's ready to prove in court he's not impotent. I'm just asking -- what? how? you know what I mean..... I see this as an all-around tendency, this eblouissation of power, loss of the dignity of power.</blockquote><br /><br /><br />From Zizek's <a href=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/slavoj-zizek/berlusconi-in-tehran>essay</a> in the <i>LRB</i>, "Berlusconi in Tehran":<br /><blockquote>The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation.<br /><br />The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).<br /><br />Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he <i>is</i> a corrupt idiot.’</blockquote><br /><br />Berlusconi's clownish style may seem new to Zizek -- and indeed it may be new in Europe which is, after all, the historical home of <i>serious</i> fascists* -- but it's old hat for we Americans. Zizek has fun with the type (I suspect he takes immense pleasure in comparing Berlusconi to Ahmadinejad, and who but a fascist clown could blame him?) and apparently Foucault, a generation ago, toyed with it as well, but the first real aficionado had to be our own Mark Twain (whom Zizek quotes in another connection) and the first one to make a career of fascist clown appreciation was, of course, H.L. Mencken. Then there was Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson (who himself became a sort of caricature of a fascist clown in his old age), Al Franken, and, during the 80's, Christopher Hitchens.<br /><br />Of course we have a tradition of fascist clown watchers because we've had a tradition of fascist clown rulers: for Twain there was the entire McKinley administration and then, finally, Theodore Roosevelt in his own right -- the prototype, as it were, of the archetype; for Mencken there was Harding, Coolidge and (so Mencken thought) Bryan; for Vidal, Hitchens, and Thompson there was Nixon (and cronies such as Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy), Reagan, and Poppy Bush; for Franken there was Dubya and of course the mouthpiece of the Fascist Clown party, Rush Limbaugh.<br /><br />A fascist clown is a living laff-riot, a strawman come to life, Chaplin's Little Dictator irl, like, for real. It's almost impossible to take him seriously -- until he has you tortured, bombs your country, or simply grinds you into poverty.<br /><br />I think it was when Mr. Burns was building the sun-blocker ("since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun!"), that his sycophant and until then co-conspirator in various evil schemes Mr. Smithers finally said something like, "Sorry, Mr. Burns, but you've just crossed the line from everyday villainy to cartoonish super-villainy" and opted out. That's exactly what fascist clowns are: cartoonish supervillains, except they're for REAL! Gordon Liddy might have slipped on a banana peel while putting poison in your medicine bottle or garroting you on the street**, but the comedy factor wouldn't make you any less dead. That's the danger of fascist clowns, they lull you into a sense of disbelief; "this cant be real, he can't be serious!" you say, right before you are economically, constitutionally, or physically murdered.<br /><br />* but wasn't it Dorothy Parker who said that Hitler could have been thwarted at the start if people had only laughed at him? My brain hurtzes.<br />** actual methods of assassination Liddy was trained to and conspired to do.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-7172373797742296722010-08-09T15:07:00.003-05:002010-08-09T17:35:05.644-05:00Nazi Child MolestersAhh, here's <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinals%E2%80%93Cubs_rivalry>George Fwill</a> proving the point I've long argued that becoming a fan of a sports team is a choice and that choosing to become a Chicago Cubs fan is an exercise in stupid idiocy, moral obscenity, and psychological retardation:<br /><br /><blockquote>"I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis. At an age too tender for life-shaping decisions, I made one. While all my friends were becoming Cardinals fans, I became a Cub fan. My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place, so of course, they became liberals. Rooting for the Cubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic and conservative. It helped out of course that the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908, which is two years before Mark Twain and Tolstoy died. But that means, class of 1998, that the Cubs are in the 89th year of their rebuilding effort, and remember, any team can have a bad moment."[4]</blockquote><br /><br />Obviously, the choice to become a Cubs fan is a demonstration of the will (no pun) to self-pity. There is an ostentatious psychology at work here: a Cubs fan is an attention whore of the "woe is me" variety; Cubs Nation is the tennager's LiveJournal of baseball fandom; as a species Cubs fans are insufferably lachrymose louts. It's also no accident that so many Cubs fans are wealthy and politically conservative, and I'm not just talking about the horrible drunken lawyers and Lincoln Park Trixies one sees at the ballpark. They live ruthlessly, adopt a totem of supreme victimization, then comes the paradox: the initially and ("superficially") superficial stance becomes so embedded in their identity that it's just as much a part of the whole as their Republicanism or their religion. These people can't be "winners" in their personal life unless their team loses -- and no team loses like the Cubs.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-75158357741436901032010-06-08T22:20:00.003-05:002010-06-08T22:30:21.684-05:00George Carlin Channeling George OrwellFrom <i>Napalm & Silly Putty</i>:<br /><blockquote><strong>Government</strong><br />The CIA doesn't kill anybody, they "neutralize" people. Or they "depopulate" an area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in "disinformation." The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something called "sunshine units." Israeli murderers are called "commandos," Arab commandos are called "terrorists." The contra killers were known as "freedom fighters." Well, if crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-50152230841017194542010-06-07T12:56:00.003-05:002010-06-07T15:58:40.930-05:00Propertarians, AgainIt takes a lot of gall to make the argument <a href=http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/31456.html>Murray's</a> making (even though he seems to have a point about fishing quotas) at any time, but considering that the stupidity and carelessness of British Petroleum and Transoceanic has so recently and flagrantly transformed the Gulf of Mexico into a geenormous tar pit, to make the argument now shows he's really committed -- or needs to <i>be</i> committed. But then he is a wingnut propagandist (Lysenkoist and astroturfing division), so QED.<br /><br />Also, disaster crapitalism and all that.<br /><br />Not that anyone should particularly care what I think, but I've said before that I prefer religious nutjobs to libertarian nutjobs, and one reason is because the former are at least sometimes honest about their desire to coerce. <a href=http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2005/11/propertarians-and-alito-in-blogistan.html>Propertarians</a> are <i>never</i> honest about it; they totally deny it.<br /><br />I used to tease <a href="http://digamma.net/notes/">digamma</a> and sneer at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20041025030351/http://oobleck.com/tollbooth/archives/001758.html">this</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060326183649/http://oobleck.com/tollbooth/archives/002082.html">sad</a>, <a href="http://overlawyered.com/2007/04/price-of-forgiveness/">pathetic</a> <a href="http://digamma.net/btfwiki/David_Nieporent">loser</a> to the effect that I knew air would eventually be privatized should their propertarian dream world ever come into being. Then their Randian heroes could charge people to breathe and further, I knew that when the penniless would inevitably suffocate, propertarians would simply say such deaths (actually, murders) were mere products of bad decision-making on the oxygen-deprived's part and no business of the government. <br /><br />Sure enough, not long after that, I saw a Fraser Institute (Canuckistani wingnutiens, I think) nimrod state his belief that <i>space</i> should be privatized. No, not outer space; just space, area, here on Earth. Once I digested the implications of that... well, I'm sorry, but I saw through bland affectations of glibertarian "principles", through even hidden (but obvious) greed, to the real desired end of the total privatization of everything: gasless* chambers -- guilt-free gasless chambers, because those squeezed into them by property law would be, as Uncle Miltie so cheerily put it, "free to choose" them. The rhetorical exaggeration I used to joke and sneer about was actually true. Eventually, I realized the germ of this mentality was always there in their melons. <br /><br />One of the reasons Melbourne's government amended the Poor Law in 1834 was because the influential thought economic "law" demanded it; but it was also consciously endorsed by the upper class as a form of self-flattery <i>and</i> as a way to spite their inferiors, the poor, for whom the right to work was deemed too cushy and the law's amenders knew they were placing under the whip of starvation. Freedom, amirite? Dig coal, toil in the prison-like workhouses, or starve; above all, play by our rules! That some of the poor did indeed move up the social ladder rather than perish confirmed and entrenched the belief in social Darwinism; stress applied to the weak had culled the worst of the lot and rewarded the strongest. The greed, ruthlessness, and cruelty of the early industrial revolution is "classical liberalism" and utilitarianism ideology put into practice; the parties responsible were the Whigs and Liberals. <i>That</i> is why glibertarians like Glenn Reynolds call themselves, when they're trying to be cute, Whigs; it's why wingnuts like a certain <a href=http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/2902.html>someone</a> I had a huge blogwar with calls himself a "classical liberal"; it is why neoliberals like Brad DeLong approvingly quote Bentham and Mill and keep pushing free trade even when they acknowledge it hasn't been beneficial, because their fealty to economic law outweighs their desire to alleviate human suffering (and why in my weak moments I want to throw a copy of <i>Hard Times</i> at his head, especially when he falsely advertises himself as a social democrat). What propertarians through the years have meant by "freedom" is actually the (dis)function of a society <i>engineered</i> around economic "laws" discovered by people who think they are scientists. And the lever by which that engineering is facilitated is always -- no matter what they say -- brutal force.<br /><br />Commodifying something means making that something scarce, which means profit for them and toil or migration or death for everyone else. Incidentally, "privatize" means what is says but in practice -- and propertarians know this, it's a feature not a bug -- it means "to corporatize." Which, in turn means that what was previously communally-owned or owned by an individual human being and therefore managed with at least some degree of accountability, will eventually be owned by a sociopathic "entity" that can bribe its way out of legal or social penalty. And of course (icing on the cake), this is always hailed as progress. What ideological conquistadors like <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar>Hernando de Soto</a> have done for land abroad Murray is trying to do for the ocean; air is next. <br /><br />Some people, not all of them vile, used to larf when I'd call libertarians crypto-fascists. Well, there's <a href=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/>not so much</a> larfin any more.<br /><br />* As in oxygen-free. Also, cf. Whitaker Chambers's opinion of Ayn Rand:<br /><blockquote>From almost any page of <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!" </blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-10683217017094854972010-06-05T10:23:00.002-05:002010-06-05T10:37:39.499-05:00Attn, Comrades! Neocon Politburo Proscribes Decadent Western Musik!From Hendrik Hertzberg's book <i>Politics</i>:<br /><br /><blockquote>The [neocon panelists'] discussion on Western culture took up the troubling question of why Vaclav Havel has a picture of John Lennon on the wall of his apartment. Hilton Kramer, editor of <i>The New Criterion</i>, bemoaned the fact that the East European dissidents liked Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles. John O'Sullivan, editor of <i>National Review</i>, said this was only because the authorities had censored them, though he didn't trouble to say <i>why</i> they had censored them. "Is rock and roll always bad?" asked a questioner from the floor. Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran-turned-Catholic theologian, said he didn't know because he wasn't masochistic enough to listen to the stuff. O'Sullivan said he disliked all popular music after Cole Porter. Kramer suggested that Lennon and his friends "used to sing the praises of Ho Chi Minh." (Untrue, by the way) Oh, well. Western civ may be as decadent as Kramer says, but at least he doesn't blame it on the stones. He blames it on the Beatles.<br />--Washington Diarist, <i>The New Republic</i>, May 21, 1990</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-84674984173389273132010-06-05T09:52:00.002-05:002010-06-05T10:20:59.383-05:00Cultural CommissarsHere is the noble Christopher Hitchens (who died on September 11th, 2001; the neocon now using the same name and more or less the same face is a ghola) demolishing the execrable Norman Podhoretz in a review of the Pod's <i>Ex-Friends</i>:<br /><br /><blockquote>A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends. This is redeemed somewhat by the possibility of making new ones, and in his late maturity -- some might say that like the medlar fruit he went rotten before becoming ripe -- Podhoretz has found companionship and solidarity with some new chums. He mentions them shyly, as if he were back in his lonely childhood and his mother had secretly bribed them to play with him:<br /><br /><blockquote>Here, in what is for me a rare submission to the principles of affirmative action, which dictate that I should strive to achieve greater name-dropping 'diversity', I will single out Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley, Jr.<br /><br />In spite of our failure to form ourselves into a cohesive family, we have managed to join forces as a dissenting minority of 'heretical' intellectuals who are trying to break the virtual monopoly that the worst ideas of my ex-friends hold (even from beyond the grave) over the cultural institutions of this country.</blockquote><br /><br />The purpose of recruiting these new chums is clear: to enlist them in the urgent task of pissing on the graves of the old ones. This makes them more like cronies, or accomplices, than actual friends. But perhaps that's better than nothing. Is it Henry and Bill, perhaps, who get together and agree to laugh at Norman's jokes? Whatever the case, the man who can describe this gleesome threesome as a trio of heretical dissenters is certainly eager to please.<br /><br />For the purposes of comparison, here's what happens when Podhoretz encounters an authentic dissident:<br /><br /><blockquote>When on a visit of my own to Prague in 1988 I was taken to meet Vaclav Havel,...the first thing that hit my eye upon entering his apartment was a huge poster of John Lennon hanging on the wall. Disconcerted, I tried to persuade Havel that the counterculture in the West was no friend of anti-Communists like himself, but I made even less of a 'dent' on him than Ginsberg had made on me thirty years earlier.</blockquote><br /><br />Good of Podhoretz to have spared so much time to put Havel straight. But that's the sort of guy he is -- always willing to oblige. Also, the fact that Havel was under house arrest may have helped both men to concentrate.<br /><br />The above anecdote occurs in the chapter on Allen Ginsberg[...]<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />The Russian exile writer Vassily Aksyonov -- another example of the real as opposed to the bogus dissident -- once wrote that Podhoretz reminded him of all the things he had left the Soviet Union to escape. He had, said Aksyonov, the mentality of a cultural commissar. As the Ginsberg essay demonstrates, he has the soul of one as well.</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-18705955299179802942010-06-04T12:55:00.000-05:002010-06-04T12:56:37.659-05:00DP For The Bunghole<img src="http://www.sadlyno.com/wordpress/uploads/2010/03/pipes3.jpg"><br /><i>Above: Schlemiel, schlimazel, schlociopath.</i><br /><br /><blockquote><strong>Shorter Daniel Pipes<br /><a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/8309/my-peace-plan-an-israeli-victory">"My Peace Plan: An Israeli Victory"</a></strong></blockquote><br /><br /><ul><li>My totally awesome plan for peace first involves manipulating American and European governments into abandoning all restraints on Israel, then the Righteous State must triumphantly exert its will on its subhuman enemies, annihilating the Palestinians and utterly crushing their souls, grinding them under foot, leaving them bereft, decimated, humiliated.</li></ul><br /><br /><hr><font size="1">'Shorter' concept created by <a href="http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2003/02/shorter-steven-den-beste-as-part-of-my.html">Daniel Davies</a> and perfected by <a href="http://busybusybusy.com">Elton Beard</a>. <a href="http://encyclopediadramatica.com/I_am_aware_of_all_internet_traditions">We are aware of all Internet traditions</a>.™</font><hr />RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-42729694943362364912010-06-01T18:00:00.004-05:002010-06-05T14:25:25.426-05:00What They (Not Ted) Said<a href=http://www.eschatonblog.com/2010/05/also-labor-day.html>Atrios</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>I really hate the annual ritual of writing columns about how people don't behave properly on Memorial Day. People don't get many vacation days in the greatest country on Earth, and sitting around pretending to be sad or watching Spielberg war porn doesn't really honor those who served either.</blockquote><br /><br /><a href=http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2010/05/31/11168>Henley</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>[W]e’ve actually reached the point where “Every day is Memorial Day.” You pretty much can’t get through a day of radio, TV and internet without multiple messages that so-and-so “honors the sacrifice of those who serve.” The message might come from the station, from a car-dealership, a personality, or a Beltway Bandit, but it’s omnipresent. Yes, these sentiments are vapid and rote and therefore not truly emo. The very ubiquity of pro-military gratitude drains it of even the possibility of meaning. If we wore fright costumes every day, Halloween would seem kind of blah.<br /><br />To really consider the meaning of all the lives lost in military service to the United States is to grieve at an awful lot of waste and rage at an enormous amount of folly. Few American wars have been both just and necessary. At best, we can imagine the American dead of the other wars saying, “<i>Had this been an actual emergency</i>, I’d have done no less.”</blockquote><br /><br />Right on cue is <a href=http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/28/every-day-is-memorial-day/>the Nuge</a> with an article whose insanely nationalistic feedback screams with the intensity of ten shitties:<br /><br /><blockquote>America is at war. Thousands of Americans have paid the ultimate sacrifice, and thousands more have been wounded. Pause to remember them this Memorial Day. Say a prayer for the warriors and their families. They are the world's true freedom fighters.<br /><br />Never forget them. Make every day Memorial Day.</blockquote><br /><br />The totality of his demand for perpetual memorial for perpetual conflict for perpetual peace of course goes hand in Godwin's hand with:<br /><br /><blockquote>When we commit our troops to war, we must make a commitment to them and their families that we will achieve total victory through the application of total war.</blockquote><br /><br />***<br />PS - <a href=http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2010/06/not-behind-the-fighter-jet.html>this</a> is good stuff.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-30292601636429121492010-06-01T14:38:00.001-05:002010-06-01T16:16:26.745-05:00This Blogosphere Needs An EnemaThere's a lot of sociopathic, not to mention Orwellian, rhetoric flying out there in response to -- in defense of -- Israel's latest brutality. I mean, Pam Geller always has the "kill all the muslooms" theme playing full blast, of course she's gonna use this opportunity to.. keep doing it. Just as predictably, the idiots at <i>Commentary</i> are playing Irgun to Pammy's Stern Gang; being smoother with words and more deft at PR but every bit as much tribalist and bigoted as she, and with exactly the same goals, they're vigorously spewing second-hand the propaganda from AIPAC's and the Israeli government's blastfax. I'm sure Chait and Peretz at <i>TNR</i> are doing much the same thing but I can't be bothered to look. Whatever. And so on. Ugh. If I were a better blogger (or I should say a less lazy, less demoralized one) I'd catalog all the moral obscenity out there -- especially from "my side" -- condemn the culprits, demand some form of accountability, and rage at the lack thereof. But, no; fuck it; what's the point?<br /><br />Slowly (I've been blogging since '03), I have absorbed the lesson that not only do I, like everyone else, have to watch hypocritical and murderous governments I am partly responsible for as a citizen and taxpayer do stupid and wicked things and totally get away with it, I have to watch demented people endorse these stupid and wicked acts, often with recommendations of even more brutality, and totally get away with it -- hell, get rewarded for it. And, obviously, I'm not just talking about wingnuts. And all this in a medium which both left and right insist is more meritocratic than the em-ess-em.<br /><br />The Arabs and Turks Israel murdered on those boats will not be restored to life. Israel and its benefactor, my country, will totally get away with the crime. The wingnuts, and so-called leftwingers who think with their blood rather than their brains, who view any American or especially Israeli military action as an invitation to fapstasy, will not only totally get away with it, but their stock, as it were, will rise.<br /><br />I should quit -- have quit. But I always come back. Dunno why.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-67157532893596395842010-05-06T04:05:00.003-05:002010-05-06T04:31:20.725-05:00A Wishy-Washy WasteChristopher Hitchens, <a href=http://www.slate.com/id/2252742/>5/13/2010</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>[Ralph Miliband's] best-known book was <i>Parliamentary Socialism</i>, in which he analyzed Labor's attempt to transform society through the ballot box. His conclusion was that <i>a party too wedded to pragmatism and compromise would in the end sacrifice its principles, but in doing so it would also cease to work as an electoral machine.</i> Perhaps I'll take this book down from the dusty old shelf on which I have preserved it.</blockquote><br /><br />(Italics mine.)<br /><br />A.J.P. Taylor, 10/1957:<br /><br /><blockquote>I doubt whether anyone with an Anglican background can become a true radical. George Lansbury came nearest to it. Yet there was always a subtle dividing line between him and the rebels around him. Gladstone tried hard, but he could never rid himself of the belief that a duke or a bishop had more political sense than Cobden or John Stuart Mill. The rule still applies in the Labour Party. Its leaders with an Anglican education seek radical ideas, but they lack radical instincts. Time and again they wind up on the Right without ever meaning to do so.</blockquote><br /><br />Throw out Taylor's "Anglican" and replace it with "professional" or even "typical" and it holds true for modern Labour and Democratic politicians. The result is or will be just as Miliband thought.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-75809560765979649152010-05-03T00:17:00.003-05:002010-05-03T02:34:24.846-05:00Like I Was Sayin'Thanks, mostly, to American academics' <a href=http://elementropy.blogspot.com/2010/04/missappropriation.html>misappropriation</a> and misapplication of Foucault, science is considered merely an ideology or a "point of view," something to be weighed against emotion and feeling and superstition and mythology, to the point that stuff like <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22dna.html?pagewanted=all>this</a> is supposed to be respected and indeed is listed in such a way as to make it equal to the other serious objections before it:<br /><br /><blockquote>Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastating rate of diabetes. But they learned that their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and <i>theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories. <br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Another article, suggesting that the tribe’s ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribe’s traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian.<br /><br />Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, “when people tell us, ‘No, this is not where you are from,’ and your own blood says so — it is confusing to us,” Rex Tilousi said. “It hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.” </i></blockquote><br /><br />(My emphasis.)<br /><br />Clearly the scientists studying the DNA fucked over the Native Americans, and abused the limited permission implicitly given them by the natives. But that doesn't mean the science is somehow false or should somehow be censored because it conflicts with myth.<br /><br />How should decent Americans want to help the most abused ethnic group in our history? Give them money, reparations, as much sovereignty as they demand, admit past abuses, demand that history be taught accurately, feel guilty and ashamed of our government's Indian policies and encourage that feeling in others, give Native Americans access to better services, stop abusing them.. the list is endless but one thing it does not include is giving in to this weird, identity politics-based form of <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism>Lysenkoism</a>. Decent people don't give a shit if the theory of evolution "offends" creationists; neither should decent people care that Native American beliefs have been "offended" by the facts of science. If the scientific evidence says <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man>Kennewick Man</a>, for instance, is one thing but Native American belief says he's another, there's only one side to take. Sadly, many on the left take the wrong side. In this regard there's no difference between <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_Deloria,_Jr.>Vine Deloria, Jr.</a>, and Jerry Falwell, except liberals think there is -- not because of their "white guilt", but because, first, academic culture and, now, the broader culture interprets and applies Foucault in a certain way.<br /><br />It's as if, for such people, the world has been <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashoman>Rashomon</a>ified. All explanations of a given problem, issue, or event are possibly valid, possibly compromised; the truth being unknowable, everything's subjective; every point of view is basically equal (democracy, amirite?) so it's best to support the point of view of those who have been historically abused. Science, after all, had its origins with imperialistic peoples (racists!), has been abused imperialistically, and therefore empiricist <i>is</i> imperialist!<br /><br />I've even had an especially fanatical Foucaultian tell me that <i>math</i> is at the very least culturally-loaded and dubious. Now I'm with Mark Twain when it comes to statistics, and know a great many sabermetricians who are total douchebag ideologues whose conclusions are complete crap, but math itself does not lie and the facts it proves are not mere "constructs" and means by which the powerful enforce their will.<br /><br />[Yes, I'm thoroughly aware of the irony here: in the previous post I am demanding more relativism, but in this post I insist some things are universal, if not perfectly so.]RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-58020899626116856632010-04-28T09:44:00.004-05:002010-04-29T03:46:44.650-05:00Misappropriation<a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/arts/25abroad.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all>Literature</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>“After the war French writers rejected the idea of narrative because Hitler and Stalin were storytellers, and it seemed naïve to believe in stories. So instead they turned more and more to theory, to the absurd. The French declined even to tell stories about their own history, including the war in Algeria, which like all history can’t really be digested until it is turned into great literature."</blockquote><br /><br />"<a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/arts/correcting-her-idea-of-politically-correct.html?pagewanted=all>Social Sciences</a>":<br /><br /><blockquote>Of course, [Julia Kristeva] is hardly the first French thinker to wield more influence over students and scholars in the United States than in France: this was also true of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In fact, it was the fate of Ms. Kristeva and this three unlikely subversives to be accused of planting the seeds of political correctness in American colleges long before the concept was re-exported back to France to be mocked as a typically American aberration. </blockquote> <br /><br />It's funny how that works. A group appropriates something borne of another culture, intended for that culture, and only properly understood by people of that culture, takes it for its own thinking the only translation or adjustment necessary is the elementary one of language. Of course it's not just the taker's fault; often it's just as much the giver's. For instance, regarding beautiful letters, it's probably more Roland Barthes's fault that American universities have utterly ruined the study of literature than it's the fault of -- I dunno -- say, Susan Sontag. And certainly, regarding "social sciences" (identity politics division), Foucault ran with and totally exploited the fame and acclaim America showered on him -- and who could blame him? -- but it was the angsty, middle-class remnants of the New Left who were all too eager to buy what they thought he was selling.<br /><br />Marxism was borne of the thwarted revolutions of 1848 -- thwarted revolutions of, at that time, the most developed countries on earth. Marxism was intended for and could only be properly understood by industrial Germany (and England, to give Engels credit where due). Naturally, it was applied to the European country most unlike those: Russia. In that application was a massive mutation.<br /><br />Christianity was borne of a colonized, tribal people, humiliated by their conquerors and suffering from occupation and the corruption of their own elites. It was invented by a Jewish man, intended for and properly understood by other Jews. Naturally, it was applied to "the uncircumcised", the goyim. In that application was a massive mutation.<br /><br />Lenin & Trotsky, Russians; St. Paul the Hellenized and Romanized Jew; American Academics -- they've all made the same basic error of taking systems of thought that are not parochial so much as culturally particular, systems they themselves do not and can not fully understand, and applied them to something they don't fit.RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-6118570226363859452010-04-22T14:21:00.003-05:002010-04-22T14:55:32.773-05:00Yay, Terrorism?Sometimes it is a <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Carrero_Blanco>force</a> for good in the world:<br /><br /><blockquote>Within about six months of being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid by four Basque members of ETA, who carried out a bombing while he returned from Mass in a Dodge 3700. ETA placed 80-100 kg of explosives in a tunnel they had excavated under the street. The blast catapulted the vehicle over the Jesuit monastery in front of which it had run, and it landed on a second floor balcony on the other side.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />This assassination, dubbed Operación Ogro, was in retaliation for the execution of five political opponents by the regime (including some members of ETA) and was applauded by many opponents of the Francoist government. Since Carrero Blanco could have become the most powerful figure in Spain upon Franco's passing, his death was instrumental in the transition toward a democratic government in that country.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />The article quotes a former member of ETA saying that a democratic outcome was highly unintended, but whatever. I mean, I'm ready to believe that Operacion Ogro was a scumbaggy exercise just as much as more obviously vile actions like Black September or the bombing of the King David Hotel. But in this case, who would take it back even if they could?RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5392098.post-12522369481728721842010-04-15T07:32:00.002-05:002010-04-15T08:40:53.100-05:00Nietzsche, Amanda Marcotte, and Science vs. "God" & Larry Summers & Greater Wingnuttia<a href=http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/>Guh</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>CAMBRIDGE -- The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. </blockquote><br /><br /><a href=http://www.classicauthors.net/Nietzsche/antichrist/antichrist48.html>Rah</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible--of God`s mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.--<br /><br />The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates man--man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God`s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God`s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt not know"--the rest follows from that.--God`s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one`s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don`t allow him to think. . . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!". . . .</blockquote>RETARDO MONTALBANhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15877771832593272287noreply@blogger.com0