December 2007
Ron Paul is No Thoreau
There is a contradiction in a campaign that champions objectivism and yet supports a document which is inherently anti-objectivist.
A lot has been written about Ron Paul’s connection to the philosophy of Thoreau, my favorite example being this video. A Google Search returns about 58 thousand entries, equating elements of Thoreau’s philosophy with the promises of the Paul campaign. Thoreau’s individualist ideology is often thrown in with Thomas Paine’s “That government is best which governs least,” but at the heart of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is an argument against the early strict-constituional government.
Ron Paul r[EVIL]oution
From a 1992 article in the Ron Paul Political Report:
If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.
UPDATE: Looks like digg is finally having a little Ron Paul backlash. It’s about time considering this quote from the same newsletter:
…our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin.
The link has been updated to the larger Kos article.
Blindly Into The Bubble
Paul Krugman writing for The New York Times:
Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.
I agree with Krugman on politicizing the mortgage crisis, but I disagree on Krugman’s alternative, which simply involves a rejection of ideology (here he’s referring to Greenspan’s Objectivist overtness). I’m all for pragmatic solutions, but Krugman is missing the Althusserian point which is that the rejection of ideology constitutes ideology at its finest. It’s important that the Democrats use this to articulate a critique of neoliberal economic policy, but the problems of the mortgage crisis, which are, of course, of a global nature, are perhaps more suited to a fundamental critique of late capitalism — that is, global capitalism.
Fearless Mice
Science has engineered mice that are no longer fearful of cats. Then again if fear is genetic rather than psychological, is it really fear?
Or to put it in perspective, in addition to coffee without caffeine and war without casualties, we now have mice without fear. Goodbye blue mondays.
Spice Girls Nostalgia
I imagine soon we’ll have no time delay between the act first becoming popular and the nostalgia reunion tour. A smart artist would just skip the “breaking into the scene” phase and just begin touring as a nostalgia act from the get go.
Ricky Gervais: Deconstructionist?
The New York Times:
Ricky Gervais says he decided to make an 80-minute finale to his HBO series “Extras” because he had a few things left to say about the wages of fame, and the people who pay them.
…“I’ve always sort of deconstructed telly a little bit,” Mr. Gervais said in a telephone interview from New York this week, where he recently finished shooting his first starring role in a feature film, “Ghost Town.” “I’ve also been in my ‘study of fame’ years. ‘The Office’ was sort of my life’s work, where I downloaded everything I knew about the minutiae of behavior from working in a normal job. The last few years, I’ve been in the media, in the middle of fame. They say, ‘Write about what you know.’”
I think deconstruction is the logical ‘next step’ to the network’s repetitive structuralist approach to television. Oh yeah, the season finale of Extras is going to be on Sunday at 9PM on HBO.
Wikileaks: The Truth is Political
The Lede:
This week, a group called Wikileaks asserted that the United States military appeared to have a Winston Smith of its own at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, mucking about with the way Wikipedia and news sites portray the base and, curiously, posting odd assertions about Fidel Castro.
Kant: Wrong For America
(Via I cite.)
Minimalist Chocolate Truffles
This looks incredibly easy. As soon as I get home for the holidays, I’m giving this a shot (maybe sooner).
The White Stripes’ Conquest
It’s a shame The White Stripes might quit touring, but if they do, I hope they go into silent film. There’s a future in that I think, judging from the unbelievable eye-acting in this video.
Horrors of the Writer’s Strike: Fergie’s Live and Let Die
You thought the Grammies and Academy Awards were awful circle-jerks?
What if you combined the bad performances of the Grammies with the banal banter of the Oscars, and then took away the awards and the talent? You’d get Vanity Fair’s Movies Rock.
The two-hour special on CBS (two hours??) aired Friday night and “celebrated every dimension of music’s leading role in moviemaking, from singing starlets to scene-stealing rappers, to directors whose indelible musical tastes redefine the way we listen to music and watch films.” Christ almighty. (Via The Playlist.)
Witness the end of times. This should make producers consider the Writers Guild’s demands…
Please, Spare Me My Life
I’m fairly certain I could write a term paper on this.
Beck Gets Blamed For Suicide
Beck didn’t want to act in a movie so somehow he’s responsible for some lady’s suicide? Well I guess logically it makes sense, but it doesn’t feel right in the gut.
Bromatological Materialism and the Meals of Late Capitalism
In an article published today in The Times, Kim Severson claims that the “entree is dead.” From this statement, I think we can learn a lot about the ideology of late capitalism. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek famously argued that it was perfectly embodied by a certain kind of Spinozism: to paraphrase K-Punk, Spinoza’s rejection of deontological ethics for an ethics based around the concept of health is perfectly embodied in his reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. Spinoza argued that because the Jews were primitive at the time, it was necessary to formulate the commandment as “Thou shalt not…,” as a performative command, yet for any reasonable person it was necessary for it to be grasped as constructive. This of course simply refers to a scientific or objective statement, such as “Thou shalt not eat from the tree of life because the apple is poisonous and will harm you.” In Zizek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything.
Read more on Bromatological Materialism and the Meals of Late Capitalism…
C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations
The New York Times:
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.
Just so you know we still live in a democracy.
China’s Valley of Tears
Slavoj Zizek writing for In These Times:
Last year, the Chinese government strengthened some of its oppressive apparatuses—including forming special units of riot police to crush popular unrest. These police are the actual social expression of what, in ideology, appears as a revival of Marxism. In 1905, Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as “the vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market.” Doesn’t this characterization still hold for modern-day China?
But what if the promised democratic second act that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never arrives? That is what is so unsettling about today’s China: Its authoritarian capitalism may not be merely a remainder of our past but a portent of our future.
Sex! In Spaaaaaace!!
US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday…
“The issue of sex in space is a serious one,” he says. “The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity.”
The title of my post could have been something like “T-minus 10 seconds to Re-Entry” or “Initiate Docking Procedurals”, but they felt too cheesy. Also, if the Missionary Position is impossible, then the end of Moonraker is a lie.
Hugo Chávez: Stalinist Totalitarian Part I
The New York Times reports that the totalitarian, neo-Stalinist dictator Hugo Chávez’s proposed constitutional changes were narrowly defeated and that the power-mad tyrant has conceded defeat.
The faces of evil!
Bob Dylan & The Band’s Baby Let Me Follow You Down
Hard rock from the Last Waltz. Sounds like a great Kinks impersonation.
Joke’s on Jay Leno Staff
Richard Huff writing for the New York Daily News:
Staffers on NBC’s “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” might start calling the host Jay Cheapo. That’s because unlike his late-night talk brethren, Leno hasn’t stepped up to pay the staff of his late-night show who were laid off yesterday by NBC.
Is the Daily News writer making fun of the bad writing on The Tonight Show with that awful pun (is it even a pun?) in the Lede of this article? Or should we just call Richard Huff, Richard Badpun?