October 2008
It’s a Springsteen Halloween
Bruce Springstreen has come out with a Halloween song and accompanying video. Featuring the tale of the fabled cryptid known as the Jersey Devil. Scarier still, you can even download it for free.
Flat Stanley
Obama’s newest advisor:
“Sometimes I get a little nervous before talking in front of a crowd, but Flat Stanley helped me practice the speech,” Obama wrote. “He made me recite it in front of him and then even gave me some advice so the speech would go smoothly. Flat Stanley is really a great coach.”
The Tallest Man on Earth
The Tallest Man on Earth is the moniker of the folk musician Kristian Matsson of Dalarna, Sweden. Matsson also sings in a band called Montezumas.
Via 3ack.
Jokes and Their Relation to Apperception
So lately I’ve been reading Robert Pippin’s book, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, which is an amazingly well-written reinterpretation of Hegel’s work, placing it in the context of the general Idealist problematic originating with Kant, viz. the “Transcendental Deduction”: essentially speaking, how can we genuinely ground our knowledge of the world? According to Pippin, what Hegel deems most important in Kant is the “transcendental unity of apperception.” What this boils down to is that when I do something, say, writing this blog post, I don’t simply write it, but I take myself to be writing it, or, to formulate it in propositional terms, the difference between asserting that S is P and taking myself to be asserting that S is P. This “taking myself to be asserting” is the apperceptive formula and, according to Kant and Hegel, the dimension of self-consciousness.
So how does humor come to play a role? Recently I was talking with some friends and the topic of conversation turned to one professor here at the university who has a reputation on campus for having a grandiose and flamboyant persona (it’s impossible to describe unless you were to meet him in person, really). When I took one of his courses during my sophomore year, for example, it was commonplace for my friends and I to work on our impersonations of him, delivering them to one another to see who could do the best rendition. Anyhow, it turns out that our on-campus Onion-esque magazine, the
The Century of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Two things: (1) Now I feel bad for deciding to not take an independent study course next semester where I would have hypothetically read the most important of his works (instead I opted to do something similar but instead on Karl Marx [Das Capital, Vol. I & the Grundrisse]); (2) I did not realize until reading this article that Lévi-Strauss was still alive. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
From Beck to Hendrix
An interesting collection of rock and roll photography from Autumn and Jerry de Wilde focusing on the last 10 years and the 1960s. Is Thom Yorke wearing a calculator watch?
Joe the Plumber Pursued for Record Deal
I wonder what this tells us about the cultural state of late-capitalism. Probably something very, very bad.
Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross Ousted from the BBC?
Speaking of daring comedy that takes risks, check out everything under the subheading “Hoax Call” in this short article. My, my, what naughty boys.
As Gordon Brown says, their humor is “inappropriate and unacceptable.”
It’s Time To End “The Office”
From Ricky Gervais’ website, Kyle Carpenter critiques the US Office for straying too far from the British original.
For the most part, the American Office has departed so far from the British version that the two can barely be thought of as the same show. One major pitfall is that some of the main characters in the American version are vastly different from their portrayal in the British one. For example, Carrell’s role as Michael Scott is, at best, an overblown parody of the bumbling British boss David Brent. The real loss is that Gervais’s style of subtle comedic delivery throughout the series has been abandoned. Instead, Carrell’s jokes are over the top and spoon-fed to the American audience.
Another prominent character that was spoiled in the American version is the role of the slightly neurotic wimp Gareth Keenan. Mackenzie Crook’s role as Gareth was turned into Dwight Shrute, portrayed by Rainn Wilson. Wilson’s role is so over-acted and unbelievable that he comes across more like a villain from a little kid’s show than a character in a comedy that is supposed to be funny because of how realistic it is. This brings me to the fundamental difference between the two shows. Although a stretch at times, the British version feels like it could be a real workplace, and the characters are humorous in their authenticity. In the American version, the characters are larger than life, and often find themselves in unrealistic situations. While some
…
Through the Glasses Darkly
Another Zizek article in In These Times—this one’s on the presidential election and financial crisis. Here’s an excerpt:
But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?
When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.
Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?
The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.
The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.
(Via I cite.)
Laying the Groundwork for the Backfire
Matthew Yglesias has it right:
This is where I think some of the recent “socialism” scare talk and so forth gets interesting. Presumably, come January and February conservatives are going to be wanting to argue that Obama’s got no mandate, that Republican legislators have no need to fear him, and that Democratic legislators should live in terror of overreaching. To that end, it’ll be helpful to argue that Obama got elected as a tepid centrist. But in their last-ditch efforts to beat him, they’re doing the reverse, and dramatically overpainting Obama as a wild-eyed radical ready to unleash Marxism on the country. Well, if you spend a month or two running around saying that, and then the voters back the Marxist anyway, he’s got pretty much carte blanche to do what he wants if he wins.
Degenerates
I’m not really sure what the context of this conversation with Zizek is, but the last line is amazing:
The Voter Fraud Myth
“If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant,” Richard Hasen, election law expert at the Loyola Law School, told the New York Times last year. “But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”
But that hasn’t stopped Republicans trying. Five of the 12 US judges who were fired last year, in the scandal that led to the resignation of US attorney general Alberto Gonzales, were axed because they refused to pursue the issue of voter fraud with sufficient vigour. It also explains the Republican attacks on the community group Acorn, which pays people to register voters in low income and minority areas. Some of Acorn’s workers made up names. That should be and has been condemned. But there is no evidence that it has resulted in a single fraudulent vote ever being cast since Acorn began its large-scale voter registration drives four years ago.
Problem is, the GOP is already setting this up as their talking point for why they lost the election, if they lose. If the margins are high enough I don’t see it gaining much traction, but if it’s close I can’t see why Jon McCain wouldn’t use this as a scapegoat, it’s too easy a target.
Hopefully one of the new administration’s new concentrations will be election systems reform.
A World-Historical Swindle
Joe Nocera writes in the Times that banks receiving pieces of the $700 bn. bailout package are actually hoarding the money instead of using it to make loans more accessible. In fact, not only hoarding the money but in some cases using it to buy out other banks!
Perhaps this is why Paulson’s “no strings attached” bill was so fucking idiotic in the first place: if the government has no ability either to monitor what these pieces of shit are doing with taxpayer money or to actually enforce the laws (what some might refer to as the raison d’etre of a “government”), then what good was the fucking bailout to begin with?
Let’s hope this isn’t another case of a world-historical swindle perpetrated by the financial oligarchy. If there is any sliver of justice left in this world, and there is little hope of that, all of the CEOs of the banks that violate the spirit of the $700 bn. bailout ought to be thrown in prison and the banks immediately nationalized.
As Ben Popken of Consumerist writes:
What is the government doing to make banks use the money for loans? Apparently, jack except for asking really really nicely. If this continues and banks don’t use their government handout to open up loans, this bailout will be the single greatest ripoff in American history, and those responsible are naive if they don’t think they’ll have a giant bloody revolution on their hands.
If the elite are…
The Financial Subject Supposed to Know
Jacques-Alain Miller on the financial crisis:
However, the financial subject supposed to know was already quite subdued because of deregulation. And this happened because the financial world believed, in its infatuated delusion, to be able to work things out without the function of the subject supposed to know. Firstly, the real state assets become waste. Secondly, gradually shit permeates everything. Thirdly, there is a gigantic negative transfer vis-à-vis the authorities; the electric shock of the Paulson/Bernanke plan angers the public: the crisis is one of trust; and it will last till the subject supposed to know is reconstructed. This will come in the long term by way of a new set of Bretton Woods accords, a council enjoined to speak the truth about the truth.
Germans Embrace Marx
The Guardian:
Increasing numbers of Germans appear ready to out themselves as Marx fans in a time when it is fashionable to repeat the philosopher’s belief that excessive capitalism with all its greed finally ends up destroying itself.
I ordered my copy this summer. (Via Lenin.)
The Reason Obama/Biden is Winning
A right-wing reporter asks some blatant McCain talking point attack questions to Joe Biden. Biden deftly and concisely handles each of the charges and asserts himself as a formidable and experienced running mate.
This is the reason Obama/Biden is winning. None of these straw man talking points stick and the ridiculous rhetoric of middle-class tax cuts somehow being Marxist makes the right sound like fools.
Even when the interview is skewed to the extreme the attacks just don’t make sense. At least the trivialities of the Bush campaigns against democrats had some focus and possible validity (i.e. perhaps Kerry did change his mind on some positions), the attacks by the GOP this cycle have been so far removed from anything real that they’ve fallen on deaf ears.
Sarah Palin “Going Rogue”
“Brace yourself for nine days of high entertainment.”
Distribution is Distribution, Not an Instant Fan-Base
Torrentfreak reports that a donation based online music model doesn’t necessarily guarantee success:
This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.
I’m sorry, but what exactly were these other bands expecting? Did they honestly believe that the reason for Radiohead’s and NIN’s success was their distribution model? (Update: And when did NIN ever use a donation model?)
Your method of distribution is just that: your method of distribution. It is not a substitute for hard work, publicity and a fan base.
I’ve been giving my music away for free for almost a year now and I’ve just started to get a pretty consistent set of listeners. I don’t think donation systems or giveaways guarantee you an audience anymore than having a record deal does.
That being said it doesn’t have to do with the quality of the recording. If you upload a torrent for Transformers 2 and let’s say Kieslowskis Bleu, the one with public approval and exposure is obviously going to get downloaded more, but that doesn’t make the lesser known one any worse.
When this was a novelty it may have generated some listenership, but it’s sort of like having…
Aww, Fuck.
Jon McCain: Aww, Fuck.
Police + Face + Cuts = ?
Ah, the glories of contextual publishing… The wrong side of Pittsburgh is Bloomfield? Funny I used to jog through there 3-4 times a week at night. I always thought it was a safe little Italy section…
Larry David on the Election
I wonder if that incident will find its way into a potential seventh season of Curb?
Sarah Palin is sooo Hollywood
I was going to compare her to Eliza Doolittle, but I think this is better:
A Kinder, Gentler Nazi
American Nazis are updating their look to appeal to more people with clothes that aren’t so Nazi inspired. The county the Velvet Howler’s founders hail from, Palm Beach County, is of course involved since it’s the strangest county in the US.
Black’s son, Derek, 19, was elected to the Palm Beach County, Fla., Republican committee in August. Local Republican leaders are trying to unseat him after learning of his white supremacist ties.
Don Black, once a Ku Klux Klan leader in Alabama, says he’s encouraged by the enthusiasm he sees.
“We see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork,” he says.
The Apple Keynote to Come
Steve Jobs will say why the old netbook market was a bad investment, and what problems need to be addressed in a three or four item item list. Maybe one of those items will be an actual problem with netbooks. It doesn’t really matter.
Then he will unveil Apple’s new netbook which has all the things on the list and will replace the white plastic Macbook as a low price point laptop. Features will include no ports, save a headphone jack. The keyboard will be replaced by a giant secondary touch screen. Interestingly, this MacNovella (as I have confirmed the new product is called) will run the entire Nintendo DS game library and share a very similar form factor.
It is revealed the MacNovella is formed by a process involving coral and Zoroastrianism, which explains the Queen music that was playing in the hall before the press event began. It will be made out of highly recyclable wax paper and Adamantium.
Apple’s stock will initially rise at the announcement of Job’s new economic stimulus package to save the world economy, but will fall at the news Apple has no plans to release the Tesla wireless power transfer system promised by unnamed sources.
Chomsky on the Economy
Chomsky on the credit crisis.
Spread the Wealth
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state…. The necessaries of life occasion the great expence of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
—Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, chapter 2, Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society
(Via EoTAW.)
Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008
Check it out. (Via IT.)
Badiou on the Financial Crisis
Alain Badiou wrote an article for Le Monde yesterday entitled, “Of Which Real is this Crisis Spectacle?.” Infinite thøught has written a translation for those who don’t speak French and since the article is so interesting I’ll just quote the entire thing:
As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the “cinema”. Nothing is missing, including terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse…
But hope abides. In the foreground, wild-eyed and focussed, like in a disaster movie, we see the small gang of the powerful – Sarkozy, Paulson, Merkel, Brown, Trichet and others – trying to extinguish the monetary flames, stuffing tens of billions into the central hole. “Save the banks!” This noble, humanist and democratic cry surges forth from the mouths of every journalist and politician. I am sure, I can feel it, that for the film’s immediate protagonists – the rich, their servants, their parasites, those who envy them and those who acclaim them – a happy ending is inevitable, bearing in mind the current state of the world, and the kinds of politics that take place within it.
Let us turn instead to the spectators of this show, the dumbstruck crowd who hears, like a far-off noise, the mort* of the cornered banks. This crowd can only guess at the exhausting weekends of our heroic small team of heads of government. It sees, passing before it, numbers as enormous as they are obscure, automatically comparing them to its own resources, or even, for a very considerable part of humanity, to the pure and simple non-resource which is the bitter and courageous basis of its very life. That’s where the real is, and we will only be able to access it if we turn away from the screen of the spectacle in order to consider the invisible mass of those for whom this disaster movie, its saccharine ending included (Sarkozy kisses Merkel, and the whole world weeps for joy), was only ever a shadow-play.
In these past few weeks we have heard a lot about the “real economy” (the production of goods). It has been contrasted with the unreal economy (speculation), the source of all evil, in that its agents had become “irresponsible”, “irrational” and “predatory”. This distinction is obviously absurd. For the past five centuries, financial capitalism has been a major component of capitalism in general. As for the owners and managers of this system, by definition they are only “responsible” for profits, their “rationality” is to be measured by their earnings, and it is not just that they are predators, but that they have to be.
Accordingly, we do not find anything more “real” in the engine-room of capitalist production than on its commercial decks or in its speculative cabins. The return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad “irrational” speculation back to healthy production. It is the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world. It is from that vantage-point that one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us. The real is not this movie, but its audience.
So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? One sees, and this is what it means to see, simple things that we’ve known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.
Let us acknowledge the didactic force of this crisis-film. Faced with the life of the people watching it, do we still dare to pride ourselves in a system which delegates the organisation of collective life to the basest of drives – greed, rivalry, unthinking selfishness? Can we sing the praises of a “democracy” whose leaders do the bidding of private financial appropriation with such impunity that they would shock Marx himself, who nevertheless already defined governments, a hundred and sixty years ago, as “the agents of capital”? Can we affirm that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole?
The only thing that we can hope for in this affair is that this didactic power may be found in the lessons drawn from this grim drama by people, and not by the bankers, the governments who serve them, and the newspapers who serve these governments. This return to the real has two related aspects. The first is clearly political. As the film has shown, the “democratic” fetish is merely the zealous servant of the banks. Its real name, its technical name, as I have argued for some time, is capitalist-parliamentarianism. It is advisable, as several political experiments have begun to do in the past twenty years, to organise a politics of a different nature.
Such a politics is, and no doubt will be for a long time, at a great distance from state power, but no matter. It begins level with the real, through the practical alliance between those who are most immediately available to invent such a politics: the newly-arrived proletarians from Africa and elsewhere, and the intellectuals who have inherited the political battles of the last few decades. This alliance will grow on the basis of what it will be capable of doing, point by point. It will not entertain any kind of organic relationship with the existing parties and with the electoral and institutional system that keeps them alive. It will invent the new discipline of those who have nothing, their political capacity, the new idea of what their victory will look like.
The second aspect is ideological. We must overthrow the old verdict according to which ours would be the time of “the end of ideologies”. Today we can clearly see that the only reality of this supposed end lies in the slogan “save the banks”. Nothing is more important than recovering the passion of ideas and countering the world such as it is with a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of an entirely different state of affairs. To the nefarious spectacle of capitalism, we oppose the real of peoples, of the existence of all in the proper movement of ideas. The theme of an emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. Undoubtedly, the word “communism”, which for a long time served to name this power, has been debased and prostituted.
But today, its disappearance only benefits the advocates of order, the feverish actors of the disaster movie. But we will resuscitate communism, in its new-found clarity. This clarity is also its oldest virtue, as when Marx said of communism that it “breaks in the most radical fashion with traditional ideas” and that it will bring forth “an association in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all”.
Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it’s all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action.
In French: *hallali. In English, the nearest equivalent is ‘mort’, the note sounded on a hunting horn to announce the death of a deer.
Can Psychoanalysis Think Biopolitics?
An old post by Jodi Dean worth reading.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
I’ve recently become really fascinated by the Romantic period and thought I’d pass that interest on to our viewers, who I’m sure will much appreciate it. Anyhow the title of this post refers to a book recently written by Richard Holmes, which Patricia Fara reviewed in the Literary Review:
Whatever C P Snow may have decreed about an unbridgeable divide between the Two Cultures, Romantic writers were fully aware of recent scientific discoveries. As a twenty-year-old medical student, John Keats spent a drink-fuelled night enthusing over a newly purchased verse translation of Homer’s Iliad. Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of ‘some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken’. Keats was referring to William Herschel, the astronomer who had effectively enlarged the solar system at the end of the eighteenth century by detecting a sixth planet, now known as Uranus, but initially named after George III. At school, Keats and his class mates had learnt about gravity through role play out in the yard: while one pupil remained stationary to act as the sun, the other child-planets circled round at different speeds and distances to form a living orrery, the human equivalent of the moving mechanical model so dramatically painted by the Enlightenment’s great artist of science and industry, Joseph Wright of Derby.
Wright’s famous picture of this astronomical instrument adorns the cover of Richard Holmes’s stellar collective biography, The Age of Wonder. Justly renowned as Britain’s greatest literary historian of the Romantic period, Holmes, in his latest book, gives a gripping account of the scientific research that inspired a sense of wonder in poets and experimenters alike. He calls for, and also delivers, a new approach to science’s history, one that focuses on scientists as individuals rather than as impersonal agents of discovery, and that rejects rigid distinctions between science and the arts, or between science and religion.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
The Permanent Democratic Majority
Adam Kotsko offers three simple steps to ensure a permanent Democratic majority. Of all of them, the second option sounds the best.
A Brief History of the 21st Century
Chuck Klosterman offers his predictions for what the 21st century has in store. I’m pretty sure he’ll be wrong about the election results, but I like the idea of Lars von Trier’s hypothetical 9/11 film. This is also an amazing piece:
MAY 24, 2029: Eighty-eight-year-old Bob Dylan celebrates his birthday with the online release of “Oh, By the Way,” a fourteen-minute song explicitly explaining the details of his 1966 motorcycle crash, his brief conversion to Christianity during the seventies, and what it was like to have sex with Joan Baez. When asked why he chose to release such personal material at this point in his life, Dylan cryptically replies, “That seems like a question you should be asking Bob Dylan.”
(Via Mike Soron.)
Lacan and Repetition
Mike Johnduff at Countermemory has a really interesting rewrite of a post written on Lacan and repetition. Here’s an excerpt:
It should be clear now that in making this short, offhanded remark about how to translate a word, what Lacan is doing is showing us that there is a basis in Freud’s language upon which we can rethink the manifestation of repetition. In other words, interpreting Vorstellungrepräsentanz in a particular way makes possible the following thought, a thought that does not allow us to fall back into thinking of repetition as reproduction: the manifestation of repetition is not a representation of a representation, but a repetition within representation.
A Breviary on Socialist Planning
Lenin:
Socialist planning is a remarkably simple idea, therefore. Its propositions do not depend on theoretical arcanum. It just happens to be the most radical extension of the democratic idea available. We now have a situation where we feel powerless, where a crisis driven by factors seemingly beyond our control, imposed on us as if by a natural force that we have yet to understand or master, threatens to destroy millions of livelihoods. We are the mercy of those whom we know don’t share our interests. That could not be the case if the decisions about production, its character, conditions, and rate, were under our direct command. We would still face all kinds of problems, and conflicts, but we would do so as the rulers of our own society with the werewithal to manage it. But such an idea, though simple, has only been asserted in revolutionary conditions: in Russia and much of Europe during the interim after WWI, for example, as well as in France after 1936, in Chile after 1970, and Iran during 1978-9. It is impossible to imagine such a transformation, though simple and obviously just, taking place in a normal political situation. It is just as impossible to see it happening unless based on a powerful experience of solidarity and collective action. As a start, then, the experience of grassroots democracy would need to be routinised in workplaces across the country, in order to offset the pressures of competition, careerism and atomisation. Such is one of the many uses of trade unionism and rank-and-file organisation. The collective defense of jobs and living conditions against the inevitable attempts to force us to bear the costs of this crisis can be the basis for establishing such solidarity. Defying the logic of capital and the priorities of those who presently rule may be one crucial step in preparing us unruly natives for authentic self-government.
Palin to Appear on SNL
Lame.
Obama is Funny (OK, So’s McCain)
Hey, this is really funny. I wonder who’s idea it was to call Al Franken.
Hey this is really funny. I wonder who’s idea it was to call… that famous funny conservative guy… uh… Dennis Mil– I wonder when Al Franken decided to join the GOP.
Gruber v. Riley
Alright, I have my problems with Daring Fireball, but this post was pretty funny. By the way, can anyone tell me what “high-level blogging” is?
FUCK JOE! & Obama’s October Suprise
I don’t feel sorry for poor (>$250,000/yr) Joe the Plumber.
PS: Is Obama’s october suprise a moustache?
William Jennings Bryan
John McCain sort of reminds me of William Jennings Bryan. I wonder when, after his election fails and he is scorned as an outcast on both sides of the political spectrum, his “Scopes Monkey Trial” moment will be, in which he completes a kind of Hegelian negation of negation, resulting in a tragi-comic death at the height of his political irrelevance.
Prince Show Needs to Be Bootlegged/Released
Prince performs to a crowd of 200 with a stripped down band and a load of covers. Someone needs to bootleg this show. Please don’t sue me for saying that.
The set list:
Show One:
- New Song
- “1999″
- “I Feel For You”
- “Controversy”
- “Sexy Dancer/Le Freak”
- “Miss You”
- “Satisfied”
- “Beggin’ Woman Blues”
- “Purple Rain”
- “A Love Bizarre”
- “What Is Hip”
- “Stratus”
- “Cream”
- “U Got the Look”
- “Nothing Compares 2 U”
Show Two:
- “Crimson and Clover”/”Wild Thing” (Tommie James/Troggs)
- “Let’s Go” (Cars)
- “7″
- “Come Together” (Beatles)
- “1999″
- “Controversy”
- “Sexy Dancer/Freak Out” (Chic)
- “Long Train Running” (Doobie Brothers)
- “Shhh”
- “Musicology”/Prince & The Band
- “3121″
- “Girls & Boys”
- “Honky Tonk Woman” (Rolling Stones)
- “Stratus” (Billy Cobham)
- “Miss You” (Rolling Stones)
- “Red House” (Jimi Hendrix)
- “Purple Rain”
Encore:
- Dave Chappelle set
- “Brown Skin” (India.Arie) (sung by Shelby)
- “In The Morning” (Sung by Shelby)
- “You Can’t Hide Love” (Earth Wind & Fire)
- “Love’s Taken Over” (Chante Moore) Sung by Marva King
- “I Want To Be Free” (Ohio Players)
- “Cream”
- “U Got The Look”
- “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” (Janet Jackson)
- “Partyman”
- “It’s Alright” (Graham Central Station)
- “Alphabet St.”
- “The Bird”
- “Jungle Love”
- “The Glamorous Life”
- “Love Bizarre” (w/Housequake)
There Have Always Been Crises
Two relates links:
- Harold Bloom writes in the New York Times about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the notion of “self-reliance” during hard economic times. (Via Ads Without Products.)
- Steve Shaviro discusses Marx’s crisis theory in relation to Fredric Jameson’s ostensible “pessimism” about the necessity of a future crisis (written prior to 2008).
Both are worth checking out.
Mack the Knife
Nick Cave sings Kurt Weill.
Kristol and Palin
Well, this might explain where the brilliant pick of Sarah Palin came from.
A key organizer and participant in the Palin meeting was Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who can fairly lay claim to having “discovered” Palin for Washington political circles. Palin’s name appeared in fifty-seven Weekly Standard articles since the Juneau meeting—starting with a paean entitled “The Most Popular Governor” that ran right after the reception.
Indeed, Kristol, who was a loyal McCain supporter in 2000 and is often thought to have suffered exclusion from Bush’s inner circle as a result, may have played a key role in McCain’s decision to tap Palin as his running mate. A McCain campaign insider described to me a tight three-way competition between Palin, Joe Lieberman, and Mitt Romney in the final days. McCain himself, it was no secret, wanted Lieberman to be his running mate, but his senior advisors were adamant that Lieberman could not be sold to the Republican base. A Lieberman nomination might risk exposing serious fissures in the party at the convention in Saint Paul.
Don’t Just Do Something, Talk
Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books:
One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
The New Socialism
Matthew Yglesias:
Over the past 30-35 years or so, the world as a whole has retreated from the high tide of state management of the economy that was reached around midcentury, and moved more in the direction of laissez faire. But I think it’s fair to say that though the trend has been perfectly general, the political leadership in this movement has tended to come from Washington and London, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the loudest and clearest exponents of it and their successors on the center-left tended to confirm, rather than reverse, a new Anglophone consensus. And yet:
The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. […] The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”
This is what a lot of left-of-center economists said in the first place, but the ideological taboo against nationalization was very strong. Now, though, the forces of looming collapse in the banking sector are proving even stronger. Thus, it looks like it’ll be George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke who bring a very strong dose of socialism to the United States of America. And yet Andy McCarthy’s busy worrying if Barack Obama is a closet Maoist.
Cutting Spending
Adam Kotsko:
You know what would really help, if you want to cut spending? Most things that actually help the majority of people — social programs, preventive health care, even free college tuition — are not very expensive. Most human beings’ needs are actually quite modest, even if you’re thinking in terms of “full human flourishing” — which of course is a ridiculous thing for the government to care about, but stay with me. The really expensive things are huge tax cuts for the wealthy ($300bn), bailouts for reckless speculators who threaten to undermine capitalism as a whole ($700bn), and unnecessary wars ($700bn).
The End of Freedom
Lenin:
… This is what is important in Marx’s ‘ideology criticism’ - far from upholding a banal dichotomy between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’, Marx collapsed the distance between the two. They are not identical, but nor are they autonomous. As he argued in the Grundrisse, against Proudhon and his followers, social equality is precisely not just a false claim made for markets. Rather, individuals are “stipulated for each other”, in the context of an exchange of equivalents, as free and equal agents. Market transactions do not express themselves as involuntary expropriation, even where that is in fact what is happening, but as voluntary engagements.
That explains the context in which the ideas of neoliberalism could even be comprehensible; the historic collapse of the postwar social democratic compromise provided the occasion for their aggressive relaunch; and the liberalisation of the stock exchange announced their hegemony. The true believers really do see the broad historical shift that is taking place…
A Quick Fix for the Soul
Darian Leader in the Guardian links the popularity of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with the rise of neoliberal ideology:
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
… Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through “work” on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher’s dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one’s existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
I suggest giving the whole article a read. Leader’s criticism of CBTs seems spot on to me: the problem isn’t that it’s merely an attack on psychoanalysis, but instead that it is an attempt at a quick fix, a cost-effective method to conform people’s psyches to the so-called “realities” of the market-economy. And, as k-punk suggests, “it is the idea that positive thinking is mandatory which most closely links neoliberalism and CBT.”
Tips for Recession Fashion
From The Moment, Isaac Mizrahi’s Luxury Guide to Recession Style:
Discounts Are for Suckers- “Never buy anything that’s on sale. That’s always junk. … You’re just buying it because it’s cheap.”
Shop Constantly- “If you need clothes, don’t go shopping.” The best purchases are serendipitous! “If you need an evening dress, a fabulous evening dress, you’re never gonna find one.”
Splurge on Shoes- “Honestly, it starts with the shoes.” Preferably some “giant fetish shoes.”
Splurge on a Hairstylist “Go to the guy you can’t afford.”
Spoiling Yourself Is Worth It- “If you go once and buy something expensive, a) it makes you into a wonderful object; and b) it educates.”
So… The Moment is definitely getting deleted from my RSS feed list. I can’t even remember why I added it.
AIG Goes On Vacation
The Consumerist:
Now that AIG has been nationalized, some folks are wondering just how their tax dollars are being spent. If you’re among them, we have some bad news for you from ABC. They are reporting that papers uncovered by congressional investigators show that “less than a week after the federal government committed $85 billion to bail out AIG, executives of the giant AIG insurance company headed for a week-long retreat at a luxury resort and spa, the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California.” Ouch.
ABC says that the documents show that the company, yes the company, paid more than $400,000 for a week long retreat at the resort. The bill included $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 in spa charges.
The View From Roanoke
The Guardian’s Gary Younge is following the presidential campaign from Roanoke, Virginia, in a series called “The View From Roanoke”. So far the series is superbly well written. Something about Younge’s outsider perspective gives things a refreshing neutrality and clarity.
An evening with the Garsts lays bare the depths of America’s political polarisation. A night out with many liberals could well produce the same confusion about what motivates the other side. The problem is not just that people do not agree with each other. It is that at times they don’t even seem to know each other politically beyond caricature. A sizeable section of both the Democratic and Republican base believes that the only reason the other exists is because they are either deluded, bigoted, misinformed, misanthropic, greedy, gullible or godless. Both believe that their information pool is contaminated - one by the liberal media, the other by the mainstream corporate media. The issue is not that there’s no middle ground, it’s that there’s little in the way of common ground.
Dreamin’ of You
Harry Dean Stanton in Dreamin’ of You, the new Bob Dylan single. He plays a Dylanologist, I think.
New WALNUTS from Salvatore the Intern
I love Salvatore the Intern, it has that great lo-fi Jon Waters atmosphere and some fantastically bizarre pauses. This one’s not as good as my favorite, the essential, The Alien That Came From Hell, but seeing as how it’s election time, how about some more WALNUTS.
I’m saddened by the fact I beat Wonkette to the punch on this.
EDIT: I Work at Blockbuster is also pretty cool.
Sweet Dee’s Confession
Sweet Dee from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has started a video diary on Youtube. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a great show. Unapologetically cynical and in the worst taste possible.
The Communist Manifesto Turns 160
Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:
This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism—a k a “free enterprise”—seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line “Sign on Wall Street yesterday,” and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, “JUMP! You Fuckers!”
The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,” for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
The New York Times Health section publishes a rare insightful account of the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, which has (rightfully and wrongfully) found itself under attack from the medical establishment, psychology, neuroscience, and biopsychology, just to name a few of the usual suspects. Benedict Carey writes:
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that psychodynamic therapy is making a comeback, largely as a reaction to CBTs, which research suggests only make short-term progress on unconscious symptoms. Yet the mere fact that psychoanalysis might be re-entering the mainstream is one that should not be taken as in itself a good thing: what is important is precisely how it will manifest itself. It’s up to informed psychoanalysts, particularly in the Lacanian field as opposed to ego psychology, to ensure that the path psychoanalysis takes in its ostensible resurgence is one that places the unconscious, and therein the signifier, at the center of analysis. What this amounts to is the proper re-politicization of psychoanalysis.
“Forget it, old people, No more TV.”
As far as I’m concerned Talk Show is the only variety show that can consistently pull off competent sketches.
AFL-CIO Speech on Obama
Ok, it’s at the top of Digg and it’s from the Steelworkers convention in July. But it’s still great.
Sarah Palin on Roe v. Wade
I updated Sarah Palin’s Greatest Hits to include this one, but since it’s somewhat buried I figured I would post the video here for our esteemed viewing audience.
What makes this video especially great is the contrast to Joe Biden’s much more, uh, comprehensible, response. Plus the teaser for those great CBS sitcoms we U.S. Americans in all 50 states know and love. And appreciate. (See the link for this.)
Returning to the Political Economy
Craig at Theoria suggests that, given the current financial crisis, we ought to return to studying the political economy:
In 1968, Alexandre Kojeve, then one of the chief planners for the European Common Market working the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, was asked what the students in the streets of Paris should do. Kojeve’s answer was “learn Greek.” It is only in recent years through Giorgio Agamben’s work that we’ve come to understand what Kojeve meant.
While I don’t claim to be nearly as smart or clever as Kojeve, it would be my suggestion, given the current financial crisis, to return to the classics of political economy.
I don’t really know much about political economy, but I do happen to be reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and Marx at the moment, and just from that I think this is good advice. Check out the link for recommendations on specific texts. (Note: None of them are in ancient Greek!)
Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
N. Pepperell on the ontological dimension of Marx’s critique of capital:
Saving capitalism from the capitalists - the language of gambling, of speculation, of irresponsible and reckless individuals - it’s all over the coverage. There are historical resonances here too - framings that were once used to push through the reforms of the welfare state. I’m also interested, though, in this specific distinction between “capitalism” and “capitalists” - this is a distinction that was, I think, quite important in Marx’s work: individuals as bearers of economic roles - individuals as beneficiaries and as more or less wilful and abhorrent exploiters of social circumstances - but capitalism itself having an ontological status that is in some meaningful sense externalised in relation to those individuals whose actions nevertheless perform the reproduction of capital. For Marx - and I’ll try to write more on this in the future - this externalisation opens up some important options for critique and transformation, while at the same time, and within current circumstances, operating as a form of domination of the collective consequences of social action over the actors. The passage above treats the externalised entity capitalism as distinct from its imprudent bearers - and this entity also becomes an ideal that must be preserved, at the expense of those bearers if needed. The capitalists can go - capitalism, no. The bearers are more contingent that the process they bear - the process is taken to carry, not simply hard force, but a distinctively normative power.
Global Capitalism and Its Discontents
On Your Call, Brad DeLong (Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley) and Robert Brenner (the director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA) will be discussing some important questions, such as:
What is capitalism? And how is the current crisis changing the way you understand the basic structure of our economy? On the next Your Call, we’ll have a conversation about economic crisis in the US and its long-term effect on capitalist economies. The current financial meltdown has sparked a debate on whether capitalism is the ideal methodology for wealth creation. What do you think?
Click here to listen to the discussion. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Keys and White’s Final Product
Cool video and both artists are of course amazing, but I’m just not feeling the song. I was hoping it was going to be more like that Beck collaboration piano track from the Conquest EP. The song, and the video, are over produced in my opinion.
Oh well, here’s to future collaboration.
Via The Modern Age.
The Mouse Problem
Just in case you were looking for subversive sketch comedy instead of that centrist SNL bullshit, Eek Eek.