Jeffrey Sachs. Why Hillary Clinton is unfit to be President.
In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.
As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.
This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat" Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.
Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.
When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.
In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made public its position: "Assad must go."
...The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a "normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?
This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure.
Assad is routinely accused of murdering 250,000 of his own people. The only problem is that there’s no proof he did.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
repeats. From the paper.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a dissent from 2009:
“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
Scalia says this because the Constitution refers to due “process” not to outcome.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The letter and the spirit of the law. The phrase itself undermines the claims of naturalist epistemology. What is judging? Who’s to judge? Here we get back to the relation of art and law and of abstraction to representation.
On the letter of the law Scalia is correct. To argue from the spirit of law or language is subjectivism, and subjectivism is inarticulate, in-formal, isolate: the end of the social. But to argue only from the letter is cold, inhuman, unjust:
“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“Okay Let him go.”
“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the law.”
Does it matter that he killed five people? Who’s to judge?
Formal logic in the world of experience is pedantry, and military pedantry in civic life is fascism. Pedantry will always become hypocrisy. Policemen enforcing law will always tend to identify themselves not with its enforcement but its embodiment. “I am the law.” And by identifying themselves with law the laws’ authority will become theirs. “St Paul says: To the pure all things are pure.” [Titus 1:15] That’s the pull of the short circuit, of identification.
The puffing moralist Corey Robin says Scalia was like Trump.
Last night Trump, not for the first time, said Bush lied about Iraq.
Trump has a good time playing to Scalia's audience while laughing at them.
A few people have compared him to Buchanan.
I haven't put anything in the paper about Gödel and Addington. It belongs with the above.
A commenter at Leiter linked the video. Scalia was an Authoritarian Catholic, and far from a brilliant example of the type.
"[T]he issue was simply whether carbon was an environmental pollutant or not, and I did not think that it was ever regarded as that. It is not the Atmospheric Protection Agency it's the Environmental Protection Agency. And it has always been thought to have authority only to control the environment and not outer space."
Friday, February 12, 2016
"Why is “Laborism” an increasing influence within the Democratic Party even though union density continues to decline?"
Rich Yeselson (previously here) makes the most honestly absurd, earnestly self-blind and self-serving argument I've read in a long time. It's impressive even by the standards of CT.
For about 30 years, a goal of the most sophisticated sectors of the labor movement has been to import the talents and commitment of the college educated middle class onto union staffs, and to export, via programs like Union Summer, the Organizing Institute, and organizing campaigns on college campuses, the ethos of unionism to colleges and other precincts of the professional liberal elite. One milestone in this effort, for example was the union-intellectuals conference at Columbia in 1996, for example, which called for an explicit alliance between leftist intellectuals and unions and featured keynote addresses by Betty Friedan, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West and John Sweeney, then president of the AFL-CIO. And this strategy worked! Key thinkers and pundits like Paul Krugman became more interested in unions as a lynchpin for addressing income inequality and, even, as institutions of civil society, being a kind of the liberal equivalent to evangelical churches. Lots of public intellectuals, during this period, wrote about labor and union issues in non-academic media.
...Meanwhile, college kids, disproportionately at elite colleges and universities, got involved in campus organizing fights and—in another superstructural result of post sixties scholarship—took leftist oriented classes in American labor history and the social sciences. Yale, to name a major example, became a major venue of the new laborism and continues to send undergrads and grad students to union staff positions as organizers and strategic researchers.
...So this all became a virtuous circle—college types go into the labor movement, making it more creative, attentive to recognitional issues of race and gender, and more interested in larger questions of political economy. (For a time, the most creative union presidents were, by common consensus, three graduates of Ivy League universities. Now David Rolf, a graduate of Hamilton College, who got interested in unions in college and has an intellectual partnership with class traitor, billionaire Nick Hanauer, is considered the cutting edge union thinker.)
A "virtuous circle" led by our liberal elite, and billionaire "class traitors".
Change comes from below.
Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.
At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues, ranging from a belief in an activist government to support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization.
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Still working. Fixed one weak spot. I like it.
The full screen button is on the bottom right.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Henry 02.07.16 at 7:17 pm
Eszter – on the contrast between the fallibility of machine learning and hype, I liked this by danah, which you’ve presumably already seen.
It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — a rant in response to the government and corporate leaders who descend on a certain snowy resort town each year as part of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Picture that pamphleteering with me for a moment…
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
I first read Barlow’s declaration when I was 18 years old. I was in high school and in love with the Internet. His manifesto spoke to me. It was a proclamation of freedom, a critique of the status quo, a love letter to the Internet that we all wanted to exist. I didn’t know why he was in Davos, Switzerland, nor did I understand the political conversation he was engaging in. All I knew is that he was on my side.
...Yet, what I struggled with the most wasn’t the sheer excess of Silicon Valley in showcasing its value but the narrative that underpinned it all. I’m quite used to entrepreneurs talking hype in tech venues, but what happened at Davos was beyond the typical hype, in part because most of the non-tech people couldn’t do a reality check. They could only respond with fear. As a result, unrealistic conversations about artificial intelligence led many non-technical attendees to believe that the biggest threat to national security is humanoid killer robots, or that AI that can do everything humans can is just around the corner, threatening all but the most elite technical jobs. In other words, as I talked to attendees, I kept bumping into a 1970s science fiction narrative.
I know many in tech are inspired by scifi, but sometimes it feels like they're trying to become scifi. When did reality become so passé?
A reference to Boyd in an old comment at Savage Minds. I'd read her a bit by then.
I guess I should be impressed. Tunney ended up an open, pathetic, fascist. Again the failures of utopian engineering, of the world and the self, beginning with self-hatred and ending in moralizing violence. Boyd is just the club kid at Microsoft.
The Economist: How John Perry Barlow views his internet manifesto on its 20th anniversary
The Economist: What do you think you got especially right—or wrong?
JPB: I will stand by much of the document as written. I believe that it is still true that the governments of the physical world have found it very difficult to impose their will on cyberspace. Of course, they are as good as they ever were at imposing their will on people whose bodies they can lay a hand on, though it is increasingly easy, as it was then, to use technical means to make the physical location of those bodies difficult to determine.
Even when they do get someone cornered, like Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange, or [Edward] Snowden, they’re not much good at shutting them up. Ed regularly does $50,000 speeches to big corporate audiences and is obviously able to speak very freely. Ditto Julian. And even ditto Chelsea Manning, who despite the fact that she’s serving a 35-year sentence, is still able to speak her mind to all who will listen.
I've made the same arguments since the time Danah Boyd was born. I was raised on them. I played Dungeons and Dragons once in my life, in 1978, sitting on the floor with a teenage grad student in computer science, dialed into the mainframe at U. Penn, reading the printouts from a large format printer. Neither of us were very interested. Five years later watching Graeber and his friends play was depressing. Even played with human beings it was more Kraftwerk than Celtic, more escape than engagement, the panicked denial of the darkness of Kafka and Duchamp, of Warhol and Robert Wilson and Bowie and Detroit. "People think that Andy said he was a machine. But he didn't. He said he wanted to be a machine and that's not the same thing at all." The isolation of machine life, the perverse pleasures of autism, of life without pain. As ideology it was the curdled nihilism of Borges: a child who grew old refusing to grow up. Aaron Swartz was too good for this world.
All repeated below in a comment at Savage Minds that won't make it. I understand why. I have no patience.
"It is strange when capitalism, which in the contemporary scene so values flexibility and mobility, invents constraints for itself that inhibit the very qualities it thrives on."
The intellectual models of Modernism are the philosopher, the engineer and the librarian, all builders of infrastructure. The primacy of ideas, not of people, or even the record of their actions. Librarians are bureaucrats, Benthamites of thought. The poetry of bureaucracy is Kafka, Otto Weininger, Daniel Paul Schreber, Wittgenstein, and Duchamp. It's mechanized violence and mechanized sex. Also Nietzsche and Borges: the celebration by neurasthenic bookworms for the romantic ideal of illiterate barbarians. A romance of freedom in a mechanized world. Fascism was born from paradox.
“shell as hard as steel” I never followed this much. Wow. Amazing how much it was twisted. The same with Strachey and Freud.
"People think that Andy said he was a machine. But he didn't. He said he wanted to be a machine and that's not the same thing at all." An old friend of mine and an expert on Warhol. The quote's from memory but I've never forgotten it.
The perverse pleasure of autism and the history of the closet. Weininger to Kraftwerk.
"Consider a discipline such as aesthetics. The fact that there are works of art is given for aesthetics. It seeks to find out under what conditions this fact exists, but it does not raise the question whether or not the realm of art is perhaps a realm of diabolical grandeur, a realm of this world, and therefore, in its core, hostile to God and, in its innermost and aristocratic spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man. Hence, aesthetics does not ask whether there should be works of art."
The perverse desperation of Viennese art was founded in assumptions of its own inadequacy: the inadequacy of the merely beautiful in the face of the intelligent.
I've always hated Weber with a passion. A Machiavel for the steel age. I have sympathy for his damaged children, but not for geeks and manic autism without irony. Aaron Swartz was a pathetic narcissist. Justine Tunney is a transexual-fascist: again self-hating and self-loving. Now Danah Boyd seems to have figured out that her Panglossian tech-hipster act has always been a celebration of Weberian authoritarianism. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Engineering The Revolution: Arms And Enlightenment In France, 1763-1815
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
Two books. The same story.
"The disenchantment of the world" is a world without desire. It never happened. It never will happen.
That Weber's supposed "iron cage" was written as “a shell as hard as steel” is just amazing. And the below becomes just obvious.
For Weber, on the contrary, the steel shell is the symbol of passivity, the transformation of the Puritan hero into a figure of mass mediocrity. True,we have not yet reached the terrifying dimension of Kafka's Metamorphosis in which the chief protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes to find himself transformed into a giant bug lying on his "hard, as it were armor-plated back" (panzerartig harten Rücken), and whose first thoughts and worries are about his job and his time table, rather than his fantastically changed state. But Weber's metaphor places The Protestant Ethic within a lineage that stretches past Kafka to embrace Hannah Arendt's concern that "watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe . . . modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel" and beyond her to those contemporary writers who speculate on cyborgs and the "posthuman"or "transhuman"condition.
Once again, the ghost of Panofsky helps me out, giving me just the sources I need to make my point.
"those contemporary writers who speculate on cyborgs and the 'posthuman' or 'transhuman' condition."
There is no aspect of scientific knowledge that mandates institutionalized instrumental reason in all aspects of life. There is no telos to the world beyond entropy, and even that puts too much of a glow on physical events. The 18th century was the age of enchantment with science, an enchantment morphing over time into various forms of a philosophy along a line also described in the arts, which themselves describe (again) not the world but our perceptions of it. Equality in the language of philosophy originates in the discovery or construction, by members of an elite, of the idea of equality, rather than in the recognition of the practice of it by the people, and has ended in the study of people by that same elite not as equal but alike: the study of each of us only in terms of the aggregate. And in this the logic of individualism becomes its opposite, except that the elite observers have quietly removed themselves from the game. The greatest heroes of technocracy are those who can predict the behavior of the middling and in this they have become middling themselves. But it’s these heroes who are left to make the decisions for the rest of us.
Farrell's fondness for Weber and for fantasy fiction (click the link at the bottom)
"If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom." A cynic's form of democracy. Farrell's such a sleazy fuck.
I should look at Mayer and Mommsen but again, I don't have the patience for polite arguments in defense of the obvious. Appropriate that Mayer was the editor of the Gallimard edition of Tocqueville's complete works and that he wrote on the sociology of film.
Sunday, February 07, 2016
@Charles_Lister Story wrong. @JohnKerry didn't blame oppo for collapse of talks, doesn't have comms w/regime & hasn't wavered on Asad.
US Secretary of State John Kerry told Syrian aid workers, hours after the Geneva peace talks fell apart, that the country should expect another three months of bombing that would “decimate” the opposition.
During a conversation on the sidelines of this week’s Syria donor conference in London, sources say, Kerry blamed the Syrian opposition for leaving the talks and paving the way for a joint offensive by the Syrian government and Russia on Aleppo.
“‘He said, ‘Don’t blame me – go and blame your opposition,’” one of the aid workers, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her organisation, told Middle East Eye.
Kerry told reporters on Friday, as tens of thousands fled the Syrian government and Russian bombardment of Aleppo, that both Russia and Iran, another of Syria's allies, have told him that they are prepared for a ceasefire in Syria.
He said he would know “whether or not these parties are serious” after a meeting of the International Syria Support Group – 17 nations including the US and Russia – scheduled to be held in Munich next week.
But Kerry left the aid workers with the distinct impression that the US is abandoning efforts to support rebel fighters.
Reuters, Feb 3
Syria says Saudi, Qatar, Turkey told opposition to quit Geneva talks.
And please bear in mind that I take neither Dr. Lillehammer nor Professor Dennett to be disputing Timothy Williamson's point in his contribution to The Future for Philosophy that, "Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth...."
Leiter 2016
I have no crystal ball, so I can’t tell you whether there will be...a return to the core values of robust expression and debate which are essential for academic life, as even Herbert Marcuse realized in his famous polemic against “Repressive Tolerance.” There is some portion of the younger generation of professional philosophers (grad students and assistant professors) who consistently have the wrong views on these questions. They may well take over the discipline, that I cannot predict. It’s ironic, because other humanities fields, like English, went through this totalitarian catastrophe in the 1980s while philosophy remained a paragon of wissenschaftlich seriousness.
The comment he quotes approvingly, without linking, (he explains why) is a series of numbered points. No. 2 refers to a "Specialization exhaustion" in the humanities. No. 6 begins: "In both cases, the proponents of the new approaches are basically of two sorts: those already powerful and those not already powerful." That's the foundation of every conservative argument against elite liberalism since the 50s. Left wing cynics have always understood white anger. Derrick Bell etc., etc.
Philosophy and economics are the last of the Modernist ideologies. The crisis in literature in the 80's was a response to change.
The girl yelling at him has the anger of a campus anti-porn campaigner in 1985. It's the anger of someone fully vested in the system, already a member of the elite, demanding and still struggling for full equality within it. It's the anger of a moralizing bourgeois reformer of her own class.
It wasn’t that one could only be profound in German, or that philosophers interested in the sciences were doomed to wade in the shallows. It was rather a point about style—that some styles of thought and writing in philosophy, more than others, are able to convey that mysterious thing, depth.
The British moral philosophy of the early postwar years, the years in which Williams began his career, was many things—clever, incisive, often funny—but it was rarely deep. It was as if the aspiration to depth had been tarnished, with much else that was the tiniest bit Germanic, by its vague association with fascism.
...The hardest thing in philosophy, Williams wrote in the preface to Morality, published twenty years after The Language of Morals, was finding the right style, “in the deepest sense of ‘style’ in which to discover the right style is to discover what you are really trying to do.”
Leiter links to this because the author spends a bit of time mocking the "effective altruism" and other moralists. He makes them sound as if they've all taken vows of poverty, when I thought the point was that they hadn't. And according to Nakul Krishna the answers to Oxonian scholasticism include E.M. Forster. The eternal struggle between pedants to fops; not much has changed in 140 years. And then there's this.
The cover of my Pelican edition of Williams’s Morality bears two details from Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, a set of double-sided discs that, when spun on a turntable at a specified speed, created the impression of depth.
That's just bizarre; appropriate, but not in any intended way.
What made the years of grad school bearable was the jokey solidarity among those of us unsympathetic to this understanding of ethics, the ones who wrote on Aristotle and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, on ambivalence, alienation and anger, and who didn’t see morality wherever they looked.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein by choice or not lived burdened lives. Aristotle is something else.
As Aristotle saw a long time ago, there’s no place in ethics for intellectual precocity. I had once seen a book-length gripe about everything other philosophers were getting wrong. I saw now that focusing on the errors of philosophers was a way of getting at something much more important: the evasions of human beings in their hankering after certainty and system. My favorite aphorism of Williams’s, almost a throwaway line in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, goes, “The only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection; moreover (though the distinction of theory and practice encourages us to forget it), we have to live during it as well.”
The Baroque is an aristocratic performance ethic, less than a virtue ethic. It's Catholic as opposed to Protestant, which is appropriate for a philosopher in an age of the decline of philosophy (philosophy defined as prescriptive and authoritarian). Theater and law re-stage philosophical argument are debate among equals, in a world without kings.
The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.
"...we shall begin with the republican state, which has virtue for its principle."
Against my argument that Nakul Krishna is just a mannered fop.
The success of Doniger’s opponents in having her book withdrawn from the Indian market is not a simple triumph of bullying; at least in this case, their means were constitutional ones. Their success is, rather, the product of the slow accrual of power to an emigrant intelligentsia with its fact-checkers and open letters on the one hand, and an Indian vanguard with its legal notices and hurt sentiments on the other. Doniger’s liberal defenders need to confront the fact that her opponents too claim the moral and political high ground. Not for the first time, it looks like liberalism is awkward when confronted with the question of power, at a loss about what to say to those to whom liberty is not the highest value.
In a very forceful sense of what's contingent, I should not be writing this sentence. I'm writing this one as well only because my mother finished the interior of a casket in a way that displeased someone, the wife of the factory's owner. Had this one person said, "Well, I wouldn't have tacked that fabric that way, but it's ok," or the like, I would not be writing this sentence either. But she didn't say that to my mother. She said something like "You need to redo that lining--it's not right." To my now long-lost mother, whose intricately crocheted doilies sit on my furniture as I write these sentences, that was needless comeuppance. She defended her work, and was sent home for the day.
And that is why I'm writing this sentence. One small moment that could have happened--the boss's wife might have caved and acknowledged my Mom was doing a good enough job--did not. And that's why I'm writing this sentence.
The fact of a working class childhood, described in uninteresting language. Like Laurie Paul.
The "discovery" by philosophers of the of fiction and "art", not as idea but practice and heuristic.
I'm not much interested in Williams, or the rest. Amusing to find out he was a "harsh" critic of Rorty. They obviously had too much in common to get along. He took form and formality seriously in a way Rorty didn't (and I say that without reading either beyond a glance). Googling Williams and Rorty, the third link down, following Williams' review of Rorty in 1989, and Rorty reviewing Williams in 2002, both in the LRB, and above Williams reviewing Rorty again in the NYRB in 1983 , was CT, and Bertram confirming my lazy assumptions.
I’m very puzzled by the claim, repeatedly made in this thread, that Rorty was anathematized by the anglo-american philosophical mainstream because he challenged their methods and their conception of the boundaries of the subject. First, I don’t think it is true that he was anathematized, just that he wasn’t taken as seriously as his fans would have liked. Second, it is very easy to point to philosophers who reject scientism and who also challenge those same boundaries and who have always been treated with the utmost respect by “insiders”. To name but one: Bernard Williams.
...My experience of reading Williams is, in some respects, akin to my experience of reading Nietzsche, in that he had the power to say something (often, merely by the lightest of comments in passing) that is profoundly unsettling. My experience of reading Rorty does not involve being unsettled in the least, just thinking “no, that’s wrong”, “what’s the _argument_ for _that_?” etc. Lots of people are even more “open-faced” in their “dissent” than Rorty, but I find it hard to believe that degree of open-faced dissent is a good predictor of long-term impact. Really having something to say, and saying it well, on the other hand, probably is.
Bertram is saying that Williams took writing seriously, and was able therefore to communicate his desires for some things to be just so, with the result that a reader who disagreed would at least understand the desire, and the complexity of Williams' person and experience. That's what good writing does.
And of course Krishna was raised to be a technocrat.
My parents were part of the educated Indian middle class who approved of books only as long as they were called, say, Advanced Statistics; when they caught me with a copy of Middlemarch they told me I oughtn’t to be reading storybooks at my age.
This is the age of reality
But some of us deal with mythology
This is the age of science and technology
But some of us are stopped by antiquity
LKJ was a Modernist. Nakul Krishna may be too close to Naipaul. But he's facing contradictions that Leiter et al. do their best to avoid. And Maybe N+1 has gotten a little better, since their days of publishing art reviews by managing directors in private equity.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
I wasn't going to do it, but why not.
Rauchway answering Clinton on Reconstruction. He links to Coates.
The simplest response all of them is here.
James Gray Pope at Balkinization, as part of a symposium on the constitution and economic inequality.
The great critical race scholar Derrick Bell, for example, argued that African Americans can advance on issues of race only when whites also benefit. One way to secure this “interest convergence,” he observed, is to ally with lower-class whites "who, except for the disadvantages imposed on blacks because of color, are in the same economic and political boat." Unfortunately, however, white workers have rarely acted on these shared interests. They stood with white planters against slave revolts, for example, "even though the existence of slavery condemned white workers to a life of economic privation," and they excluded black workers from their unions, thereby "allowing plant owners to break strikes with black scab labor." To Bell, such choices reflect a form of racism so virulent and deeply rooted that it overrides economic rationality and blocks any hope of genuine racial equality or class solidarity. In apparent despair, he warns that black Americans face permanent and irrevocable subordination because of “the unstated understanding by the mass of whites that they will accept large disparities in economic opportunity in respect to other whites as long as they have a priority over blacks and other people of color for access to the few opportunities available.”
...When the situational force of law is considered, we may dissent from Bell’s conclusion that poor whites were "easily detoured into protecting their sense of entitlement vis-a-vis blacks for all things of value."
The story begins with a prequel. In colonial Virginia, black and white bound laborers routinely cooperated in escapes and resistance. During Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, an army composed mostly of freed servants and slaves captured and burned Jamestown, the capital of Virginia. The planters’ solution to this threat, according to historian Edmund Morgan, "was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt." The Virginia Assembly, elected not by poor whites but by landed gentry, constructed a legal order in which the poorest white laborer occupied a more exalted position than the most prosperous black planter. Poor whites were rewarded economically and psychologically for assisting in the control of black slaves. In this legal environment, black-white cooperation largely ceased.
By the time that the American working class began to form in the early 1800s, the Constitution and laws of the United States left no doubt that labor freedom, civil rights, and citizenship hinged crucially on being white.
Monday, January 25, 2016
More from Maria Farrell. My italics. The comments are interesting.
Stuck in his tent for two days, too ill to move, Worsley finally called for rescue late last week. He died yesterday of peritonitis that caused multiple organ failure. His wife was at his side at the end.
Every day for the past couple of months, Worsley has been doing a daily update on his progress and talking about what it is like to be alone and pressing on through some of the worst conditions on earth. E, who served under Worsley, had been following the podcasts. (Most nights he would get into bed and put it on, and I would grumpily roll over and tell him to use his headphones.) At the end of each recording, Worsley would answer questions, many of them from the children who listened in each day. There was something sweetly old-fashioned about that. He would satisfy questions like ‘what is it like to celebrate Christmas on Antartica?’ with a condensed but not unrealistic description of life in the white darkness.
I will never understand why people want to climb Everest or walk to the Pole. The human drive to ‘conquer’ landscape and survive in hostile environments is wholly alien to me, and probably to most of us.
The very proper wife to a career military officer. "I love a man in uniform", "Chicks dig the uniform", etc.
So totally unaware.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Submitted 1/1/16
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For the Museum of Capitalism: A Dissent
When I heard about the competition I sent in a proposal immediately with an email, a youtube link and a request for the check. Frankly I was surprised to get a response. The writer wrote to call my bluff: anti-proposals were welcome, but I needed to register first.
The video link was a few minutes from D.A. Pennebaker's short film documenting Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York, a self-destructing machine installed in the garden at MoMA in 1960 and switched on in a show of discreet catastrophe for an audience of money-men, their wives, and cognoscenti. The low-res video images are horrifying, maybe more so than the film, hinting at the destruction of the 20th century, air-raids and ovens, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The event itself was a comic and nihilistic theater of anti-Fordism for an audience of Fords and Rockefellers.
If I were a designer or an architect or an artist interested in conceptual games I suppose I could draw up a proposal for a self-destructing building. But this isn't a proposal for a building, or an argument against a building made via the proposal of an impossible one. Anti-architecture, like anti-art, and anything predicated on opposition, is by definition an angry child, its anger predicated on the existence of a parent. Parents have responsibilities that children don't, and children on their own are no longer children; they have no choice but to be adults before their time.
Artists want the luxury to remain children; we’re always looking for indulgent parents to adopt us so that we can be angry with them. It's a new phenomenon over the last two hundred years. Entertainers are what artists used to be and architects still are: tradesmen and professionals who work to pay the bills. But architects are required to be optimists while entertainers have broader options.
Entertainment is the art of bourgeois capitalism. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction began with Gutenberg and the printing press, and includes both Shakespeare and the modern novel. Fine art, the art and craft of high-value commodities is a holdover from the ancien régime, and its partisans now play a role no less absurd than defenders of the eternal verities and the gold standard.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
Capitalism, in an irony Marx would have enjoyed, returns us to the ancient past, the Bronze Age: the age of stories. The Golden Age is the age of kings, or at the very least aristocrats; capitalism at its grandest is gilded. Architects now are stage designers. The museum of capitalism is the shopping mall, our greatest art made from the conversations of observers of the scene, sitting and talking under the palm trees at Starbucks.
The designer of your webpage understood this, maybe unthinkingly. A 3D font is an illusion of physical and architectural space, but your designer chose a font that's doubly fictional, a contradictory illusion, the only appropriate form for a museum built to house them. It was a brilliant choice. My only quibble with the design was that reading the words “call for ideas”, my first thought was, “Where’s the number?”
After registering, I began to work on a film, a montage of youtube videos recorded in groups as screen captures (the web is the greatest library since Alexandria). I approached Werner Herzog about a voiceover, but I’ve been told now that you’re only reviewing static documents.
In the absence of that I offer the words above. Once you open, the film will be available for exhibition, as will my appropriation of your designer’s image, which I’m having enlarged to 11’x17’, in an edition of 3.
Judith Butler is not by any stretch of the imagination a public intellectual.
...There should always be a space for philosophers who simplify and translate philosophical positions and arguments for a broader audience. But a university’s primary mission should be to advance the disciplines it represents. In short, a university should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige in the future and not in the present. So, a university’s mission with regard to its philosophy department should be to support those who are attempting to formulate new positions and arguments, rather than those who seek contemporary relevance.
A few hops from the first link takes you here, an on to here.
In 2011 Laurie Paul defends Stanley's arguments for "progress" in philosophy
I watched the presentation and I thought Jason Stanley did an excellent job. He gave a really engaging, fun presentation that was geared to the academic audience in the room and then handled Romano's insulting and rather ignorant comments extremely well.
Stanley: "In short, a university should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige in the future and not in the present."
The logic of original intent writ forward. Again, none of this is new but the examples are clear-cut.
Paul is drifting away from philosophy towards literature.
Stanley in becoming politically engaged becomes just sort of moralist that Butler criticizes.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
This is not Occupy Wall St. It's not vanguardist. No anarchists, no tenured radicals, no calls for "full communism", for utopia, no worries about a "beckoning light". It's Wisconsin. It's the fucking bourgeoisie.
We can now say, with the benefit of hindsight, that in January 2015 France succumbed to an attack of hysteria. The massacre of the editorial board of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as of several police officers and the customers of a Jewish shop, triggered a collective reaction unprecedented in our country's history. It would have been impossible to discuss it in the heat of the moment. The media joined hands to denounce terrorism, to celebrate the admirable character of the French people, and to sacralize liberty and the French Republic. Charlie Hebdo and its caricatures of Muhammad were enshrined. The government announced that it was giving a grant to the weekly so that it could get back on its feet. Crowds of people followed the government's appeal to march in protest throughout the land: they held pencils to symbolize press freedom and applauded the state security police and the marksmen posted on the rooftops. The logo `Je suis Charlie' CI am Charlie'), written in white letters against a black background, could be seen everywhere: on our screens, in the streets, on restaurant menus. Children came home from school with a letter C written on their hands. Kids aged seven and eight were interviewed at the school gates and asked for their thoughts on the horror of the events and the importance of one's freedom to draw caricatures. The government decreed that anyone who failed to toe the line would be punished. Any secondary school pupil who refused to observe the minute's silence imposed by the government was seen as implicitly supporting terrorism and refusing to stand in solidarity with the national community. At the end of January, we learned that some adults had started to behave in the most incredibly repressive ways: children of eight or nine years of age were being questioned by the police. It was a sudden glimpse of totalitarianism.
Todd is good, but his references to Weber and to science are defensive puffery. Sociology is not a science in the way he wants it to be. He's an intelligent, disinterested observer. Statistics is a tool. Disinterest is not objectivity.
I'm going to repeat this. It's easy but it works. And I'm feeling self-indulgent.
PLAYBOY: How is your relationship with Elton John these days?
BOWIE: He sent me a very nice telegram the other day.
PLAYBOY: Didn’t you describe him as “the Liberace, the token queen of rock”?
BOWIE: Yes, well, that was before the telegram. I’d much rather listen to him on the radio than talk about him. Let’s do something else. Want to write a song?
PLAYBOY: Sure.
BOWIE: All right. We’ll call the song Audience and it’ll be about rock ‘n’ roll. All right? I’m gonna say, “Led Zeppelin is solid. They make you like a wall.” [Writes it down] Quick. Give me the name of an artist, someone in rock.
PLAYBOY: How about Stevie Wonder?
BOWIE: Good. “Stevie Wonder is growing and you love him most of all.” [Writes it down] He’s sort of the golden boy, everybody loves him. Who else? Name a good songwriter.
PLAYBOY: Joni Mitchell.
BOWIE: “Joni Mitchell has our hearts.” [Writes it down] She does, doesn’t she? OK, let me get my guitar. [Looks at what he’s written and begins strumming and humming softly] All right, here we go. [Sings] “Led Zeppelin is growing, erasing our minds / They make us feel stony, they make us go blind / Hey, Stevie Wonder, there like a wall / So good to lean on, the hardest of all. . . .” Isn’t that a nice little tune?
PLAYBOY: Is that how you wrote Changes?
BOWIE: Naw, but that’s basically how I wrote most of the Diamond Dogs album.
PLAYBOY: What happened to Joni Mitchell?
BOWIE: She’s good enough, she doesn’t need me crooning about her. You see, of course, there are no rules to my writing.
PLAYBOY: We see.
...
PLAYBOY: Last question. Do you believe and stand by everything you’ve said?
BOWIE: Everything but the inflammatory remarks.
UK 1971:
"I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes
Living proof of Churchill's lies, I'm destiny"
and 1977
"What kind of a fool do you think I am?
You think I know nothing of the modern world
...Even at school I felt quite sure
That one day I would be on top
And I'd look down upon the map"
"God save the Queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
And England's dreaming
...Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
...Oh God save history
God save your mad parade"
I posted a comment elsewhere responding to an academic, anthropological, opinion, repeating what I've said before. You have to see all of this in terms of the breakdown of older class, family and social relations. The comment hasn't appeared and may not make it.
As I said yesterday, this is all repeats. But one of the links in that bunch is this one, which includes a quote taken from a comment on a post by Bertram written a couple of days after Thatcher died.
From a comment by Ajay
Rich and poor existed alike inside a great framework of British institutions. It was the lower-middle-class who went from their schools to keep shops or manage small businesses; who did not participate, for the most part, in the institutions you’re describing; who therefore saw the state not as the guarantor of the framework in which they lived, but as a constant demander of taxes and producer of paperwork; and whose resentment ultimately produced Margaret Thatcher.
The famous Playboy interview from 1976 with Cameron Crowe. On Crowe's website.
I'm embarrassed I took the fascist references as seriously as I did. He's biting, sardonic, hilarious, a bastard. The conservatism comes through clean and clear.
"The demimonde by definition is anti-humanist and anti-democratic. Modern libertines are libertarians, though some grow out of it. Most rebels as they grow older, if they make it, retire as liberals."
[In Berlin] I was in a situation where I was meeting young people of my age whose fathers had actually been SS men. That was a good way to be woken up out of that particular dilemma... yeah, I came crashing down to earth when I got back to Europe.
His angry post-hippy individualism connects as punk did with Thatcherism. The pop musical avant-garde of the 70's, the only avant-garde that mattered, set the stage for the mainstream in the 80's.
“… over in Detroit Bowie’s followers were like something out of Fellini’s Satyricon: full tilt pleasure seekers devoid of anything resemlbing shame, limits, caution and moral scruples. I distinctly remember a local lesbian bike gang riding their bikes into the foyer of the concert hall and revving them loudly just prior to Bowie’s arrival onstage. This had not been pre-arranged.. Meanwhile, the toilets were literally crammed with people either having sex or necking pills. The whole building was like some epic porn film brought to twitching life. Back in London’s West Side, the best loved theatrical presentation of the hour was an asinine farce called No sex please we’re British, a title that pretty much summed up the United Kingdom’s awkward embrace of its libidinous potential even during the so called permissive age. Put that reticence down to a mixture of instilled Catholic guilt, cold showers, single sex schooling and steady on old boy stoicism. Our young american cousins had no such inhibitions to curb their lust… This was not lost on David Bowie, whose new Aladdin Sane songs were clearly part inspired by their composer coing into direct contact with the Babylonian sexual frenzy of young America in the early seventies.
"I distinctly remember a local lesbian bike gang riding their bikes into the foyer of the concert hall"
Compare Cornelius Cardew.
When a pop star declares that he is ‘very interested in fascism’ and that ‘Britain could benefit from a fascist leader’ he is influencing public opinion through the massive audiences of young people that such pop stars have access to. Such behaviour is detrimental to the interests of the Union, since it prepares the ground for a political system in which the Trade Union movement can be smashed, as it was in Nazi Germany. This Central London Branch therefore proposes that any member who uses his professional standing or stage act or records to promote fascism should be expelled from the Union.
Does anyone doubt that biker dykes are fascist? But that's the whole fucking point. Cardew, following the line of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of England, was just another symptom of decay, but as moralizing wholly dishonest.
Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them.
I don't have much interest in Bowie after 1980. His career as a careerist isn't very interesting. The older he got the more he returned to being David Jones with a stage name. "I listen to Station To Station as a piece of work by an entirely different person." His wife is very specific about that. "I married David Jones - I've never met David Bowie". He lived a longer life for it. And as far as jet-setters go, both come off well. Amusing that people focusing on Bowie's past to condemn it ignore that his wife of 25 years is a Somali Muslim, and one who has her own history of playing to others' fantasies, and not just as a model.
"He hypes it that I'm six feet tall; I'm barely five feet nine inches," Iman says indignantly. "He claims I didn't speak a word of English; I spoke English, Italian, and Arabic, as well as Somali. He says he found me with goats and sheep—that I was some kind of shepherdess in the jungle!" She shakes her head, still amazed. "I never saw a jungle in my life.... But Peter lives in a fantasy world. He loves the idea of being my Svengali."
Iman, who was promptly hailed by Diana Vreeland as "Nefertiti rediscovered," became enormously successful, but Beard never had an affair with her and never profited in any way from her career; he seems simply to have enjoyed the drama of it all. And Iman eventually resigned herself, with a sort of amused exasperation, to his enthusiasms—even his nostalgia for the bygone culture of the British colonialists he so admires. "Peter loves the myth of Africa more than I do," Iman explains. "He 'loves' Africa, but we always have an argument about what Africa really is. Is it the animals and the landscape, or is it the people? He has no respect for Africans, but it's their continent—not his. For him, there are no people involved; they get in the way of his myth."
Maybe The Thin White Duke married Nefertiti, but they they both laughed about it, and I'm not going to waste my time psychoanalyzing the merely rich. Neoliberalism is a mode. Bowie turned down a CBE and a knighthood; they seem to have worked at being decent parents. And he will be remembered for the work made when he was young.
But the work that will last isn't fascist any more or less than Eliot's poetry is reactionary. Both describe the interior life of the reactionary mind, the insecurities and fears, phobias and manias, and for Bowie in extremis, in full flower. That's why we value them. Fascist art itself can show no weakness, which is why Cardew's pompous condemnations are more reactionary, as authoritarian form, than Bowie's honest expressions of authoritarian desire.
But art is temptation, and the Whig history of art says that what we like must be liberal, not only that we like art that represents liberalism, but that because we like it it must therefore be what we're supposed to like. The first definition of liberalism is self-definition: "I'm a liberal". The rest is open.
Bowie's early politics were reactionary, and his ability to communicate the inner life of reaction means that if we understand it we've shared the feelings, including the ecstasy, confusion, and rage. To appreciate Bowie's art is to have a sense of some very illiberal imaginings. Better that than innocence, false or true.
I said I didn't have much interest in Bowie after 1980, but there's an exception. It may have been the road not taken: that of an older more mature artist. He chose pop stardom. The video of the BBC production is here, discussion here. The music for the The Drowned Girl is the original setting by Weill.
