An Unenviable Situation

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

"...we are not always consistent" etc.

Sunday, November 24, 2024

He couldn't think of the obvious, and had to imagine something implausible.
It took me back. The politics of earnest, seemingly sexless, men. Also of course, some women.

It's the self-blind politics that makes support for transwomen obligatory because they call themselves women; but Philosemitism is suspect, and Rachel Dolezel earns mockery.
Arthur Danto on urinals

 Oxbridge "philosophers".
I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? 
Like Moyn's pathetic politics. And he's doing it again. Brazil just indicted Bolsonaro, but somehow the US is supposed to be above such things. The model is the faculty lounge.

2020
repeats.  The distinction between collaborative reason in the academy, and adversarial reason in the world at large.

2017
The fetish for happiness, for demand for resolution of all conflicts, external and internal, the denial of the possibility of tragedy, the liberal institutionalization of narcissism, while denying the possibility that it could exist. Cafe revolutionaries, liberal Zionists, transsexuals, the popular triumph of wishful thinking. The absolute triumph of course is fascism.
The overlap between critics of liberal transgenderism and defenders of Zionism, and critics of Zionism and defenders of male fantasy. Zionist fantasies have become reality through the state of Israel, and Palestinian reality has become tied to fantasy. 

I really feel almost alone

Lewinsky tells her story
And so we moved to the bathroom and were more intimate. There was some attention paid on me and then I was reciprocating, where up until that point he had always stopped before completion on his part,” Lewinsky said, delicately trying to explain their encounter.
“I sort of stood up and said I wanted to move past that stage and so he finally said OK.
That’s when the dress was soiled, but Lewinsky didn’t notice at the time. “So that finished and then I hugged him after. And he hugged me,” she said. “And off I went.”

The 30 year old man on the right is officially a woman, named Giulia Valentino.  

Friday, November 15, 2024

The 62-year-old surgeon told MPs: "What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area and then the drones would come down."
His face shook with emotion as he paused for several seconds to compose himself.
He continued:"The drones would come down and pick off civilians - children.
"We [were] operating on children who would say: 'I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.'
"That's clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act - persistent targeting of civilians day after day."

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Looking at  Jeff Wall




The arms, the hands, including the fingers, the formal arrangements, staged out of observation. Degas, including the green. 

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

The Beautiful Game

Twitter may not last.

Wednesday, November 06, 2024


 
repeat from 2021, and 2016: synecdoche.
I didn't have the patience to explain everything. see also
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In no particular order, because it doesn't matter. What's done is done.
"getting priced out" of the neighborhoods they've lived in all their lives, while liberals move in.  Liberals love the passive fucking voice.
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One more I'd missed

Monday, November 04, 2024

"Two women about to give birth were shot and bled to death in the street,..."

"The AP spent months gathering accounts of the raids on al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan Hospitals,.... "

...Medical facilities often come under fire in wars, but combatants usually depict such incidents as accidental or exceptional, since hospitals enjoy special protection under international law. In its yearlong campaign in Gaza, Israel has stood out by carrying out an open campaign on hospitals, besieging and raiding at least 10 of them across the Gaza Strip, some several times, as well as hitting multiple others in strikes.

It has said this is a military necessity in its aim to destroy Hamas after the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. It claims Hamas uses hospitals as “command and control bases” to plan attacks, to shelter fighters and to hide hostages. It argues that nullifies the protections for hospitals.

“If we intend to take down the military infrastructure in the north, we have to take down the philosophy of (using) the hospitals,” Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said of Hamas during an interview with The Associated Press in January after the first round of hospital raids.=

Most prominently, Israel twice raided Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the biggest medical facility in the strip, producing a video animation depicting it as a major Hamas base, though the evidence it presented remains disputed.

But the focus on Shifa has overshadowed raids on other facilities. The AP spent months gathering accounts of the raids on al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan Hospitals, interviewing more than three dozen patients, witnesses and medical and humanitarian workers as well as Israeli officials.

It found that Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence in those cases. The AP presented a dossier listing the incidents reported by those it interviewed to the Israeli military spokesman’s office. The office said it could not comment on specific events.

Al-Awda Hospital: ‘A death sentence’

The Israeli military has never made any claims of a Hamas presence at al-Awda. When asked what intelligence led troops to besiege and raid the hospital last year, the military spokesman’s office did not reply.

In recent weeks, the hospital has been paralyzed once again, with Israeli troops fighting in nearby Jabalia refugee camp and no food, water or medical supplies entering areas of northern Gaza. Its director Mohammed Salha said last month that the facility was surrounded by troops and was unable to evacuate six critical patients. Staff were down to eating one meal a day, usually just a flat bread or a bit of rice, he said.

As war-wounded poured in, exhausted surgeons were struggling to treat them. No vascular surgeons or neurosurgeons remain north of Gaza City, so the doctors often resort to amputating shrapnel-shattered limbs to save lives.

“We are reliving the nightmares of November and December of last year, but worse,” Salha said. “We have fewer supplies, fewer doctors and less hope that anything will be done to stop this.”

The military, which did not respond to a specific request for comment on al-Awda hospital, says it takes all possible precautions to prevent civilian casualties.

Last year, fighting was raging around al-Awda when, on Nov. 21, a shell exploded in the facility’s operating room. Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, two other doctors and a patient’s uncle died almost instantly, according to international charity Doctors Without Borders, which said it had informed the Israeli military of its coordinates.

Dr. Mohammed Obeid, Abu Nujaila’s colleague, recalled dodging shellfire inside the hospital complex. Israeli sniper fire killed a nurse and two janitors and wounded a surgeon, hospital officials said.

By Dec. 5, al-Awda was surrounded. For 18 days, coming or going became “a death sentence,” Obeid said.

Survivors and hospital administrators recounted at least four occasions when Israeli drones or snipers killed or badly wounded Palestinians trying to enter. Two women about to give birth were shot and bled to death in the street, staff said. Salha, the administrator, watched gunfire kill his cousin, Souma, and her 6-year-old son as she brought the boy for treatment of wounds....

Monday, October 28, 2024

Updated at the top. 
There was always to risk that the Democrats would up the ante. And they did.


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This idiot did more damage to the GOP than the Democrats have recently. America will become a failed state before it's ruled by fascists. The images, repeats: one and two 

Friday, October 25, 2024


reworking something from last year. oil on canvas, 11"x14".

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Gary Indiana RIP

"One Brief, Scuzzy Moment"
 
 

Indiana, reviewing Blake Gopnik's book on Warhol in 2020, inadvertently writes his own epitaph, but less insulting to him than his fans 

This book could appear only at a time when the bohemian mobility, sexual freedom, and cultural ferment of New York in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties are not simply being forgotten, as people who were there die off, but becoming unimaginable. A time when New York has become so cluelessly middle class that someone can actually write, of the back room at Max’s Kansas City, that Warhol “behaved more like the cool-cat senior in high school who the freshmen do everything to impress and who looks on with amused condescension.” This is the point of view of someone who never, ever could have gotten into Max’s.

Lorentzen now has a tag. I was thinking it was odd Indiana doesn't have one, but Colin doesn't have one either. It's not always a compliment. 

Friday, October 18, 2024

"I am not the leader of a militia, I'm from Hamas. And that's it. I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence. You are a war correspondent. Do you like war?"
 
Not at all.
 
"And so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war."
 
But you have been fighting for all your life.
 
"And I am not saying I won't fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free."
 
Borders have been basically sealed-off for 11 years. Gaza doesn't even have water anymore, only sea water. How is living here?
 
"What do you think? 55 percent of the population is under 15. We are not speaking of terrorists, we are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free."
 
80 percent of the population depends on aid. And 50 percent is food insecure—50 percent is hungry. According to the UN, Gaza will soon be unfit to live in. Yet still in recent years Hamas has found resources to dig its tunnels.
 
"And luckily. Otherwise we would all be dead. The way you see it, it's the way the Zionist propaganda tells it. The siege didn't come after the tunnels; it wasn't a reaction to tunnels. It's the other way round. There was a siege and a humanitarian crisis, and to survive we had no other option than digging tunnels. There were times when even milk was banned."

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Eagleton again. (repeats)




repeats. from Larkin to Baudelaire.
I had provided myself with the popular books of the day (this was sixteen or seventeen years ago), and for two weeks I had never left my room. I am speaking now of those books that treat of the art of making nations happy, wise and rich in twenty-four hours. I had therefore digested—swallowed, I should say—alI the lucubrations of all the authorities on the happiness of society—those who advise the poor to become slaves, and those who persuade them that they are all dethroned kings. So it is not astonishing if I was in a state of mind bordering on stupidity or madness. Only it seemed to me that deep in my mind, I was conscious of an obscure germ of an idea, superior to all the old wives’ formulas whose dictionary I had just been perusing But it was only the idea of an idea, something infinitely vague. And I went out with a great thirst, for a passionate taste for bad books engenders a proportionate desire for the open air and for refreshments.

Tuesday, October 08, 2024

Hersh was right.
 

Sunday, October 06, 2024

Kitsch, Politics, Philosophy, Pedants and Children, Naturalism, Determinism, Make it Idiot-Proof,



It's a good lecture: the German academy, Humboldt, Marcuse, Wissenschaften, Mill, the defense of academic freedom over freedom of speech; Leiter touches all the bases. And as always, he twists them to his preferences. 

Any defense of academia as an arbiter of truth is vitiated by indifference to genocide, as it's always been vitiated by academic, qua academic, responses to crises. But the pretensions of Modernism: positivist, radical, vanguardist, technocratic; elitism of one sort or another, has rendered academics of all stripes immune to irony. One way or another, they're all big children. 
 

[Michigan in the World features exhibitions of research conducted by undergraduate students about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships beyond its borders.]
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR 
LANSING, MICHIGAN 48903

GEORGE ROMNEY
GOVERNOR
August 9, 1965

Dear Dr. Kaufman:

Your article, "Teach-ins: A New Force for the Times", in NATION of June 21st has been called to my attention. I  admire you for the depth of your conviction that you have performed an essential service for democracy; but, I would have wished you to be more objective in your presentation. Your phrase, "But presumably in the world of Governors and auto executives, business is always business, and sacred11 , is a neat stereotype, but obviously removed from the facts of the case. It certainly does not describe accurately my response to your original teacher strike proposal.

My reaction, that of the legislature, and your colleagues, too, should have made it crystal clear that our concern was for the majority of students, faculty, and administration at the University who did not choose to participate in your demonstration. The strike would have forced a cancellation of classes, whether this was desired or not, to be made up later if schedules · could be rearranged. Certainly
you felt your cause to be important enough to warrant "a departure from work as usual". And you anticipated an audience of 700 from a student body of 30,000. Following your example, it would be necessary for the whole University to defer to any 2% of the University community which felt it had a cause important enough to bring the tight schedule to a standstill.