The man talking above is a liar, a hack, abetting a crime. The kid below thinks he's saying what he sincerely believes, riffing with no idea beyond enthusiasm of what his words might actually mean, a spoiled moralizing brat, one of a group that now includes "African Americans".

"The cloying theatricality of American protests" etc.

'It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst,' she said of the rally. 'The rhetoric is too heavy handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify.' Someone on the stage railed against police brutality, and she rolled her eyes."

Nicholas Christakis in 2024—

"Universities remain strikingly incurious about where all the anti-semitism (as distinct from opposition to Israeli policy) has come from? How and why have students come to think and act this way? Might the pedagogy of faculty and policies of administrators have anything to do with it?"

—and 2015: "...other people have rights too." Responding to protests about Halloween costumes, but not this one:

2015 NYT,  "Walmart Withdraws Hooked ‘Sheik Fagin’ Nose From Halloween Store"

The link (Christakis ) from 2015 includes a link to this. 

"To be perfectly clear, student journalists do have the right to take photos and protesters do not have a right to push away journalists. Students engaged in public protest, the very purpose of which is visibility, cannot credibly argue that they have any reasonable expectation of privacy."

During Jummah (Friday prayer) this afternoon, Columbia University students formed a human shield with blankets to provide privacy to those students participating in prayer after a video showing students praying on the lawn began circulating on social media

📸 pic.twitter.com/xnPllK0shV

— katie smith (@probablyreadit) April 20, 2024

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education changed their name in 2022. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression hasn't commented on the behavior of the students at Columbia.

The protestors are or have friends who are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Any sense of principle beyond loyalty is minimal. "The fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote." 

"This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT."

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

Some can read, or at least want to, but it's a battle.

Caitlín Doherty, "poetry editor" at a journal so over-the-top that its editors used mocking criticism for its blurbs—

“an overdesigned manual in nihilist navel gazing” “Coffee table architectural favela porn.”

— writes an article attacking contemporary feminism as style, in the NLR.

via Anton Jäger. You can't make this shit up.

Andrea Dworkin

Swimming in the blood of her own body, in labor and in pain, the woman is a half-human who achieves her half-human fate in pregnancy and childbearing. The canal through which the infant is extruded is the man’s place of sex; he enters, not wanting blood to drown him or contaminate him or pollute him; the blood makes her dirty and threatens his pristine penis; this makes her an abomination.

Susie Bright was right, she's a great pornographer. She's wrong to call her a lousy writer; that's a good paragraph. But how do you deal with so much self-loathing; anger directed first at herself and then out at the world? Dworkin did it by making her hate into a kind of art that laws she promoted would ban, or should if they're followed. Far from the first artist to make an art from self-destruction. 

Doherty is no better than the women she's responding to, all of them focused on style to avoid what they can't face, following Dworkin's model rather than trying to understand it. But Doherty can't accept that it's the style that makes it personal; and even the impersonal is a style if it's filled with details. It's those details that make it the communication between one single, specific, individual, person and another or others, and that's what the other writers are responding too. It's the details that make it the writing of "Andrea Dworkin". But Doherty—the poetry editor!—has no interest in the specifics of another life; she can't even read "Fascinating Fascism" for what it is. 

Doherty has to pretend. Programs and positivism: so earnest.

It cannot be overstated how deeply boring all this is. How unthrilling, how inessential, to how few urgent questions this seems to contain the seeds of any possible answers. As Dworkin said of porn (after her friend said it of heroin): ‘The worst thing about it all is the endless repetition.’ We’ve been here before, of course, in the past few years’ debate over Afropessimism. Similar risks adhere to a negative feminism: if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender, as of race, to one that is socially constructed but no less real for it in its consequences, might it not behoove us to arrive at a category definition that does not condemn all those who fall within it to limitless amounts of pain? Feminism has no absolute right to existence. It must describe something about the world accurately for it to make sense as a political-philosophical position. And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style.   

"Afropessimism",  academia like big pharma, evergreening the blues, "double-consciousness", "down by law", the history of black experience, and the experience of the working class, of any race, for the age of buppies; like Zionism and "little Israel".

And then this: "...if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender" Brilliant. 

"And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style."

All of this describes the current situation of women. But it's up to the next generation to read the details and understand the inner lives of the dead.

I've said it before: I was was shocked when I learned, late, that Brecht never recognized his own decadence. It was always the doubleness, contradiction, the violence that made the hairs on my arms stand up, that gave me shivers. I always saw everything for context. Everything's always been double. Or if it wasn't needed to be. If it wasn't double it bored me. But the obliviousness of people now, those who should know better if only because they've read the history, and even teach it! amazes me.

"and the experience of the working class, of any race". Cracker pessimism

Andrew-Lloyd-Mother-Fucking-Webber

updated, more than once. rilly.

---

"There is no easy path from the aesthetic experience to politics."

From the "Brooklyn Institute" to Jacobin, 

Oduor, previously. It's almost impressive.

And now I'm going to watch Tár, to see if my assumptions were off in any way at all.

There is no "path" from the aesthetic experience to politics; they're inseparable. Your preferences are shown in the record of your actions, not what you claim for them.

---

I'm a few minutes beyond the credits and it's absolute kitsch. She's blurbed as being an EGOT winner, along with Mel Brooks, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Whoopi Goldberg, and Andrew Lloyd Motherfucking Webber. It's not a film about art; it's a film about Aaahhrt. And it's just going to get worse. Brooks at least would get the joke. Jäger and everyone else, from the New Yorker and the NLR  is fucking blind.

But no. I was wrong. He's following Ruben Östlund, Force Majeure, The Square, and Triangle of Sadness. It's still shallow and reactionary—lazy, obvious, at least to... what, the old? the actually sophisticated? And Brody, Jäger et al. are still fucking blind.

Jäger

This is perhaps why the moralistic commentary on Tár runs into an explanatory impasse; for it is not Lydia’s personal culpability but these impersonal forces that are the real subject of the film. 

The most obvious among them is the stratified sphere of classical music – in which the lower ranks can only improve their career prospects by cultivating informal relationships with those higher up the ladder.

He makes it so easy. From Lydia Tár to Avital Ronell, because in fact it's the other way around.

"The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures."

Mocking Gopnik's script, and Lydia’s personal culpability, from the start. 

He runs down the list of EGOT winners, cross-cut with shots of Blanchett at work, ending on "...Andrew Lloyd Webber, and of course... Mel Brooks."  The audience laughs and Blanchett looks up from the page, as if hearing the laughter.  It's not just the cheapness. That one leaves a bad taste.

This is the core issue: the film was made as parody, and being received as serious it's become kitsch. Or maybe Field can't make up his mind what kind of cheap moralist he wants to be. Either way I don't care.

Jäger: "Throughout, Field meticulously evokes the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum".

"Authentic" He sounds so American.

And I'd forgotten this.

This could all hinge on my snobbery against others'; never mind the Spaceballs vid. But I've never forgotten the description of Adolph Green's last night, written by his son, and this:

We argued the relative merits of classical composers (any suggestion that Tchaikovsky had a maudlin streak or that von Suppé might not have been the last word in profundity infuriated him).

I don't like Tchaikovsky, but through Strayhorn, there'd be no Ellington without him. My father hated Kerouac but loved Pynchon. He was right about both, but couldn't accept the relation. That more than anything is the beginning of my argument with modernism as ideology as opposed to modernity as fact.  Mel Brooks will outlast Andrew Lloyd Webber. Adolph Green knew he loved crap and minor art, and he didn't care. He worked with the maudlin and the sentimental and made something out of it. That's more than Field is capable of, or Östlund for that matter. And Sir Steve McQueen is a good filmmaker, but his politics is not the politics some think it is.

---

My father hated musicals but he could quote lines from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. My parents loved Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford. Gilford was an old friend of David Graeber's parents. My mother's last words were lyrics from Oklahoma. 

The above, indirectly, from Mary Gaitskill. Read it, and the comment by Tavi Gevinson. If you don't recognize the name, google it. 

Gevinson

Also reminds me of a friend who's reading Bret Easton Ellis's new novel. I haven't read it so here's my friend's description: "the teenaged character is invited to a producer's hotel room who then says 'now you have to do something for me' and essentially rapes him.” In the novel the narrator says something like, “But I wasn’t a victim.” And my friend said that reading the novel, he (my friend) felt like the narrator was clearly pained and trying to reframe it. But in a podcast interview, Ellis talked about how that really did happen to him, and also said something like, “I decided I’m not a victim.” My friend said that in the novel the line felt nuanced, whereas in the interview—especially given that Ellis is typically pretty reactionary--it sounded more like a comment on the culture wars, somehow no longer about one person’s experience and psychology.

I guess this is not a revelation (that fiction can be capacious in a way non-fiction isn’t), but maybe if I have any point it’s that it still feels really important to me that writers grapple with this stuff in nonfiction contexts where the reader knows more about what is at stake for the writer. (Just knowing I May Destroy You was based on Coel's experience made me more attentive to and trusting of the show's ideological arguments, even though it shouldn't be read as purely autobiographical.)

The private world and the public world of politics.

Since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence, even the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm. Yet there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrelevant becomes automatically a private matter. This, to be sure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. ("Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.") Because of Its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.

What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character. Modern enchantment with "small things," though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner. This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.

With some people I'm always torn between criticism and silence. I'm not sure I'm done with this.

Unexamined priors

Contradictions of technocracy again. Two more from Leiter, like last time, one after the other, but even closer together: 13 minutes. The last time it was 24.

The elite have no right to treat their peers like children...

The "diversity" mafia is insatiable

Three "diverse" scholars explain in Nature that at the current rate at which universities hire "diverse" candidates, "racial parity" (with the population at large) will not be achieved, therefore universities need to hire 3.5 times as many "diverse" candidates.  This would, of course, require a massive increase in discrimination against non-diverse candidates (beyond what already occurs, which as everyone knows is substantial), but that does not figure in the relevant conception of "equity." No explanation is given for why "racial parity" is the desideratum,* and of course there is no discussion of the class dynamics that are central to any serious explanation for the existing racial disparity in higher education. "Racial parity" is already an illegal criterion in hiring, and "diversity" will be unlawful within the year.  What will the insatiable proponents of "diversity" do then?  This is going to get ugly, I fear.

*One line of text asserts that, "Decades of work across policy and the social sciences have established the normative importance and empirical benefits of demographic parity in higher education."  The footnote has a couple of citations.  Authors who make claims like this are clearly counting on the fact that most readers do not actually examine the literature, which establishes nothing of the kind, and which certainly does not make the case for "racial parity." 

but policing the rabble is for our own good. 

The EU continues policing Google

They will now require Google to remove inaccurate information from search results. Google will not go out of business as a result, although opponents of such moves always invoke doomsday scenarios to scare off meaningful regulation in the U.S.

Leiter opposes enforced self-criticsm and denunciation rallies for his own. So do I. The piece in the CHE is a disaster on all sides.

Reparations to The Palestinians and The Native People of Liberia. Technocratic empiricism is an oxymoron. 

Fetterman and Warnock. Three cheers for petty bourgeois reformism. The "radicals" are crying in their beer, right? No, they're happy. It was just cosplay. 

Democrats won on economic populism, not on defenses of looting, the abolition of small businesses, of the family, or childhood, or the castration of 12 year-olds.  The overlap between technocrats and anarchists is almost fascinating. 

As with abortion, Republicans overplayed their hand, and the stories of hormones and preadolescent surgery went over the heads of most people. "Myside bias" and "implicit bias" If you can't conceive of the facts, then having them right in from of you means nothing. The straightforward and neutral description of medical crimes against children—yes, giving estrogen to 10-year-old boys sterilizes them—puts reactionaries and radical feminists in the position of Palestinians describing Israeli terror, or American blacks in the past and even now describing racism, though "transracialism" isn't accepted, any more than "transablism".  And the majority of people on both sides of  "GLBT" issues haven't come to terms with the fact that partisans of the "T" call for the elimination of the first three letters of the acronym, because homosexuality is transphobic.

Race (Adolph Reed shit again)

Lee Fang

Stacey Abrams spent the election emphasizing race, gender, calling opponents racist and making up a lie about voter suppression. Raphael Warnock ran on jobs & getting things done. Extraordinarily easy to see how he wildly surpassed her in the same state.

And note Abrams had a massive SuperPAC, her "Fair Fight" dark money group with tens of millions of dollars, and Abrams outraised Brian Kemp with tons of national money and nonstop positive coverage from the national media.

Abrams defended Bloomberg in 2020. She sat next to him when parishioners turned their backs to him in church. She's a corporate liberal, and a woman. But Warnock is in a runoff against a parody of negro servitude. To win he'll have to show no anger in the face of insult and absurdity. Angry black men can't win an election beyond a city council seat, unless they represent white anger.

Fang defends post-racial politics without understanding of why Obama played the game. Like Warnock, he had no choice. Fang is against identity politics unless it's Jewish identity politics, and he'd a fan of Chatterton Williams.

Reformist prosecutors are popular.

NYC: the disconnect between crime rate and press coverage.

updated

---

"New York was full of stimulation: it was a more anarchic city then.... 

I had to get away from Indiana, and the only way I could do that was to go to school in New York.” 

Darryl Pinckney

He is appalled by the rise of sensitivity readers and trigger warnings; identity politics, he believes, is forcing people into culs-de-sac from which it may be extremely difficult ever to back out. “I find myself in lots of books,” he says. “They don’t have to be by a gay, black man of a certain age for that to happen. What makes James Baldwin riveting is not that he’s black and gay; it’s that he’s a genius. I’m not for censorship of any kind. If a book offends you, don’t buy it.”

Publishers have, he believes, been infected by something that began on university campuses; in the grip of theory, both have been weakened as places for experimentation. “It’s a sort of suppression. I don’t want to be the guy who’s saying: when I was young, things were better. But I do find this real sharp repudiation [of ideas and of people] in the name of progress to be a form of cowardice.

“There’s no way a student should be in charge of the classroom. I don’t believe in safe environments. I don’t believe in triggers – and anyway, you’re supposed to be triggered. I do believe in respect, and calling people what they want to be called. But I don’t believe in a freedom that comes at the price of someone else’s; in saying ‘it’s my turn to be master now’. I don’t like to reach for analogies like the Cultural Revolution. But we live in a time where there is such hostility towards expertise. It’s a form of policing thought… this atmosphere of correction.”

 Pinckney reviews Thomas Chatterton Williams

Race transcendence is still a crank’s racket, but it is usually offered in the spirit of a gift to humanity. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, this cheerful manifesto of the light-skinned and well placed, carries an atmosphere of gratitude for the acceptance France has promised Williams’s children. He has assured himself that in these times of tattoos, manipulations of the body, gender subversion, transition, transformations of the self, class fantasies, and cultural smugness, not much essentialism remains in definitions of blackness. We are saved already if we but knew it; we are already well, sound, and clear; we have only to recognize it. 

The pitch, from the NYRB 

The link in the Pinckney quote is to an earlier post, that includes a link to Pinckney's review and to another earlier post, on the politics of minority communities. Self-hatred is ubiquitous.

I've said it all before 

I repeat things because others do.

Leiter quotes a brief in the Harvard affirmative action case. 

Shortly after Grutter was decided, the defendant in that case confessed that he had pressed “the ‘diversity’ rationale” as a litigation strategy. Bollinger, A Comment on Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1589, 1590-91 (2003). Bollinger bemoaned that he could not defend racial preferences as “a ‘remedy’ for past societal discrimination”—what everyone in higher education “really believed.” Id. Bollinger is hardly alone. Shortly before Grutter was decided, Harvard’s Randall Kennedy said, “Let’s be honest: Many who defend affirmative action for the sake of ‘diversity’ are actually motivated by … social justice.” Kennedy, Affirmative Reaction, Am. Prospect (Feb. 19, 2003), bit.ly/3EJc5To. They would defend racial preferences “even if social science demonstrated uncontrovertibly that diversity (or its absence) has no effect (or even a negative effect) on the learning environment.” Id. NYU’s Samuel Issacharoff likewise knows “‘[t]he commitment to diversity is not real,’” and Columbia’s Kent Greenawalt has “‘yet to find a professional academic who believes the primary motivation for preferential admission has been to promote diversity.’” Fitzpatrick, The Diversity Lie, 27 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 385, 395-96 (2003). The list goes on. See id.; Schuck, Affirmative Action: Past, Present, and Future, 20 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 1, 34-36 (2002); Levinson, Diversity, 2 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 573, 601 (2000).

I've also argued previously that "diversity" is a weak and implausible rationale for affirmative action. 

Leiter: There's no epistemological need to have blacks, or women, or homosexuals, or Palestinians, tell their own stories, or judge others' stories. 

On affirmative action, constitutional or not—and contra Leiter, there's an argument to be made that strictly speaking it never was—times change.

---

To be clear because I've said it before: affirmative action may have been unconstitutional, but it was necessary. 

updated

I've said it all before. 

Arguments could be made that the original intent of the reconstruction amendments was "unconstitutional", inconsistent with previous understandings, or that the framers wrote amendments in race neutral terms but then while they could promoted discrimination based on race. A brilliant decision, to set their own policies on auto-destruct, only after they'd begun to do their work.

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts.

"to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts." How's that for a brilliant way to sow anger and mistrust among the poor white trash? Divide the poor, and conquer. The policy was blatantly unconstitutional, but it was the only call the white liberal elite were capable of making.

Equality before the law is a simple phrase, but not a simple fact.

[Jackson's] argument stood out from those employed by her liberal peers: Justice Elena Kagan focused on real-world effects, tracking the demise of the VRA and grilling Alabama’s solicitor general about whether his theory could create a map with zero majority-minority districts. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that while the Black belt, a Black-majority region of the state, has been cracked over and over again into multiple districts, predominantly white counties were repeatedly left intact. 

Follow the bouncing ball...

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism.

The 1619 Project is bad history in the model of the New York Times bad history of Zionism. 

I watched Jackson cry listening to Cory Booker kiss her ass; it was like watching two annoying children.

And after writing the above I go to google and find this at the top.

Booker began his remarks by thanking AIPAC president Mort Fridman for his “leadership and his friendship,” telling the crowd that he and Fridman “talk often” and “text message back and forth like teenagers.” 

Again and again. I'm not complaining: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need." 

Liberals who've criticized judicial review are praising Jackson—they're ecstatic—but the pendulum has moved away from elite decision-making to politics from below. 

The woman on the left in the photograph, from 2011, ran for congress this year

Leiter links to Solveig Gold again—see previously—ignoring that the exchange he links to continues from a defense not of the classics as such, but "Western Civilization", and that she's defending Trump from accusations of racism in his use of obviously coded speech. This time she reminds me of Lipstadt. 

Leiter knows the context. He's not lying; he's behaving like a lawyer, an advocate, not a seeker of truth. What would John Tasioulas say?

When academics veer towards activism, perhaps in quest of bureaucratically mandated 'impact', there's often a rise in hyperbole and a corresponding decline in credibility. One of the reasons I find John Curtice so admirable, I have no clue which way he votes.

— John Tasioulas (@JTasioulas) August 29, 2019

The rule of law - too easily confused with the rule of lawyers.

— John Tasioulas (@JTasioulas) September 9, 2019

In the same post he links again to Adolf Reed, from 2013

Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or essential characteristics attributed to them. 

Shelby Steele, "The Inauthenticity Behind Black Lives Matter"  2020

Insisting on the prevalence of ‘systemic racism’ is a way of defending a victim-focused racial identity.

Reed in 1997 

Beware the proliferation of a peculiar political species-the black conservative crusader against "race-based" policies.

"The Descent of Black Conservatism", The Progressive, Oct 1997

Times change

I listened to Reed on a podcast and at some point he paused: "Mea Culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."  He was talking to himself. The interviewer said nothing. 

Like Geuss: raised a Catholic and opposed to politics, believing only in "truth".

Leiter: Adolph Reed on "antiracist" politics: neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic. 

Zionism is neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic. 

Al Jazeera:  Germany bans vigil in memory of journalist killed by Israel

Berlin police tell pro-Palestinian Jewish group the vigil falls under the ban on protests in the run-up to Nakba Day.

repeats 

Efforts by German authorities to clamp down on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign took a sinister turn recently after a Jewish-German singer and daughter of a Holocaust survivor was warned that a concert in which she is scheduled to perform would be cancelled if she made any remarks in support of BDS. 

Reed's piece says nothing about the attack on voting rights. Again: Reed is an ass. He and Leiter are united in snobbery.

Boredom, Banality, Buppies, pedants and children, free speech etc.

update:

The Intercept, Feb 24, Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion if it Fights Russian Invasion.

Not anymore.

I emailed Lev Golinkin, and he said he'd check with Facebook. Today (5/18), they said there's no new change in policy. 

But my accounted is restricted for a month. 

PCHR: Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

(Weekly Update 31 March-06 April 2022)

Violation of right to life and bodily integrity

Three Palestinian civilians, including a child, were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)’s fire in two separate incidents in Jenin and Hebron, and another one was killed by an Israeli settler who opened fire at him after carrying out a stabbing attack near Bethlehem. Also, 31 Palestinians, including 7 children, sustained wounds and tens of others sustained bruises and suffocated due to teargas inhalation in separate incidents in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem

On 31 March 2022, two Palestinian civilians, including a child, were killed and 15 others, including 3 children, were injured in excessive use of force during clashes that accompanied IOF’s incursion into Jenin refugee camp. More information available here. On the same day, a Palestinian was killed by an Israeli settler who opened several live bullets at him after carrying out a stabbing attack that resulted in the injury of a settler in an Israeli bus near “Neve Daniel” settlement in southern Bethlehem, according to IOF and there were no Palestinian eyewitnesses to the incident. In the evening hours, a Palestinian was wounded with a live bullet in his pelvis near al-Khadury University in western Tulkarm.

On 01 April 2022, a Palestinian civilian was killed after being shot with a live bullet in his chest by IOF during their incursion into Hebron. On the same day, 9 Palestinians, including 3 children, were shot with rubber bullets during IOF’s suppression of Kafr Qaddoum weekly protest in northern Qalqilya. In the evening,...  

The SCOTUS hearing was unbearable to watch for many reasons. I haven't read anyone complain about a woman feeling compelled to apologize to her children for not being a good mother. And all the celebration of the first black woman on the court would be the same if Biden had chosen Michelle Childs. 

"Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism."

Follow the bouncing ball and it will take you to the source. If you're impatient click here.  

I also want to see a mashup of talking heads proclaiming the importance of having a black woman on the court with videos of the importance of the fight in Ukraine: It's not Iraq; it's not the third world. "It's different this time." The link's to South African Trevor Noah. 

Another South African on Key and Peele in 2013, on the website named for the phrase that I thought of when Ketanji Brown Jackson said her parents had given here an "African" name.

Read or scroll down

What’s not included in the video above was their introduction to the live studio audience where Peele announces: “OK, so Africa is a fucked up place.” To which Key, seemingly surprised, responds in a disingenuous defense of Africa: “You wouldn’t want to see the Nile? The plains of the Serengeti?” Which is really just the vehicle for which Peele’s lambasting can continue: “You have flyover states. Now, to me that’s a flyover continent.” And the pièce de résistance: “Slavery was an awful thing. Silver lining? It got my ass out of Africa.” The follow up to which was the skit depicting two slaves who get increasingly jealous that no one is bidding for them at the slave auction.

President Zelenski just abused the Greek Parliament's invitation by sharing its platform with members of the neoNazi Azov Battalion, thus undermining the Ukrainian people's heroic resistance to Putin's criminal invasion. We stand with Ukraine, not with the Azov neoNazi Battalion

— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) April 7, 2022

An early reply points out that the far right has more representation in the Greek parliament than in Ukraine. It was meant as a criticism of Varoufakis, but it's obvious that's why Zelensky included them.

Fair enough. But Zelenski CHOSE to stand next to a neonazi during his video-talk to our Parliament. He must be condemned on two grounds: 1. Normalising Nazism 2. Supporting Putin's claim that Ukrainian resistance = nazism

Still fucking with this thing, and fucking with Adolph Reed.

---

Jäger, a good one

Very weird when EU analysts continue to describe Brexit as this insular, endogenously ‘British’ event when clearly it was the 2011 ECB rate hike that turned Britain into an employer of last resort for a eurozone pushed into recession and handed Leave one of its key weapons.

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) February 1, 2022

Adolph Reed, is an ass.

Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his polemical writing, unusual. Called “The South,” it is an account of growing up in segregated Arkansas and New Orleans, and of navigating, as a young man, Jim Crow’s immediate aftermath. The book read to me as a memoir, a term he adamantly rejects. He told me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences. 

Reed is a vanguardist, and vanguardists are snobs.  

What a fucking idiot.

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I call Reed an idiot—he isn't—because he's a pedant. It is a fact that race is less of an issue. It is a fact that people argue from self-interest and not "truth". It is a fact that "Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism." It is a fact that the fading of race as an issue will return class the the central role that Reed prefers. And it is a fact that Reed is so angry that the peasants aren't intellectuals that he can't think straight.

And elitism, as I've said again and again, has a double edge: the elect are permitted to indulge sins forbidden to the common people: "To the pure all things are pure", "Homosexuality for us, but not the masses" "Don't call it a memoir!!" 

In my twitter days, I trolled Catholic rightists by telling them they wanted people to share their own self-hate. Innocence was a lie. The lack of self-hatred disgusted them. They agreed. I was less trolling them than the liberals reading them who didn't get the point.

"Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God." A quote attributed to Cyril Cusack, whose performance in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is a pitch-perfect model of the priest to Oskar Werner's boy. I saw the movie as a boy and don't remember if Cusack reminded me of Daniel Berrigan, whom I met as a 5 year old—he stayed at our house for for a few days when he was on the run—or the reverse.  I've never forgotten his face, moving down towards mine as he shook my hand. I recoiled, pulling my head back, and later asked my mother to explain just what it was I'd reacted to. Her reply was, "Unctuous". Years later I saw the same expression in a part-time student, model, hustler, from my circle—not the director of the Halston bio—who'd been raised by Jesuits. He had the smile of a man who wanted to seduce anything alive. Even his friends didn't trust him.  

Reed is offended by the thought that he's been outed as a storyteller, an orator, not a philosopher, and interested in telling a story about himself. Only members of the elite, his own kind, are allowed to know his secret.

Corey Robin makes my job even easier: "I once said that Adolph is the closest thing to Max Weber we've ever had in this country." And as I once said about Weber:  "The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self." All of this in various ways goes back to my comments about The Name of the Rose, from 30 (40?) years ago: the decay of scholasticism. And now the rise of the black bourgeoisie, offends the righteous academic left.

I'm sympathetic to elitists. My stockbroker stocks up on marijuana edibles at places that look like Apple stores; it's something out of A Clockwork Orange.  I miss the days when good drugs were left to criminals and serious intellectuals, who understood the cost.

Unlike Reed I get the joke: "Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."

 

I'm playing cute with all this. It's fun playing at being catty. I take all this shit for granted and I can't write as if anyone has the slightest idea what the fuck I'm talking about, or if they do, that it matters.

speak softly and carry a big black stick

Biden saying that he was going to choose a black woman was the worst kind of white pandering, and politically incompetent. If he'd had the guts to play hardball he would have spoken only about policy, and then nominated one of the same women he's looking at now. It's not the battle; it's the war. Leave proud statements of moral superiority to others.

In other news I'm still in the Berkshires and obliged by my host to watch MSNBC, where the talking heads of every color are praising Biden's moral superiority, calling for war with Russia, and silent about the US policy of death and destruction in Yemen and starvation in Afghanistan.

And Whoopi Goldberg is being criticized for saying Jews are white.

An assistant editor of HamasMag in the New Left Review, and two months later in Foreign Policy.

Mills felt that in key respects the bourgeois task of abolishing non-economic hierarchies had not yet been accomplished in either country. Both were riven by deep inequalities that were inseparable from the racial form in which they were manifested. In 1970s Jamaica not one top firm was controlled by black people, despite their making up ninety percent of the country’s population. For the young Mills however, this entanglement of race and class did not justify a move away from socialism, but merely proved that the cultural domain was also a material one. In ‘Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?’, a magisterial essay published in 1987, he sought to explicate the oft-quoted dictum of Stuart Hall that race is the modality through which class is lived, arguing that Hall did not mean to suggest that there was a perfect correlation between the two categories. Rather, racial classifications were the result of conflicts between social groups and represented different relations to economic and political power. On this basis, Mills concluded that ‘the ideologies and cultures of resistance that develop in the Caribbean will be most strikingly characterized by the reciprocal valorisation of blackness, whether in the form of Garveyism, Rastafari or Black Power.’

The dominant forms of Anglo-American Marxism however largely did not exhibit the subtlety of thinking about culture that Mills believed was necessary to navigate the relationship between class and race. Much of his early career was spent wrestling with conceptual matters – questions of history, ideology and morality – which he felt that this work had misconstrued. Analytical Marxism, which took as its starting point G.A Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), aimed to apply a scientific rigour felt to be lacking in the interpretations emerging out of France and Germany by borrowing the tools of analysis developed by economics and logic to address issues of agency, class interests, and the relationship between base and superstructure. The concept of ideology however – the subject of Mills’s thesis – presented serious problems for this paradigm, since it seemed to suggest that an essential component of Marx’s theory was a rejection, on epistemological grounds, of the autonomy of social practices and morality.

Foreign fucking Policy

There exists a strand of social thought, stretching from Georg Hegel in the 19th century through to Max Weber in the early 20th and Juergen Habermas in the postwar era, that insists that a hallmark of modernity is the differentiation of forms of human knowledge. The sophistication of culture is defined in part by the autonomy of science, morality, and art from religion, and their mutual incommensurability. Any undoing of this development, according to these thinkers, would mean regression to a less sophisticated form of culture.

What then is to be made of “theory,” a term that became en vogue among English-speaking intellectuals in the second half of the last century? Defined not by a focus on a specific subject domain—biology, say, or sociology—but instead by its commitment to producing concepts that could then be applied to different forms of thought, theory became a catch-all phrase for whole swathes of (primarily French) philosophy and cultural criticism from the late-1960s on. There were, however, some unifying features of the genre, including the commitment on the part of its most famous practitioners—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze—to breaking out of the confines of orthodox Marxism, often in ways that mirrored the criticisms put forward by uncritical defenders of the free market.

...Unlike the socialist political economy and philosophy of the early 20th century, postwar theory was propelled not by any kind of practical engagement but by a constant demand for innovation and newness, needed to keep up with a postwar political landscape that was thoroughly fragmented. The social transformations theory attempted to make sense of—disillusionment with communism, anti-colonial movements, women’s liberation, the existence of an underclass, the continued existence of capitalism—undermined so many assumptions about the world held across the political spectrum that it was hard to see how any overarching ideas could synthesize them, or whether theorists’ inability to do so should be considered a failure.

The contradictions make your head spin.

  

Mills: from  "liberalism is racist", to "deracialized liberalism"; from Tolkien to Fanon to Black John Rawls. Arguing with G.A. Cohen is even more of a waste of time than reading him. 

But John-Baptiste Oduor is a fan of Geuss, the fan of Fanon and "Ghandi", while Arendt "was certainly not a philosopher at all,... nor "a particularly good practitioner of her chosen profession of historically oriented political journalist." Violence or non-violence, as long as it's pure: pure Jesuitical sleaze. 

And the NLR publishes puff pieces by the same author about makers of luxury commodities—$1,575,000 at Sotheby's—because "fine art" is like "philosophy", and now the "fine artist" is black and a woman. Here she's chatted up in Vogue. The last time I made this point it was Christie's; the philosopher was a woman and the artist was a man, also touted in Vogue.  I guess "the bourgeois task of abolishing non-economic hierarchies" has been accomplished. Where does that leave John-Baptiste Oduor, the New Left Review, and HamasMag? Perhaps theorists' inability to synthesize a response should be considered a failure.

The prices for Yiadom-Boakye's paintings have no relation to anything beyond the bubble—or bubbles within bubbles—of the market, and are only slightly less absurd than the valuation of an NFT.  But what do I know? I'm just a sociologist from Mars.

12 years ago a gallery director offered to help me pitch the drapery project to Massimiliano Gioni—a name mentioned in Vogue, not the NLR—but when he read what I'd written he backed off. I've never blamed him for it.  And this was the same man who saw me at an auction at Christie's and gasped "What are you doing here! This is evil!" We both laughed. He's player, a cynic and survivor, but he loves the art he loves, and he defends it, which is why he was at the auction. But I'm not a player; I can't pull it off. I wish I could. But since timing is everything, here's one post about the project.

Pseudo leftists aren't what they were. They celebrate Hollywood liberalism and now preadolescent fantasies of communism—the womb or the hive—proclaim the end of intellectual conservatism while praising a "scholar of the demimonde". Geuss at least still understands the obvious, that communism and monarchism, taken seriously, have a lot in common. 

Martin Scorsese is a conservative. Tarantino is a conservative. Stephen Frears calls himself a "Queenist"

And on and on.

Liberalism is a fucking disaster. And innocence in adulthood is a form of decadence.

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repeat and update: the Teddy Roosevelt statue is gone.  And Hammons is represented by Bob Mnuchin, father of Steve. His connections to Goldman, financial and social, date back decades. The MoMA show was great, but as always, and as any dialectical materialist should know, the medium is the message, and Hammons is a conservative.  

henri matisse (b. dec. 31, 1869) painted avant garde art at a middle grade level and the beauty of adulthood is i really don’t have to pretend otherwise 😌😌 pic.twitter.com/5EbEgx5t8g

— vanessa a. bee 🐝✌🏾 (@Vanessa_ABee) December 31, 2021

E. Vanessa Assae-Bille (JD, Harvard), on her immigrant American Dream, becoming bourgeois and a (black) gentrifier, published in a magazine whose existence is predicated on gentrification. Four paragraphs: first, from the middle, penultimate and last.

THE FURNITURE CATALOGS and interior design books belonged to my mom’s friend, who collected them in her flawless house in Wembley. I liked to peruse their pages on my overnight visits, after everyone went to sleep. As a 12-year-old kid with a vivid imagination and an aptitude for the visual arts, I’d long paid attention to space and aesthetics, to the way things landed and were laid out. But seeing others’ visions had opened my eyes to a universe of possibilities. Home didn’t have to be a compromise or mere afterthought; it could be intentional, a place built on principles. I daydreamed of someday moving into a home where I could paint the walls, where I could realize just one of those possibilities for myself....

My parents had done everything right. The house was overpriced,  but their loan itself had been within their means. They were proud to be owners and cared for the house with love. The stenciling was scraped off and the carpet torn out. The first floor was child-proofed so my mom could operate a small home daycare. We repainted the walls and planted tiger lilies outside. By the time I left for law school in August 2009, the house was prettier than ever. Nevertheless, outside forces had concluded it was now worth half the purchase price. Like many of their neighbors, my parents were facing a financial cliff. Being underwater meant paying for a house without building equity or security for the future. They might as well have rented and externalized maintenance costs on a landlord. But it wasn’t as simple as leaving the keys in the door—unless they could work out a deal, their lender would count on getting repaid in full, no matter how little money a sale could bring in. My parents’ ideal home had turned into a financial nightmare that would haunt them for years.... 

With the knowledge that some of my building now resented me, I grasped for the first time the strength of my position as an owner with a title equal to my neighbors’. That day, I’d staked a claim on behalf of the West Indian house and other Black Petworthians, myself included. There was nothing my neighbors could do to force me out. There was no manager, no landlord, not even a police officer they could call on to punish my bluntness. I was as free as they were. Unless they wanted to suffer another public shaming, it was on them to accommodate my intolerance for their racist speculations. I expected them to try with the same zeal they showed in demanding our block accommodate their preferences. I didn’t regret my outburst. If living alongside Black people was so antithetical to their vision of the ideal home, they could leave. 

And most of them did, in time. I doubt that it was my doing, as flattering as that would be. This is DC; turnover will always be high. The staffer and his husband bought a house north of our building. One of the two churches on 8th Street relocated to Maryland, where most of its Black congregation had already migrated, and sold to a developer who tore down the church’s dark brick and colorful windows, replacing them with high-end condos. The newlyweds left with a baby. Domku, the popular restaurant, closed after a decade in Petworth—the landlord raised its rent by 66 percent and wouldn’t budge. Sheila moved out of the corner unit, to a Maryland suburb with “good schools” for her infant daughter. My former roommate relocated to New York City and became a prosecutor. As for me, my days in the building were numbered after I met my future partner. Fortunately, the grandmother in the house next-door will outlast us all. Seven years after my arrival, you can still find her sitting on her porch, watching us come and go.

Nathan Robinson, (JD, Yale) her former editor

One problem with film reviews is that they are often so concerned with evaluating the quality of a movie that they don’t get chance to seriously discuss the ideas it raises. Reviewers are preoccupied with questions like: How is the acting? The editing? Is the dialogue sharp? The pacing energetic? Are certain mawkish indulgences by the director partly counteracted by a thoughtful score? In the case of a satire trying to make a point, does it make the point well, or does it do it “ham-fistedly”? Is it subtle and graceful or does it “beat you over the head”? 

Vanessa A. Bee is performing a mixture of arrogance, indignation, self-aggrandizement and regret. These are her "ideas".

Fortunately, the grandmother in the house next-door will outlast us all. Seven years after my arrival, you can still find her sitting on her porch, watching us come and go.

"They endured."

"We're voting for the nigger" II

Liberals are confused

If capitalism were racist then white people would still be ruling the world.

On race, the changes for the better have increased the confusion.

repeats. from 2008 

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the nigger!"
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the nigger."

Confusion, and not just for white people. There are more native blacks willing to express shock and horror at the the quote above and fewer willing to admit cynicism in public (black immigrants are more willing to shrug). As I said at the time, the quote made me laugh; that's when I knew Obambi was going to win. I'm sure he was happy when he read it.

Bill Clinton was the last white democrat who could go for the cracker vote. Obama went for it, as much as he could. Again, this was obvious at the time.

Josh Marshall initially thought the debate was a draw and wondered why Obama hadn't been more aggressive. The major newspapers with the exception of the NY Times also called it a draw. But the public says it's a clear win.

How would it have appeared to the block of narcissistic but all-important "undecided" white voters to see a young black man attack an old white man as aggressively as white liberals imagine they would if they were in his place? That's not to say Obama's reticence is conscious and strategic, only that it's how he's played the game; and it's important to understand he never had a choice.

From 2008 to 2010. In fact is was both conscious and strategic, though he never had a choice.

Obama, the "prep school negro". 

Top pic from Ben Rhodes. And the second doesn't undermine my comments on race and capitalism. Look at the numbers. America is not the world.

America is still a country of racists. It's a country of anti-Semites, but of course they support Israel. Zionists still identify as realists. White liberals, and Americans, are still trapped by their own guilt, self-pity, and self-interest.  

"...paperback originals with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface"

in re: the contemporary ubiquity of academic discussions of "images": the art of the past framed thoughtlessly in the language of the present. Benjamin returns us to the Gothic in more ways than one; focusing on immateriality and ideas—ideas are immaterial—takes us out of the world. 

A monk staring at an icon is looking for "truth". Painters like storytellers are craftsmen, makers of fictions, illusions, and "lies". "There’s no art more ironic than a Fra Angelico."  Historians are secularists; priests are sincere. Philosophy is so fucking reactionary. 

new tag: The Same Story About Barthes

I used to be fond of "subaltern" academics in the west, but they've become so successful that the outsider status has become aestheticized. Academia serves its own interests. The romanticism of the international hereditary PMC: a discussion of Egyptian political prisoners is a discussion of prison abolition, which follows a discussion of Egyptian architectural modernism. Utopianism is anti-political. Academia is a safe space for priests and pedantry.

Honoured to be launching (with visionary curator @lisa_g_dub) @alaa’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated at this year’s Dublin Art Book Fair. In conversation with @AnniefletcherR and with readings by @asoueif @seanehewitt and @RonitLentin https://t.co/qRBxu12ItC

— Hussein A H Omar (@chebhocine) November 8, 2021

Put a pdf on the fucking web. Share it "for the revolution". Fuck "curators", "aestheticized politics", and "French flaps, using a custom serif typeface".  Fuck "Coffee table architectural favela porn.” 

And who gives a fuck about the fucking Queen?

Times Change

Leiter 

 When the current US Supreme Court strikes down race-conscious admissions procedures...

...which they will almost certainly do in the next couple of years, the Court will, oddly enough, in this instance have majority sentiment on its side, if not elite opinion:   opposition to using race and ethnicity as factors in admissions decisions for colleges is quite widespread.  More than 60% of Blacks, Hispanics, and Democrats say race or ethnicity should not be a factor at all in admissions.  (Philosopher Thomas Mulligan [Georgetown] has called attention to this striking fact previously.)

Leiter links to Leiter, quoting Mulligan 

Whites oppose affirmative action because they believe it violates merit-based hiring. Blacks support affirmative action because they believe it enables merit-based hiring, by nullifying racial bias and other forms of disadvantage.

Despite appearances, when it comes to affirmative action, there is no moral disagreement. Both Blacks and whites believe that the best-qualified applicant should be hired. What we disagree about is a factual question: Does real-world affirmative action enable, or detract from, our shared moral goal?

"More than 60% of Blacks, Hispanics, and Democrats say race or ethnicity should not be a factor" 

They say that now. What did they say in the past?

1983

The black respondents strongly endorsed all eight of the items. The average endorsement of the positive response was 78.7 percent. The range was from 59.6 percent to 91.3 percent (see Table 1). Item five, which elicited the weakest response, asked the respondents if they thought there would be "reverse discrimination against white men." This ia a perceptual item that elicits other reactions than just support for affirmative action. Nevertheless, it still contributed to the overall scale. Items three, seven, and eight, which simply asked how strongly they supported affirmative action programs, received the strongest responses. Roughly 90 percent of the respondents supported these items and only about four percent opposed them. Clearly there is strong support in the black community for affirmative action programs.

"Elite Opinion" gave us Brown v Board. Decades later, Derrick Bell dissented. Leiter would never agree with Bell's reasoning.

A 1963 Nation Opinion Research Center survey of black opinion as to priorities had voting rights and desegregation both at 13%.  Jobs came out at 58%

Mildred A Schwartz, Trends in White Attitudes toward Negroes, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, 1967 https://www.norc.org/PDFs/publications/NORCRpt_119.pdf

The 1956 Roper question was as follows: "Now there have been a number of different viewpoints about the Supreme Court decision against separate schools for Negro students. Which of these comes closest to expressing your own personal opinion? (1) Negroes should go to the same schools that white children do and separate schools should be done away with immediately in all parts of the country. (b) Every attempt should be made to do away with separate schools for Negro students, but a reasonable time should be given to work out the problem. (c) The time may come when Negro and white children should go to the same schools, but it will take years in some places and it shouldn't be pushed. (d) The Supreme Court decision was a mistake and white and Negro students should never be forced to go to the same schools"

The largest proportion, 31 per cent, felt that the Court decision had been a mistake. Twenty-three per cent were of the opinion that school integration, while desirable, would take many years and should not be pushed. Another 22 per cent wanted separate schools done away with, but agreed that "reasonable time" should be allowed for this. Altogether, then, 45 per cent opted for a gradual approach to school integration. Only 12 per cent were in favor of immediate integration. [The remainder had no opinion.]

 Leiter has no sense of history. He imagines a timeless world. 

Arguments could be made that the original intent of the reconstruction amendments was "unconstitutional", inconsistent with previous understandings, or that the framers wrote amendments in race neutral terms but then while they could promoted discrimination based on race. A brilliant decision, to set their own policies on auto-destruct, only after they'd begun to do their work.

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts.

"Divide and conquer" Radical reconstruction wasn't radical. If it were, black and white poor would have been treated as equals and the wealth of the rich would have been seized.  But however it was done, affirmative action was always strictly speaking, both unconstitutional and necessary. It's still a white man's world, but not for much longer. 

"Whites oppose affirmative action because they believe it violates merit-based hiring." They have a point, but that's not the only reason they oppose it.

Politics is argument in time; it's low and high, vulgar and fine. It's force and logic, reason and interests. Leiter, like all philosophers, fantasizes a world of one without the other, where their own interests play no role.

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More on Bell and Arendt a few months later, 5/22.