If I were Barrack Obama, I'd feel justified in asking God what the hell I'd ever done to him that merited this whirlwind of insanity. I think that smart, thoughtful presidents in the 21st Century aare at an awful disadvantage politically, and have been really since the Kennedy assassination. The guy is trying to do good things, but the world doesn't cooperate. It can't -- it's the world and consists of a lot of insane people with guns, money, lawyers, ski masks and a mass of contradictory hidden agendas and open manifestos. In some ways, ISIL is a nice change -- they don't have a secret agenda, they're pretty open. They don't report to the same God that most of us recognize in the 21st Century. Still, they may call him Allah, but I think they worship Cthulhu or some other very dark overlord with a completely different agenda.
a bit of knowledge without justification on santayana's argument that empirical knowledge, including science, rests on faith:
In Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana goes so far as to assert that all knowledge is faith precisely because we are never in a position decisively to refute scepticism, that is, to remove objective uncertainty. Santayana sets out the familiar sceptical arguments elaborately, and in fact endorses their conclusions. That is, he affirms that we are in a position, as far as the exercise of reason with no assumptions is concerned, of radical and unrelievable doubt as to the existence of the external world, the deliverances of memory, even as to the existence or at least the nature of the subject. Or rather, if we were in fact creatures that generated beliefs by the emotionless exercise of reason with no assumptions, our doubts would be radical and unrelievable. But as agents, as passionate, individual creatures of the sort we are, we happen in fact to be under no serious doubt about these things. (The similarity of the position under consideration to the "naturalized" epistemology of Quine and others should here be remarked. Like Kierkegaard and Santayana, proponents of that project hold that scepticism is irrefutable and that how we actually come to acquire beliefs is relevant to how we ought to acquire them. And the similarity of the position to my reading of Diogenes, Johnson, and Moore need hardly be emphasized.) Santayana says: "the scepticism I am defending is not meant to be merely provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is faith only."(20)
This does not mean that all factual claims are wholly unjustified. Rather, Santayana's view is that all such claims rest finally on beliefs for which no justification can be produced. Knowledge, says Santayana, is faith mediated by signs. We take our intuitions to be signs of external objects and events. Taken in that way, such intuitions can lead to justified beliefs. But there is no justification for taking them that way. Animal faith, then, consists in the treatment of intuitions as signs of the external world, in "supposing that there is substantial there, something that will count and work in the world" (SAF p.39)
stray graph that might have been in the atlantic piece:
I want there to be no God, and I am speculating that it is the same for Richard Dawkins. We would find a God-centered universe less open, less fascinating, less challenging than a material universe, and perhaps also more oppressive. We need to acknowledge that, like everyone else, we believe not as reasoning machines, but as flesh-and-blood human beings.
October 12, 2014
so if you were wondering about the word 'riff', the thing below's all hook + turnaround = essence of the blues.
October 11, 2014
i have an essay on atheism up at the atlantic. i might put the point a bit more strongly: no one lives without faith, and no one's belief system can establish itself with no assumptions or no passionate commitments or no irrational kierkegarardian leaps.
probably the best statement of the sort of position i develop in the piece is santayana's scepticism and animal faith.
in connection to the movie 'kill the messenger', some writing i did in the early sdays of this blog on the whole affair:
this webchat with zizek shows various things about him that i like and various things that i don't like so much. so first of all, i like that there's a philosopher doing a webchat at the guardian, and in general how free-wheelingly and frequently zizek writes about contemporary issues in the day-by-day media. at least a philosopher exists in that space, and he is quite the swashbuckler, either doing high-end history or philosophy or metaphysics, or writing columns on the economy. i think he writes boldly and relatively clearly in english for a continental killer. we need more folks who do all those things; these are things i would like to do and be.
now, on the very other hand, i would prefer almost anyone to hegel, marx, and lacan as figures to push into the future. i think he constantly constantly flirts with totalitarian communism, and always withdraws the most achingly disastrous conclusions. but he's always opposed to any sort of anarchism, and that's one of many things that lead one to think that, like everyone else, he's got the same old giant leftist state coming at you. the totalitarianism takes care of itself after that, btw.
indeed, most of the questions in the chat are political, and really several of them have that quite bizarre marxist-scholastic tone of like soviet apparatchiks. i guess in the back of my mind i figured that there were still people like that, but lord.
but zizek in response is typically both playful and always slightly fudging at the pivot points. it's awfully hard to know how seriously to take him at any given moment, and i think he's quite a bit more improvisational and probably ultimately more unpredictable than people usually give him credit for. these are good things to blow into the academy at this time.
The items here probably the represent the 'light' or fluffy side of my authorship, which might be unfortunate, because the light side is also a rather dark side. They range from a personal essay on addiction to a satire on race to an amazing "solution" to the question of the meaning of life itself or, thinking about it from another angle, to the question of the meaning itself of life, or perhaps to the question itself of life's meaning.
The centrality of the arts for understanding history and contemporary culture, and our coming rapture/damnation by comedy in the Cynical ecstasy at the end of history: these are related underlying themes of many of these essays. Often I apply ideas and taxonomies from art history and aesthetics to various sorts of materials, for example to gender and sexual orientation, or to popular music forms, or to the structure of history, and then try to let the material re-map those areas of inquiry. I don't insist that any particular one of these essays constitutes philosophy or aesthetics or anything else; I've tried to follow from thing to thing, idea to idea, fiasco to calamity, rather than worry about where precisely I was in the disciplinary maze.
Some of these essays reflect engagement with stage and parlor magic and sleight of hand; a number discuss or obviously reflect obsession and addiction; a number display a lifelong love of popular music; a number reflect engagements with my favorite writers and questions about writing. All of these obviously have various autobiographical connections, and I suppose they are all attempts to determine what you can see from here, wherever 'here' is now: including, white heterosexual middle-aged person; aficionado or enthusiast; daddy, American, me, etc. I'm happy to let these connections emerge explicitly, or not.
As I've gone on writing, I have tried to get less showboaty and more obviously committed to subject-matters other than myself, though it might not seem that way. Nevertheless 'I' weaves in and out here, and I do think that even academic writing - which this may be or not - should be more personal, insofar as persons, with their passions and pathologies, still lurk behind it or create it in some way. The 'I' changes in different essays, but I am not going to be precious about it: by 'I' I mean me. I mean me perhaps at different moments or moods; certainly 'Detritus' was written at a nadir, and I'm doing better now, and would have something happier to say about myself. I am content even if uncomfortable leaving that essay as a trace of then. It's not, on the other hand, that I'm 'a different person' than I was in 2008. If only. But you know how we end up being transformed without meaning to be, under necessity, like ramshackle ships of Theseus.
Most of these texts were read in some form as lectures/multi-media extravaganzas; others were pitched to various sorts of publication with varying success. Thanks to Muhlenberg College, Slippery Rock University, Notre Dame, East Tennessee State, Southern Illinois, Concordia College, Cal State Chico, Oregon State, Gettysburg College, the Nordic Society for Aesthetics, Duquesne, the International Country Music Conference, and others who hosted me on occasions when this material was presented. Parts of pieces appeared in Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, The Rolling Stones and Philosophy, How Does it Feel to be a White Problem?, and Tricksters and Punks of Asia. Each paper has been at least somewhat revised, though they are still to be taken as representing the time they were composed. For example "How to Escape" was written before the killing of Osama bin Laden. In some cases, related blog entries from eyeofthestrom.blogs.com or related journalism by me from various sources have been annexed.
Near the end of his life, my father, Franklin Sartwell, gave me editions of Mencken's autobiography and Beirce's Devil's Dictionary with an air of passing on key bits of family lore. For him, as for his father - both newspapermen in DC - Mencken was the greatest of their own kind, or what they aspired to be: irascible, politically perverse, hilarious hard-drinking bastards who knew everything, especially about writing. Also Frank took to me to see the Seldom Scene, Thursdays at the Red Fox Inn in Bethesda, Maryland.
For better and disaster, the effects of Judith Bradford and Marion Winik on the thought and prose style of this book, and the experiences represented, are obvious, at least to me. I think Arthur Danto's influence is pervasive; oh, probably Richard Rorty's too. I read Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History in high school and am still battering my old Dover edition; amazing how something like that can infest your thinking. Throughout, art historical terms, such as stylistic terms or periods ('soul', for example, or 'classical') should be understood as sketched out in the lexicon, pp. .Thanks to Andrew Kenyon for collaboration on this volume. The city of Baltimore and the countryside of South Central Pennsylvania. The Maryland Institute College of Art and Dickinson College.
As usual, you should blame those people and institutions, rather than the author, for all the infelicities, fatuities, solecisms, barbarisms, contradictions, absurdities, and blunders you find here.
my book of esays is out. it's in my less academic, more rollicking voice. stuff on magic, bluegrass and punk, graffiti and dutch painting, cynicism and the meaning of life, addiction and terorism. some bits are from this blog.
making music with whales, making music to fight climate change, chattering with the squirrels, etc: these are very bad ideas. and the amazing thing is that even as you are frolicking grimly among the whales as they bellow like bono, you are doing less than nothing to save the planet. at least the music is irrelevant, though. but the new york times cannot run even a piece about singing with the whales without going brainbrainbrain. possibly, the idea is to compensate for not having a brain by saying 'brainbrainbrain' all the time. it's like getting hungry and feeding yourself the word 'sticky bun.'
Music expresses emotions, and that’s why we love it so. Whales and humans may share a capacity to express complex emotions. You see, both our brains contain a mysterious kind of cell called the spindle neuron, that until recently was known only in the brains of primates. We don’t know exactly what it is for, but scientists believe it has something to do with the ability to experience complex, layered emotions. And whales have three times the number of these cells in their brains than we do.
as per usual the spindle neurons are doing nothing for anyone, just stuck in there for the sound or something. the pseudo-science is completely out of keeping with the tone or point of the piece, but you can't write anything for the nytimes without putting that paragraph in it. scientists speculate that it is possible that mystical mystery neurons may be involved. astounding? yes. but that is what science shows.
and not to rag on y'all too bad, but i do want to point out that the times just published this sentence: 'Music expresses emotions, and that’s why we love it so.' scientists speculate that the 'blank' neuron is responsible for the production of such sentences, and though whales have blank neurons too, they are so amazing because they never yap the boilerplate like that. climate change, though, may induce a human-like neurological erasure even in humpback whales. it is the tragedy of the commons.
sometimes i seem awfully negative as a blogger. anyway, i think the thing below is one of the best pop songs of the last few years, by one of the best artists.
the lightness of touch should be a lesson to all bludgeoners, from bono to bruce. it refers to all sorts of moments in the history of soul, funk, hip hop, pop, but ed at his best is also inimitable and extremely contemporary. and he can extremely rap and play guitar and write.
oh and of course there this one - showing all them skills and then some - which conquered the world awhile ago.
i have no idea what arthur c. brooks thinks he's doing in this piece, but the attempts to naturalize or biologize the left-right spectrum are just pitiful. some folks want to imprint it on your amygdala, while others go olfactory. folks have wound themselves into such partisan tizzies that they cannot think their way outside at all; they have lost even a rudimentary power of self-reflection. they are trying to say: everyone in the whole world, insofar as they are human, is trapped in the democratic/republican, or socialist/laissez-faire dynamic forever. this would be surprising, since the whole thing is at most a couple of hundred of years old, and both sides are miserably incoherent authoritarianisms. of course brooks also goes for the jonathan haidt chestnut defining liberals as those who oppose authority and conservatives as those who enthuse about it. this too is surprising since every single liberal solution to every single thing is the state the state the state, which is just coercive authority, whatever people may have convinced themselves it is (our collective identity etc). and one thing i want to say about questionnaire research of the haidt variety: it shows either that liberals are anti-authoritarians, or that they are skull-crushingly self-deluded. seriously, i say the data supports either hypothesis equally, which might make one reflect on the methodology just a bit. fortunately we have an external reality - the actual solutions advocated and the actual political system as it stands - by which to measure the truth of this answer.
anyway, at least start grappling with this: people in dallas are more conservative than people in chicago. men are more conservative than women. rich people are more conservative than poor people. white people are more conservative than black people. now, wouldn't this tend to entail that this is at least partly to be explained by, or that it is correlated, with a set of smell facts? we would expect, if this line of research is right, that people from dallas tend to smell different than those from chicago. and of course there is a long traditional history of the claim that poor people smell different than rich people, or black people than white people. or indeed, that their brains are different or that they have different bumps, etc. even y'all can do better than this.
as i may have mentioned, i'm teaching a course on american popular music. it occurs to me that the twentieth century in american music was comparable to, say, the sixteenth century in italy in visual arts. i am quite serious about that. so, you know, botticelli, leonardo, michelangelo, girgione, titian, up to correggio and caravaggio. or: louis armstrong, charlie parker, bessie smith, blind willie mctell, robert johnson, jimmie rodgers, hank williams, tammy wynette, waylon jennings, billie holiday, duke ellington, sam cooke, otis redding, thomas dorsey, aretha, janis and jimi, run dmc, public enemy, biggie, eminem, bill monroe, early scruggs, muddy waters, little walter, b.b. king, duane allman, professor longhair, oh there is no need ever to stop.
stephanie convery in the the guardian on iggy azalea: "actually, she is the inevitable product of neoliberal capitalism, and in some ways she is much a victim of it as a culprit." really, you have just got to, got to, got to stop this bullshit (rap that line). 'neoliberal capitalism', i assert, is a non-referring phrase, and the fact that people are still picking non-stop at the rotting scraps of marxism is just pathetic. you've got an intellectual structure, but no contact with reality whatsoever. and also that intellectual structure is stupid and useless and extremely over and extremely disastrous. just grapple with this assertion: iggy azalea is the inevitable outcome of economic forces. seriously, the dialectically material process of history was always going to culminate in 'new bitch'. you are talking about iggy azalea. shut up and enjoy the damn album, will you?
the idea that iggy is a victim of whatever economic structures are around her encapsulates much of what is wrong with this whole obsolete line of thought. she may appear to be a powerful and creative person who is expressing herself boldly in public space and who gives pretty damn good flow, but really it's all false consciousness, and if she knew her real interests, she'd agree with me, stephanie convery, and go work at a non-profit. actually, i think neoliberal capitalism is being victimized by iggy azalea. one might focus instead on the ways she is playing with race and gender, using the signifiers in her own project. the deafness and joylessness with which this post-critical-theory leftism approaches music is a good sign of the world that it wants to induce.
this ebola thing is not going perfectly well. cnn got the story that no one has cleaned up the dallas guy's apartment at all: sheets and god knows what else, with people still living there who had, let's say, no training in hazmat clean-up. there are many scenarios for a flare, even supposing people suddenly started doing competently now what they've been doing incompetently up to now. i would say that i am not finding the cdc and their echoers as reassuring as they think i should. i am very not clear whether they regard their primary mission as providing accurate information or 're-assuring the public'. sadly you can't always do both. also re-assuring the public and showing how wonderful we here at the cdc are is the very same mission, which could also cause truth-type issues.
so tom frieden and his mirrors (such as the doctor/healthcare reporters on the news networks) have almost scoffed at the idea that we could have a significant outbreak in the states, because of our '21st-century health infrastructure', 'excellent public health system', and so on. oh the entire handling of the thomas duncan case in dallas makes quite the little hash of that. a hospital sent an infectious ebola patient home. the cdc showed no interest in cleaning up the site, and no one else did either, until cnn broke the story.
so: the idea that ebola is extremely difficult to spread and cannot be spread by people who are asymptomatic: how absolutely actually certain are they about that? to what extent has the transmission of ebola been very carefully and systematically and widely studied before now, in those tiny sporadic outbreaks? because tom frieden and co are betting their lives on it. if we're not certain on that, who counts as a contact is so very very much larger. the problem is so very much larger. i find the difficulty of transmission a bit difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to square with the idea that ebola is increasing 'exponentially' in africa, or projections of a million or more infections in the next few months.
ah, women. wait, can you still say 'ah, women'? or is that discriminatory harassment? if so, let me just say that mistakes were made. from a review of samantha ellis's how to be a heroine (tls sept 26): "Ellis re-reads Wuthering Heights once a year, in the run-up to her birthday, often in a hot bath with a glass of wine." then she writes a book about that. perhaps the whole thing is a devastating parody of bourgeois white het femaleness? like maybe 'samantha ellis' is a fiction created by angela davis or dorothy allison? yoga is likely, and scented candles. but two things i do know for sure: novels made ellis who she is, and there will be chardonnay.
meanwhile matt bai is everywhere with his book about 'when american politics went tabloid': the gary hart sex scandal during the 1988 presidential campaign. so one thing's obvious in the radio interviews etc: hart is bai's hero and he thinks that's where everything went terribly wrong. i can see the argument that who one may be fucking is not really the most relevant piece of info with regard to political leaders. but what i like about this era of examining leaders' private lives is that it continually punctures the mystique in which power enshrouds itself. it shows people wearing suits or uniforms who emerged from yale law school to run our nation are at least as gross and stupid as anyone else. it reveals over and over and over why people want power and what they do with it when they get it. when you get to the point where there just is no mystique, no possible cult, of state power, when all glamour has been scrubbed clean, then everyone is a de facto anarchist,.
the secret service fence-jumper scandal is the only thing they want to talk about on cnn and msnbc. war in the middle east has dwindled to irrelevance. amazingly, this is in a situation in which nothing really bad actually happened. whatever. chill and re-think your security.
meanwhile, morning joe among others is bemoaning the fact that one 'pillar' after another - all the institutions that the american people apparently trusted - the secret service, the nsa, the irs, congress, etc - has lost all credibility. thank god we still trust the military, seemed to be the consensus. so why would trusting the government be a desirable state, and when were the american people ever doltish or submissive enough to trust the irs or congress? i don't even think that is is physically, morally, or intellectually possible.
i hope they are being sarcastic about the military. trust the military? have you lost your fucking mind or been asleep for the last half century? also, what the hell, the military is precisely what gave us american hero omar gonzalez.
people who trust those who seize and hold power over them, or trust the institutions in which they are embedded, by which they are surveilled etc, are likely to be raped and executed, and, honestly, it's fundamentally their own doing: evidently what they want and deserve. right now people are just visibly yearning to submit, and are so upset and alienated that watching the news makes that harder. but a situation in which it is glaringly obvious that only a masochistic cretin would trust the authorities is better than a situation wherein everyone or indeed anyone trusts the authorities. that can only be based on secrecy and lies, because the fucking authorities are no better than you or me, to put it mildly.
somehow the united states went from 'congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press' to “There are a lot of names and descriptions that were used over time that are inappropriate today,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. “And I think the name this is attributed to the Washington football club is one of those.” in other words, we used to value a bold brawling discourse; now our speech is run by little schoolmarms: 'inappropriate!' honestly, that something is inappropriate, other things being equal, recommends it. i suppose 'appropriateness' is the constitutional standard on prior censorship of expression in our jurisprudence?
it is usual to pay tribute to the power of literature to remake reality, teach us how to feel, and stuff. let me just say, i think the efficacy of such measures is limited. but really the most hyperbolic claptrap goes down easily. jonathan taylor in the tls september 12:
No longer enthralled by landscape, no longer "dwelling" in it, modern human beings, it woukd seem, stand homelessly apart from it. What writers like Hardy, [Arthur] Ransome and Lawrence manage to do, as heidegger might expect, is to reconnect their readers with the earlier, more transcendent response to nature: through their writings, readers re-learn how to dwell.
honestly, i like swallows and amazons more than i like jude the obscure. but as i cast back to re-call how i felt after i read them, oh you know i dragged my ass out to face another day, got a flat tire on the way to work or whatever. i mean, i guess people are continually having their whole selves and realities transformed by reading novels?
Crispin, as most of his devoted Crispyheads know, doesn't like Dylan. However, I was driving home the other day, and something I'd never heard before that was obviously an older number because he didn't sound like the late Bob Shepard, Yankee Stadium PA man channeling Son House while introducing Mickey Mantle and it struck me. And, got me thinking about how screwed up the world is...we've got a brilliant president replacing the village idiot; we are a pretty smart country. And we keep stomping on it with cleats...not rubber cleats, but sharp steel ones like Ty Cobb wore
I've been shilling Russian mail order brides to all my lonely, unmarried or thinking about it friends. I'm helpful that way. One of my buddies, recovering from his third or fourth marriage told me that he would run before having anything to do with a Russian woman because they come from the womb crazy. This from a guy with 9 cats who wears thin lapelled suits and thin ties with a fedora at work...my comment was fairly simple. "And..." figuring with the Russian bride, you don't have to fool yourself that it's going to be wonderful.
it's obvious to naomi klein and to many others that capitalism is to blame for climate change; that's why it is a very convenient problem: because it obviously makes socialism ever-more urgent. but let me ask you this: how good were stalinist russia or romania, or maoist china, on greenhouse gas emissions, or environment in general? say you socialize all industry or something and prohibit people from driving cars or cooking hot dogs. what you would be doing is turning the economy over entirely to precisely the sort of people who run the government now. do you think, for example, that they'll be less concerned with economic growth than titans of industry are now? you want to put every center of power in the same hands. that is a realistic formula only for making every aspect of the problem worse.
we do not live in a capitalist world. we live in a squishy totalitarian world in which state and capital are interlocked at every location. they are pretty much equally implicated in climate change. handing more and more power to the state does not reduce the economic pressures toward expansion, etc; it just puts everything in the hands of a sclerotic bureaucracy. say you think fracking isn't the best idea we ever had. well who is responsible for fracking up pennsylvania? private companies operating in tandem with government agencies. correct? why do you think making the state the lone fracker would improve matters?
think seriously, in general, about the nature of the 20th-century fossil-fuel economy. who developed these resources where? interlocked state/private concerns. who controlled and exploited middle east oil, for example, and who does that now? who developed the world infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy, the interstate highway system, e.g.? to recommend nationalizing or internationalizing extraction or consumption is to recommend an even more rigid, uninterruptable, world-bestriding hierarchy. this won't even ameliorate the problem it is supposedly designed to address. as to its other effects: they don't bear thinking about.
putting all resources in the hands of the state is, if history shows anything, the very formula of corruption, and if you really do want your richest people and your bureaucrats and political flaks to be exactly the same people, this is the correct formula. on the other hand, if you want to reduce the exploitation of resources, etc, it's ridiculous.
one thing that the khorasan group has allegedly been working on is exploding clothes. now, i feel that this is a marketable concept, a future fad. i love your outfit! i'm hoping to see a lot of exploding clothes on the red carpet at awards shows. at any rate, i just want to reach out to khorasan in case they need help with the ipo.
i heard the pres of the phillippines, benigno aquino 3, on npr just now. among the problems caused by climate change, he listed 'drugs'. so should all decent people nod along to absolutely anything that would, if true, help make the case even more urgent? say that climate change is an extremely imminent total-destruction emergency. would that make it obligatory to just emit any sort of jive that might get people going? or would it make it morally obligatory to try to believe that jive, or actually to believe it, or to pretend to believe it so we can all work together in virtue of the fact that we are all wackily credulous together for a good end? because that is the actual policy. all they actually ought to accomplish by this means, and pretty much what they are accomplishing, is to have people switch off. sadly, the response to that is that they will redouble their efforts. it might seem obvious that if people aren't listening to you, you must yell louder, gesticulate more wildly, make even more dramatic/baldlyridiculous claims. but really, it's already been backfiring for many years.
naomi klein says change or die. here's one reason i don't regard folks like that as sources of information, even though she - in the habitual fashion of climate eschatologists - congratulates herself continually for being in touch with reality, while excoriating her opponents for living in a fantasy. naomi klein urges that the turning point is a week from friday, by which time we must institute all the economic changes that she has believed in since she was 12. the sky is whispering to naomi klein: socialism, socialism, as the wind whispered 'mary' to jimi hendrix. but then again, everything has been whispering 'socialism' to klein for decades.
so she, like a lot or people (al gore, e.g.) think, or say, that the only chance for human survival is for us all to commit ourselves immediately and with total passionate fanaticism to the political vision that they themselves came in with. it's supposed to be a sort of coincidence. climate change is the cattle prod that's going to get us to where naomi klein always wanted us to be. she has every motivation in the world to describe climate change in the most extreme and dire terms imaginable, and she does, every day.
now, the fact that climate change is a useful state-leftist propaganda tool does not mean that it's not a problem, or even that it's not the case that only a world government can save us. it just means that there are good reasons to be skeptical of people like klein. they want tobelieve that this is the terminal do-or-die human crisis, and it would be very useful to them in realizing their idealistic vision if you believed it too. i just hope that in 2030 we'll remember what she's saying now, because by 2030 there will be no effective world carbon regime and there will be no socialist worldstate of the sort klein fantasizes about. so we'll be running a test on this 'change or die' thing.
[don't take it that i'm conceding that if her description of the situation were true, her political conclusions or prescriptions would actually follow.]
in the course of this npr piece on the climate march, people give the rote characterizations: "the biggest crisis civilization has ever faced"; "the most pressing moral issue of our time". the non-stop flow of hyperbole - intended to manipulate people, then echoed and echoed - has continued for decades. they got to rhetorical defcon infinity in 2001 or whatever it was. since then it has simply been hyper-repetitive shrieking. i can't even hear it anymore.
let me do a bit of comparative work about the greatest crisis the universe has faced since dr. strange saved it from the dread dormammu. in the last three years, 200,000 people have been killed in syria. half the country has been displaced.i will remind you that since about 1950 we have faced the realistic prospect of total nuclear annihilation. the plague killed a third of europe and asia, etc. by comparison, climate change is extremely amorphous. no particular event - for example, no particular actual death - can be definitively chalked up to it. on the other hand it could be 'connected to' any particular death anywhere. it might be causing all our difficulties. then again it might not. it might be or it might not be the greatest threat we have ever faced, but it is by quite a ways the vaguest, vaguer even than the dread dormammu. it might be having all effects or none.
now, i understand that people think - or at any rate say - that climate change is driving the syrian conflict. people think every war and famine and disease is due to climate change. or they say that. but they can't show it at all, and it's just another element of strategic hysteria-inducement. that is the main rhetorical shift from the early 2000s to now: the strategy is basically to indicate that every adverse event, from immigration difficulties to inequality to terrorism, is caused by climate change. often a strory in the press will simply connect them in the same sentence, deploying a sheer assumption of causal connection. it's quite like satan, something that underlies all evil, more or less. and just as clearly as climate change caused war x, it caused your last divorce, or made you drop your phone into the toilet.
they're still squawking 'science', no doubt. but they are very very far from empirically connecting climate change to any particular refugee crisis or epidemic or genocide. and they are people who wish it were so, in order to mobilize you; they've been coming at you from every angle, deploying every strategy they could think of to manipulate you, hammering at you from every direction, for decades. i am way too numb to pay any more attention and i suspect i am not alone, so if i were them i'd try something else.
i think that climate activists have fully absorbed the style of american politicians: many might actually be confused as between what is true and what would make people join. it will turn out that the ebola outbreak is connected to climate change: you draw the conclusion before examining the evidence, and then why bother with evidence? [or really, the move is this: 'is the ebola outbreak due to climate change? many experts think that it might well could kind of be. clearly, it's not clearly not. if you don't want your kids to die of ebola, we must immediately institute a worldwide environmental regulatory regime. we are at the pipping toint.'] it might not be evident to themselves whether they are trying to speak the truth or trying to make you do what they want you to do; they might even have a sort of slapdash theory of truth on which these are not clearly different activities. no point, really, in paying attention to people like that.
the rhetoric is jacked up to 11 precisely because the problem is so amorphous: they're always trying to make it definite, or to bring it in from vague atmospheric conditions to localize it or detect it in particular events, but this inference is never nailed, and in fact is incompatible with the basic way the science is approached. where it is localized or where it suddenly explodes out of the ether into the causal chain directly affecting events, depends on what makes for the most compelling rhetorical flourish: it's our greatest national security issue, or our biggest social justice issue, our biggest economic threat, or whatever it may be next week or for a different audience.
on the other hand, its formlessness or dispersion through the atmosphere is a sign of its sheer size and power, the infinity of its unprecedented threat. but for me, right now, i am telling you that the fact that i forgot to get coffee at the grocery store is a bigger problem than climate change, so it's going to be hard to convince me that i am living in the middle of the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. saying it over and over again in an apparently unending crescendo is just not going to get me moving, and if i set myself to tackle the world's problems - which i have not - i'd start somewhere else.
do you know how extremely you are not supposed to say things like this in academia? what i just wrote makes me again a pariah, actually an evil person. whether it's true or not doesn't matter at all. but extreme social pressure isn't quite the same as actual solidarity, is it? and unanimity isn't exactly truth, either.
anyway, if y'all could please calm down and try to talk like reasonable people about reality, i will re-focus and try to listen. if it's just ever-more repetitions of the greatest crisis in the history of your ass ...
and let me instruct bono & co. as to the nature of the miracle of joey ramone: it had to do with economy, directness, hilarity. joey ramone never took himself too seriously; bono never for a moment has not. joey warbled of lobotomies; bono delivers one, every time out. he is the very voice of my headache, a voice thatmight be described as migrainous, which, thankfully, turns out to be a word. great sunglasses, though.
i'm teaching a first-year seminar on american popular musics. we're going blues, jazz, country, rock, punk, hip hop. (there are several whole genres i would have liked to add, believe me.) i am pretty deep in the standard histories. the first day, one of the students asked a pretty basic question: which came first, blues or jazz? i have been contemplating, but actually it would take a pretty long spelling out.
the short answer is that the history of these forms before publishing and, in particular, recording, is swathed in myth and will never be fully recovered. and in particular, i say the origin of the blues is up for grabs. early sources seem to hear something like it here, something else like it there: in the mississippi delta, around new orleans, in east texas, in georgia, in missouri, in arkansas. so the first thing you should do is divest yourself of the idea that any of these coud be in any way insular cultures; musicians and styles are traveling throughout the black south.
the idea that the blues originates in the mississippi delta makes it a 'folk' or peasant form, migrating to cities. this origin is far less agreed-on in the scholarship than it once was. and here is my theory, ok? it radiates from new orleans, the hub of the semi-circular blues region. in the 1890s or 1900s in nola, there may have been a sprawling group of musics known indifferently or at different moments or in different neighborhoods as 'blues' and 'jazz': i do not think these are distinct forms early on. one things the books say is that ma rainey, for example, 'hired top jazz musicians' like armstrong or oliver, but i wonder whether she or they heard themselves as playing two different genres. not, i should think.
if you were listening to the legendary originator of jazz buddy bolden, i bet it'd rest on the twelve-bar. most every jelly roll morton or king oliver recording is either a straight blues or rests on blues elements. most of them are called blues. they would be, in the early 20s, because the blues was something of a commercial fad (later superseded by 'jazz'/'swing').
no one knows what blues sounded like in the delta before performers from new orleans could have passed through, or even before people could have heard recordings of the new orleans 'jazz' bands playing the blues. obviously, we are flowing up and down america's first super-highway, and instantly it's in memphis and helena and st. louis and chicago.
really where i, like a lot of people, hear jazz exploding in my head is in the louis solos on "chimes blues" and "west end blues". one thing that makes them jazz is the virtuosity of the soloist, which is shown specifically by his ability to improvise on, play with, and potentially rip apart, the blues form. it is obvious he has known this form from the womb. this is true of that jelly roll thing too: it takes a 32-bar ragtime break in the middle of a series of blues verses. and yet the improvisation or break-out is precisely an improvisation on or from the blues: i am telling you they are not primordially distinct. but jelly roll always adds the syncretic element: the latin thing or the rag, and that eclecticism is characteristic of the unfolding history of jazz as it is not in the later history of the blues.
there is no less reason the blues should be a commercial form that went folk than that it should be a folk form that went commercial. and by 'commercial' i mean everything from storyville and parade crews to medicine and tent and riverboat shows to publishing and recording to people picking up gigs at parties or jukes, or even busking from town to town.
"How does she marry him after that? How does she go in front of (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell? That's pathetic to me," Robinson said during the radio segment, according to CBS Sports.
he was suspended. or how about the atlanta hawks owner talking about the economic implications of the racial makeup of the crowds at hawks games, in a way almost anyone might in that position? he had to sell out the day it was reported. just make up your mind to this: speech is not assault. and for god's sake, stop becoming outraged at people for saying even things that you are yourself, or that very many people, are thinking. there's no percentage in that. people do not want there to be any public actual discussion of anything, in particular race and gender. they want everyone chanting the same pc cliches in unison.
the baseline is that anyone gets to say whatever they like, and what you are doing is forcing dishonesty on everyone, even yourself. after that, you're going to wonder why no one appears to be a racist or sexist in a society that is structurally racist and sexist. my basic explanation of this always-apparently-mysterious fact is that it's one of the effects of of the overwhelming social sanctions against using certain words or expressing certain thoughts in public space. i think people really are or were confused between racism and the vocabulary of racism, sexism and the vocabulary of sexism: people seriously held the view that it would be a substantive improvement in the condition of women if no one ever used 'chick' or even 'girl', ever again.
pretty soon, not only is everyone policing every word out of their own mouths, they are editing their own thoughts, or trying to, because they themselves believe that the basic thing that makes you a racist is that the word 'nigger' crosses your mind. that is, the general theory that drives the policing of speech - the idea that reality is the result of our simultaneous incantations - itself becomes widely accepted and applied. then if you do kind of edit that stuff out of your own internal monologue, you believe of yourself that you cannot be a racist. that would actually be true if the 'words-have-power' magick theory of reality were true. the ever-more thorough and effective censorship regimes around racism and sexism combined with the mysterious persistence of the hierarchies themselves actually show that words are shit. or proverbially: talk is cheap. surely anyone who has lived among humans has learned this lesson, and no one can have better data on that than members of oppressed groups.
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