CNN speaks a different language than I do

"No one" apparently means "Nobody white and affluent."

Oh, and if you peer deep into the lower left hand side of the picture above, you'll see yet another case where loads of foreigners died and nobody who reads CNN noticed.

(credit to the Baronette for that last one liner, which was actually way funnier when she said it)

The Can Peel Sessions are amazing

BDR knows it

I got nothing to add:

The central contradictions in this blog's political jibberish is I believe that corporate knows what it's doing, I believe corporate thinks it knows what it's doing but doesn't, believe corporate knows what it wanted but got greedy and fucked up but thinks it can catch its balance, believe corporate knows what it wanted but got greedy and knows all is hopelessly fucked up and is stealing everyfuckingthing down to paperclips while the stealing is good and the parachutes can be readied.

I'm no longer shackled to either/ors: I say all four and and a gazillion other contradictions can all be true by anchor of one constant: corporate always wins.

They changed their plans to serve the president

Obama's gonna be at Buff and Johnnie's house tonight! Why, that's less than five miles from my house! Unfortunately, it's also $7500 to get in and touch the hem of his garment. I'd say I'd crash the party, but then I'd probably either get the FBI in my house or worse, so I'll be honest and admit I'm not doing anything of the sort, if only because I'm not creative enough to come up with a prank worth getting mowed down by the SS for.

The article I linked is a fluff piece about food, which is always preferable to the alternative, fluff pieces about politics. My favorite part is this:

Indeed, there isn’t much glamour harvesting apples at Dame Farm in Johnston or vegetables at one of the city gardens of the Southside Community Land Trust; or raising animals at Lily Rose Farm in Foster, or hand-crafting cheese or chocolate. But now each of these farmers and artisans can boast that their bounty fed a U.S. president.

Ha ha! Because growing boutique luxury food for the little people is such a trifle! Why would you want to do something so trivial as that? I cover food for the Providence Journal!

And then there's the reader comments on the article. For favorites, I'm wavering between this:

Enough of this, send him home hungry.

And this:

I am excited to be picking some herbs for him

Sadly, I think the second one is sincere.

let x=x

questioning the assumption that our lives are equivalent to the products others choose to create is a wonderful impulse. what time we have and give to the demands of the world should be considered.

a problem is when people feel outrage over the inane instead of the miserably absurd. take for example those who are offended by pork-barrel spending. they deem the products - such as a "donkey museum" - to lack equivalence. what they neglect is the alternative: a system that fuels itself upon stripping the lives of others. this creates an endlessly widening rift between the value of one life to another.

this may be the main reason that those in power are promoting the economic strife expressed by those affiliated with the tea party. what is unfortunate is that the basis of that strife comes from a well-reasoned position. as i said before, it questions the value system placed on one's life by another. however, it is ultimately turned on itself and self-reflection is removed. that way it is possible to capitalize on a very emotional impulse with a specific, ethical logic while simultaneously creating an argument that goes against that very logic.

what's more, it lives by the argument.

just to clarify, my use of mo tucker's example isn't to mock her. i'm just little under the influence and felt like riffing off of that last post.

night!

Svenska grupp

If You Close The Door...

Moe Tucker, drummer for the Velvet Underground and solo musician, was recently interviewed at a Tea Party rally (2:40). Following its worldwide delivery, there was a backlash against Tucker from some of her fans. Based off of a ten second clip, people were saying inane shit like "the dream is dead" and acting as though this indicated some kind of mental lapse on her part. (I mean, what was the dream you people think she embodied? She didn't embody the lyrical content of the VU nor did she want to really take part in their scene.)

I try to reserve any criticism on members of the Tea Party until I know a bit more about their reasoning.* After seeing the original interview, I figured I would wait to hear more from Tucker. Well, The Riverfront Times just published an interview with her following the video release. In it, she discusses her viewpoints and talks about how she came to embrace the Tea Party. She makes some pretty wonderful points, but seems to - sadly - miss the mark on a lot of fundamental issues. Here are a few thoughts I had as I went through it:

Agree:
"My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats."

Disagree:
"I'm against a government that will not defend our borders; and on and on and on." If it isn't clear why I disagree, understand that I am not in favor of nations as they often reek havoc on this world and stand in the way of life.

Agree, but with some reservations which I go into after:
"I'm stunned that so many people who call themselves liberal yet are completely intolerant. I thought liberals loved everyone: the poor, the immigrant, the gays, the handicapped, the minorities, dogs, cats, all eye colors, all hair colors! Peace, love, bull! Curious they have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who doesn't think exactly as they do. You disagree and you're immediately called a fool, a Nazi, a racist. That's pretty f'd up!!I would never judge someone based on their political views. Their honesty, integrity, kindness to others, generosity? Yes. Politics? No!"

Reservations:
The fact that kindness and generosity are in no way present in the defense of national borders. While I agree that the direct actions people take in life are very important, established support of a system which produces an unparalleled deal of harm is a huge issue. Can a person be judged for not stopping that system? No, because, really, how is that to be achieved by a single person? Can a person be judged for endorsing something that renders their values meaningless? Maybe not judged, but they at least shouldn't be delusional about it in thinking that the such contradictory principles can exist in harmony.

And the misguided:
"I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream land be paid for? For those who actually believe that their taxes won't go up in order to pay for all this insanity: good luck!"

Why it's misguided:
Pretty obvious that Obama isn't gonna make a utopian dream land and she knows that. So why more extensively concerned with the ends being achieved with that money? Instead of being angry at pork-barrel spending, be outraged that your money is going to the devastation of life. Think of it this way: would you rather have your money go towards death or a "donkey museum"? I know what I'd pick!

But really there's no need for people to get so upset about this. To feel as though the image of someone they knew, which has been acquired through a body of work, has been defaced by some horrific impostor. Mo Tucker is who she is whether or not you agree with her.

So, Mo, the answer is still yes.

* My sense of the Tea Party is that they have a healthy distrust of power, but can be fairly misguided. Many seem to limit the definition of power to government figures in favor of spending. Not to mention that their often self-centered concern can easily be seen as the privileged fearing that they might experience disadvantage. (Tucker does point out that she grew up very poor, as I am sure many of Tea Party supporters did. So I am not suggesting that all members of the Tea Party share this trait. It does, however, manifest among many of its figures either overtly or as an undercurrent.)

And speaking of whole stupid things

First Banksy, now Ratzi. And here I thought The Simpsons was, at this point, irrelevant.

I actually think the Banksy thing is the dumber of the two.

Dodged a bullet

I'm so glad I was away for the big anarchinterblog tizzy prompted by FB's post on Stop Me Before I Vote Again (which I guess I'll link to for posterity). It's not that I'm not up for a big discussion on whether or not anarchists are all dumbo-heads, as FB asserted (my answer: we're not, but then I'm biased); on the contrary, as Squigglylines pointed out, it's really weird that a lot of people's reaction seemed to be "Why are mommy and daddy fighting?" and "why would two people want to spend time exchanging ideas with one another?"

No, that's not why I'm glad I missed it. I'm glad because my god was it a whole lot of goofiness as it actually played out--and the goofiness was unavoidable from the start.

The Baronette recently took a class (don't ask me why) that involved a lot of discussion of political and social issues. The majority of her classmates fell along the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot conservative/liberal axis that the majority of people in the US place themselves on. The Baronette, naturally, does not. One of her continual frustrations in discussion was that she had to constantly explain, and re-explain, every aspect of her views, from the ground up, starting from first principles (like, say, why we should be skeptical of power), every time she wanted to say anything. Whereas everyone else could just say "as a Democrat/Republican/conservative/liberal, I think..." and everyone, agree or disagree, would at least have a basic grasp on the thought process that led to the statement.

And even with all the explaining and explaining and explaining, she still had to get used to constant misunderstandings, mostly of the "you criticized a Republican so you must be in favor of the Democrats" type (or vice versa). Often, clarifying and clarifying and clarifying got too exhausting, and she would just have to give up on being understood.

But at least the people she was talking with had an excuse: these were ideas they simply had never been exposed to before. Their positions on the conservative/liberal spectrum weren't entirely of their own making--they weren't lucky enough to even partially escape the pervasive ideological conditioning we all go through from early childhood.

All of which is my roundabout way of saying that FB coming along with his "anarchism [is] a silly, juvenile sort of rhetorical posture...I'm admittedly not very familiar with the corpus of anarchist thought" is just the kind of irritating, ignorant imbecility that, coming from someone explicitly outside of the limited conservative/liberal axis, seems specifically designed to be provocative, not of constructive discussion, or even of usefully impassioned argument, but rather of bitter pointlessness. And, shockingly, that's pretty much exactly what he got, despite the best efforts of others to make more of it. So really, I'm just glad I missed the whole stupid thing.

Cabin Fever

We're going off to a little place in the woods for the weekend with a group of other attractive twenty-somethings of our generation, so the blog may be a bit quiet and unresponsive for a bit. But go right ahead and yak at us if you want--assuming we don't get attacked by a knife-wielding maniac or shave our leg skin off, we'll be yakking back at you on Monday.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Important terror news

The Brooklyn Bridge apparently was shut down for a while today because there were flashlights on it.

Opting out

The plot of William Gibson's latest, Zero History, is driven by a "secret brand" of clothes called Gabriel Hounds (after one of those crazy things that happens when local religious traditions get overlaid with trappings of invading Christianity). Gabriel Hounds doesn't advertise, doesn't seem to care if people know about it, except perhaps insofar as it may prefer that people don't. More importantly, it very deliberately is made not to be tied to the "style" of any given time, and, as one character who knows a bit about the Hounds explains, they don't have seasons in the traditional sense of the fashion world:

When they remake the jackets, if they ever do, they'll be exactly the same, cut from exactly the same pattern. The fabric might be different, but only an otaku could tell....It's about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty.

The Baronette picked up the September issue of Wire and I've been slowly picking through it. The cover story is called "Retro-Activity," and is made up of a bunch of shorter stories about different ways that contemporary musicians or music scenes are using the music of the past, not simply as revivalism, but in creatively interesting ways. In the first section, Nick Richardson writes about the new coldwave and minimal synth scenes as a "radical revivalism," arguing that their

retro-resistance is more ideological. They resist the mass media's belief in novelty-as-quality, resist the forced "progress" of neo-liberal capitalism--where "progress" means a drive for efficiency at the expense of human interaction. So their material does sound new, even if its sound isn't new. That is to say, it's the sound of something it wasn't before: a radical dissent that's as much a product of its time as Marquis De Sade [one of the original post-punk era coldwave bands] were of theirs. A stubborn stride backwards in a culture driven forwards at the end of a whip.

I'm not personally familiar with any of the new music Richardson's discussing, and not much more familiar with the original batch from the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, but regardless of whether I would agree with the assessment were I better acquainted with the material, it appears that there is Something In The Air.

Gibson's story is about the attempt to turn the methods of the Hounds to the advantage of the global capital machine, which is appropriate considering that the figure driving the action of all three of his latest novels, the hilariously-named advertising magnate Hubertus Bigend, is explicitly--and excellently--portrayed as turning the methods and theories of the Situationist International to this same advantage (which is in itself perhaps the greatest, and most despicable, example of détournement imaginable). In fact, a constant theme throughout the books--and possibly their entire Deeper Meaning--is that, regardless of your relationship with this machine (both as personified in Bigend and in its myriad other forms), regardless of the relationship you desire to have with it, you are always benefiting it. Even if you come up with what seems like a foolproof method of defying it, of fighting against it, you're still complicit, and it will simply find a way to twist your methods to its needs. That Gibson is, to all appearances, merely ambivalent to all this (when surely the only sane reaction, on becoming aware of it, is Lovecraftian horror), ends up actually adding to the impact of the books for me: they show all this in action, they show how it all works, and still they can't find a way to just straight-up condemn it.

I doubt that either Nick Richardson or the members of the scene he writes about are naive enough to not realize all of this. And, for the moment, their system seems to be working, at least on a minuscule level. It's not a revolution, but it is resistance.

I have my doubts about the specifics--a revival of a specific period will always have a flavor of "going back to before it all went wrong and starting over," and in this way I think perhaps the atemporality of the Hounds is more effective (though of course there it's still just another way of pushing consumer goods). And the music of the post-punk era, in addition to being aesthetically appealing to me, also has the very strong virtue of having happened right on the cusp of the Thatcher/Reagan era. But while Thatcher and Reagan are among the best examples of what's wrong with everything in this world of ours, I worry that a revival of this era can send the erroneous message that they were the cause or the beginning of it. Though on the other hand perhaps we could see this more as a revival of resistance to the wrongs that they exemplified, a resistance that went wrong the first time.

Regardless, though, I'm getting caught up in the specifics of an example, when I meant to be examining the broader concept. I'm not sure I have much more to say about it. But: resistance to novelty as resistance to capitalism. Nice. Like it. That's all.

500th Post

And I'm going to use it to point out that the world's most adorably chubby bird is awkwardly flapping around my backyard right now. How's that for more substantial posting, huh?

Just a quick bit of trivia

More substantial posting tomorrow, probably.

A couple weeks ago the stupid gawker sci-fi blog io9 that I read despite how dumb it is posted an interview with Steve Vogt, the astronomer whose team discovered that awesomely earth-like planet 20 light years away. He insists that this planet must have life on it, which is fairly unscientific of him but I tend to agree, because I love the idea of life on other planets, no matter what, and because it just seems so probable to me; after all, we have pretty decent suggestions of life, past or present, occurring on a pretty large number of bodies just in our solar system alone, so this rocky planet right in the "habitable" zone of its star seems like a good candidate, you know?

Anyway, Vogt was talking about his reasons for being so sure that there's life on this planet, and he described things in a way that had never really presented itself to me before, and I liked it, so here it is:

[T]he universe is a vast place and most of it is totally unavailable for life as we know it. There are two things in the universe you can't get around: Temperature and gravity. So if you are in interstellar space you're at 2.7 degrees kelvin. Your atoms are hardly vibrating and you're not going to be alive. Life as we know it can't survive. So you have to be near a star. That's good, but stars have gravity and you can fall into them. Your only hope is to be near a star but not falling into it – you need an orbit. And that's magical. That's where you can have enough warmth, but not turn into a cloud of plasma because you've fallen into the star. So when you have a planet in orbit and it's the right size and in the right orbit [like Zarmina], it's a very special place. There are many planets like that but we didn't know that [until our discovery].

Customer service, part three of now I'm thinking maybe even four

Part one was mainly about how a company's customers come to hate the company's workers, a hatred overriding their shared class interests.

Part two was mainly about the reverse: how the workers come to hate the customers, overriding yadda yadda.

This part will be about how worker turns on worker at the same company. I don't think I have a coherent essay in me about this, so some numbered points will follow. This is also gonna be shorter than the other parts. While I'm predicting the future, early next year President Obama will announce that he has been in communication with extraterrestrials; by the end of the year, alien technology will have cured all human illness and ushered in a new era of peace lasting three millennia. During this time, however, the Firefox spellchecker will not yet have learned how to spell Obama, millennia, or, for that matter, Rhode Island.

For the present, here are some things I want to say.

1. Corporations like keep staffing to a bare minimum. In every customer service job I've ever worked, this means that regular staffing on a regular day is just enough to sustain near-crisis levels without slipping into actual-crisis. Of course, this means that when someone takes time off, you get crises. And since people tend to think in terms of immediate causes rather than underlying systems, you get workers resenting other workers for taking time off. This effect is even stronger when only certain people have the training or authorization to do certain required tasks.

2. There is a strong cultural taboo against telling anyone how much you make, or asking how much other people make. In many workplaces, there is official policy backing it up--in my job, discussing pay is a firing offense. Most people seem to think that this is good, that pay should be just as private as, say, masturbatory fantasies. This is weird. The fact that I make x amount per hour (and I won't be specific here because I'm a slave who's lucky to be owned) is not some sort of fact about me; it's a fact about where my employer's desire to retain employees rather than train new ones intersects with their desire to wring as much profit out of each employee as possible (and, of course, where each of these intersects with the availability of other employment).

Concealing this fact is of course useful to the company. If I don't know how much the people I work with make, I don't know if there is significant inequality between me and them: do different jobs make unreasonably different amounts? Do different people (say, men and women) doing the same job get different pay? Not knowing the extent of the inequality makes organizing to combat it more difficult, and keeps each of us isolated, focused on #3.

3. And #3 is the competition for raises and promotions that workplaces encourage. In an environment of peers who feel no solidarity, all working at pay scales that are typically near-sustenance level for the lifestyle we've been raised to think of as necessary (and which the constructed environments we live in to a large extent require), in which there are limited opportunities to improve those pay scales, this competition can easily become consuming. We all must strive constantly to be the best worker we can be (from the company's perspective), so that at those times when raises or promotions are available, we'll have a record that reflects well on us (from the company's perspective). Often this striving takes the form of monitoring our coworkers for our employer's benefit. And in the specific case--say, one higher paying job opens up, the company is hiring internally, and there are ten people who want the job--we will do anything we can to benefit ourselves, which typically includes something that is detrimental to others. Then, should one person be successful, the others who are unsuccessful will resent that person--he or she got something they deserved. This resentment is of course misplaced (it is not the worker but the employer that has created this situation), but it is easily understandable, and hard to avoid, especially for those not in a habit of examining systemic issues, as I mentioned in #1.

So the customer hates the worker, the worker hates the customer, and the workers hate each other. The company, above all of them, is relatively unscathed.

If there's a part four, it'll be examining all of this at work in a video of an incident at a Target store--it was the video that inspired all these essays. Fans of bloggy novelty will want to skip it, as the video was posted all the way back in July. Who could have predicted back then that I'd still be on about this?

PS Ha ha, I guess it wasn't shorter. Whoops! My other predictions are still accurate.

Happy 70th, John

Some of the best use of overlays (or double exposure or whatever) this side of Kenneth Anger, if you ask me.

This live version of "Cold Turkey" is great, as is the whole Plastic Ono Band Live Jam disc, which I think exists as its own album but which I have as the second disc of Sometime in New York City.



I'm very unreasonable about John and Yoko. If you say anything mean about either of them, I will hate you. You can go ahead and think mean things about them if you want, but keep 'em to your damn self.

A Wonder Unlike Any Other...

All considered, I'm not sure you could call the 50 second mark a "punchline", but it is a delightful bonus to this Malaysian treasure.

I'm promising myself that this'll be the last of these for a little while

...but come on now, he was asking for it with this one.

Matt Yglesias has, apparently inadvertently, revealed the core principle guiding his thought process:

It makes perfect sense, of course, when you think about it for a minute. But in general I hadn’t.

Emphasis mine, everybody.

Behavioral conditioning

While I was away, JRB wrote a great little post linking to a great little post by Adspar, who seems to have a great little blog that I'm gonna start reading now that I know it exists.

Adspar wrote:

It occurs to me now that years and years of taking orders from authority figures really fucked up my ability to manage my time, and to direct my efforts towards goals of my own choosing. Whenever I had time to myself, I just wanted to do nothing, perhaps because I was accustomed to goal-directed activity being unpleasant. And it was unpleasant partially because I wasn't the one setting the goals. I suppose these repeated periods where I squandered my time were when I rejected being an agent for someone else's goals, but was incompetent at setting my own and executing on them.

Huh. Sounds familiar. Actually (and there's some me me me blah blah-ing coming up here) I've been mega struggling with this recently. I have all kinds of things I want to do for myself and for the people I know and who live near me. Making music, writing (on this here blog and also the fiction I keep telling myself I write), reading more, learning to cook, getting in shape physically. Getting involved in local culture. Getting involved in local activism.

And I have plenty of time to do all of it. I'm extremely lucky, in a relative sense, in having a part-time job that provides me with just enough to live on, so four days out of the week are mine in their entirety, which most people can't say. And yet I hardly do anything. More often, I sit around all day thinking about the things I want to do, and then go and laugh at the stupid thing digby just said or whatever. Finally it's getting to the point where I can't stand it anymore, where I need to change it. I think I'm starting to turn it around--that's in part what my week-long break was about--but it is hard for me, way harder than it has any sensible right to be.

JRB wrote:

Politically speaking, we need to live but we also need to live as ourselves, in which case we take on double-work: the work of contributing toward that which earns us income, and the work of contributing toward ourselves.

Consumerism tells us to relax when we aren't working as required by its needs. Our work is done as producers; now we must consume! But as our friend suggests, that investment leaves nothing extra for ourselves.

It's funny. I wrote a while back about how our culture conditions us from childhood to be unable to see certain obvious truths, and that some of us, due to the luck (or chance, more accurately) of our own specific lives, manage to overcome that conditioning, or avoid it altogether. I tentatively included myself in that "some of us." I still think I belong in that category--though I am always open to argument on that if anyone feels it's necessary, and I should clarify that "category" is a misleading word and it's more of a spectrum, and a process, but now my parenthetical is getting way too long--but only now am I realizing that whatever quirks of my life led to that independence of thought also seem to have led to a near-complete lack of independence of action. The conditioning of my thoughts didn't take, but the conditioning of my behavior did.

They'll fuck ya one way or the other.

I've been in a very particular mood recently

I listened to Cocteau Twins' Treasure twice in a row yesterday, and now this morning this sounds to me like the best song ever made:

Slowdive - Miranda

Though every other song on the album is also a strong contender for the title.

Another slow pitch

Yglesias (and don't go clicking the link to read the rest, cuz this is all there is):

According to my calculation, if we were to cut America’s $663.8 billion defense budget by 1%, that would free up enough funds to double the budget of the FBI. Doesn’t it seem like that would probably, on net, reduce the risk of Americans dying in a terrorist attack? And in the meantime we might catch some more bank robbers or other banal threats to public safety.

I'm all for cutting the "defense" budget, of course, but this post came only slightly more than a week after the mass FBI raids of anti-war activists and really just in general diverting military spending to law enforcement is such a goddamn reprehensible bit of shittery. Why not cut military spending by 1% and give it to me? We'll be just as safe from "terrorists" and maybe I'll even use it in ways that would end up reducing some of those "banal threats to public safety." Which, incidentally, jackass.

PS If you're robbing a bank, and you're successful, more power to you. That's fucking God's work there.

UPDATE: Al takes over where I left off.

Taking it slow

Imagine traveling in a time machine back to, say, 1850, giving the first person you see a Tootsie Pop, and telling them that the outside tastes like fruit and the inside tastes like chocolate.

Blogospherical 'Nouncement

Y'all, I am taking a break. An internet break. Back in like a week, hopefully recharged. In the meantime, check this out:

Customer service, part two of I hope three but who am I kidding?

Wow, part one was a long time ago. Oops.

So, in that part I wrote about how the nature of customer service jobs alienates the "customer" from the "service" provider, even when both parties should share class interests. Now to look at it from the other direction, the perspective of the worker.

There are several mechanisms at work here that work towards ensuring that the alienation is complete. The most obvious is the one I briefly mentioned in the previous essay: the customers hate the employees, so the employees naturally come to hate the customers.

Another mechanism is, basically, Stockholm syndrome: the employee comes to identify with the employer. I saw this in operation the other day when management called a meeting to unveil the new "attendance policy." It was essentially the same as the old one; my understanding is that it was intended more to standardize things across the entire company (whether this means US-only or if they're actually trying to standardize policy transnationally, I don't know). A bunch of my coworkers weren't happy with it, though. Why? By providing for a system of "warnings" before "termination" for "non-compliance," it was too lenient. "The attendance policy should just be 'You have to come to work,'" one of them said, to widespread agreement. "What else does it need to say?" Here, the workers have come to identify with the needs of their employer to such an extent that they don't even remember that they have their own needs, let alone that these needs should be more important to them.

This comes to be in exactly the same way that Stockholm syndrome occurs in a kidnapping or hostage situation (or an interrogation or abusive parenting or any number of other unbalanced, coercive relationships): the party with power mixes cruelty with an appearance of kindness in such a combination as to maximally disorient the party without power, to convince them that the cruelty and the kindness are directly related to their own behavior. (Reinforcing this is also the true purpose of most of the inspirational and self-help genres, which I'm sure I'll get to examine in more depth if I ever get back to the goddamn QBQ.) So, returning specifically to customer service, our employers take away enormous chunks of our lives, filling them with the degradation of telephonic (or face-to-face, depending on the type of customer service) abuse, insulting lectures on "attendance," wall-to-wall surveillance (at my job, they record our calls--and have a "mentor" system in place to remind you that they listen to them--they monitor what our computers are doing, and they have signs up everywhere saying that the "premises are under video surveillance" and that "security is everyone's job"), required daily groveling in the hopes of future advancement, and demands to perform to a level made essentially impossible by lack of staffing and by inadequate tools. But they pay us! And even give us (a little) paid time off! And (shitty, but better than no) health coverage! And if we're extra good, extra devoted, well, at some unspecified point far down the road, we might get more of all that! Or at least manage to hold on to what we have without losing too much of it! They're so good to us. They love us. And hey, we're lucky to have a job (my goal is to include that link in all three parts of this series).

At my job, at least, they make sure it's all working by holding quarterly meetings to tell us that yet another three months during which none of us has seen a raise has brought corporate profits above and beyond projections. This is supposed to make us feel happy and proud of our work, and for a good portion of us, it seems to do just that.

So the indoctrination goes, and so when faced on the telephone with unruly customers who have the nerve to object to something the company--now thought of as we--did to them, we view the customer as a personal enemy. Instead of thinking "I wish I could get the company I work for to give you a refund, but I'd put my job in jeopardy if I did that too often," or similar, we think "I can't believe these people want me to give them a refund." We might even think that clients demanding refunds are eating away at our raises, as I heard someone I work with say the other week. Never mind that new accounts for fiscal year whatever are trending higher than goal and that profits company wide are blah blah million dollars higher than projected, and still no raise is in sight. Or whatever--despite all the vagueness, that is of course just one specific example of how the thought process works. It's applicable to all sorts of different situations, though, in exactly the same way. The customer wants x from me, but I don't want to give it to them because the company doesn't want to give it to them--and I am the company.

Thusly, ergoly, and in conclusionly (TM the baronette), we in the underclasses begin to identify more with our overlords than with other members of our own class, and the exploitation continues.

Part three, should it ever swirl into existence, will cover the alienation of worker from worker within a customer service setting. I'll probably talk more about attendance.

I have to stop just making fun of people

I've been wanting to start being more constructive, but, come on. This showed up in my blugfeed at 3:52, followed by this at 5:22. The same day.

In case you haven't checked back yet

JRB's back from his vacation, and that is awesome news for us.

It would be funny even without Starbucks

In some internet peregrinations I just stumbled upon this daily kos diary from late August, and I really just assumed that even there the headline had to be a joke, or at least a kind of self-deprecating bit of goofery.

But, y'all, I read the article, and it is not. It is dead fucking serious. And that, my friends, is hilarious.

The Kuleshov Effect

Eric Martin, some yahoo named Gulliver whom Martin quotes approvingly, the New York Times article they are both responding to, and thirty Helens agree: the United States is militarily involved (if you know what I mean) in Yemen in response to the terrifying incident of the underpants bomber.

Which is funny because didn't that happen on Christmas day? And don't I have here an MSNBC article dated December 18 fessing up to U.S. missile strikes in Yemen? (That earlier article, incidentally, is a marvel of propaganda, but then I'm sure you knew that without even having to read it.)

Eric and Gulliver are innocent little babies here, repeating fiction as truth because they specialize in being uncritical of the narratives they're spoon-fed, so long as the one holding the spoon is both liberal and reputable. Which of course the New York Times is. Let's look at that reputable liberalism in action, shall we?

The debate is unfolding as the administration reassesses how and when to use American missiles against suspected terrorists in Yemen following a botched strike in May. That attack, the fourth since December by the American military, killed a provincial deputy governor and set off tribal unrest.

The Yemen quandary reflects the uncertainty the administration faces as it tries to prevent a repeat of the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man trained in Yemen.

Isn't that clever? End one paragraph with the accurate*-yet-vague "since December" timeline, start the next paragraph with the accurate-and-specific "Dec. 25" event, and let the reader assume from there. Faulty memory and the (terribly convenient!) closeness of the events will do the rest.

*Yes, I'm sure we were in Yemen earlier than the MSNBC article admits, but for now I'm gonna give it to them for convenience sake. (Convenience's sake?)

Freethinking

I don't pay much attention to what the Atheists* are babbling about on the internet aside from scanning posts by PZ Myers and occasional other similar nincompoops for particularly egregious nincompoopery. But it has come to my attention that, apparently, some of them are using their freethinking, unfettered, rational brains to believe, probably based on lots of supporting evidence, that Obama is an atheist himself.

Now, this actually seems kind of likely to me, despite all of Obama's public religioning, because it's hard for me to believe that he cares about anything bigger than himself (except insofar as such things must be destroyed). I kind of doubt this is what the Atheists are saying, though I can't be sure because Myers doesn't actually link to anybody and I'm not about to go looking. It seems much more likely to me, though, that this is just more of that bizarre liberal projection that Obama still seems to enable (though thankfully not as strongly as he used to): "I'm an atheist, Obama is just like me but cooler, so he's probably an atheist too!"

Myers, to his credit, isn't buying it. He's not buying that weird D'Souza anti-colonialist thing, either (on the liberal response to which I hope to have more later). But let's see what he's selling instead.

Look, it's so much simpler. Obama is not a socialist or a communist or a Luo tribesman. He is a centrist politician from Chicago who believes in improving peoples lives incrementally by working step by step through political compromise. He pisses off the liberal, progressive wing of the Democratic party because we want him to be bold and aggressive, and he's not, and because he's also comfortable with the military-industrial status quo. He really annoys the wingnut right because he wants to move the country away from their dreams of a Reaganesque/Randian capitalist paradise, and he is…slowly and tentatively.

That's really all you need to know to comprehend what Obama is doing and how he works. It's sufficient to explain everything.

Mr. Myers, freethinker, scientist, man of reason who only believes what there is sufficient supporting evidence for: on what evidence are you basing your conclusion that Obama believes in improving peoples lives? Can you lay out your logic in connecting this with being comfortable with the military-industrial status quo? Please state for me the steps Obama is taking, slowly and tentatively even, to dismantle the capitalist paradise.

It's very, very simple. I don't believe in god, but even if I did, I could see it. Obama cares about himself. Obama is trying to amass power and wealth to himself. In order to further this goal, he is working to maintain and further empower the system which gave him the power he has now. Improving people's lives doesn't need to enter into it. Occam's razor, Mr. Myers.

Myers and his fellow Atheists say that religion is insanity, because it's believing in things without evidence. But at least it is possible to posit "god" on top of what we see, without denying what we actually do see. What Myers is doing is creating a fictional alternate reality that flies in the face of all logic and evidence. I'll take religion over that any day.

TANGENT It's funny to me that pretty much every mainstream reaction to Obama, positive and negative, involves assuming that he's "secretly" what you want him to be: a progressive**, a communist, an atheist, a Muslim, an anti-war reformer, an anti-colonialist tribesman; always with one of those whatever-dimensional chess games going on. I realize that our society is the society of the lie, of fiction, but this is so much more on the surface than usual. In a way it's kind of great, but in a much more powerful way it's just kind of terrifying.

*As opposed to people who don't believe in god but don't particularly care if you do.
**Whatever that is.

tl;dr

There's an odd tendency that a lot of people have (myself, in my weaker moments, included). I've always been vaguely aware of it but it's been coming to my attention more and more in recent weeks. This tendency, whose existence I have introduced mysteriously so as to "hook" you into reading further, is to question other people's motives for liking things.

Consider this, from Rate Your Music member dnieper111's review of Lucio Battisti's 1974 album Anima latina (cut and pasted, so apply [sic]s as needed):

[G]eez, look at all these hyperbolic reviews. Unearth's review, for example. Funny how a high average rating seems to trigger so much subconscious sycophantic self-deception:

"I need to listen to this a hundred more times before sufficient words will form. I need to place these exquisite forms and colors within my framework of sound interpretation. I need to assimilate the rareness of this beauty completely before I can explain to you why this is one of the supreme examples of recorded art I have ever encountered. For now, just leave me alone with it."

Yeah, unearth, you *get* it don't you?

I wonder what prompted that review: was it genuine enjoyment of the album, or a desire to appear knowledgable about a highly rated obscure album that's far removed from typical pop music? A desire to tell himself "I seek to understand this album. I am noble and honest in my musical listening. I appreciate subtleties, and I have the ability to understand the nature of all music."

...a review like this, which basically says "This is a great album, but I don't know why..." is the best example I've seen of the fawning and delusional hyperbole that is an undercurrent for so many RYM reviews. Its purpose is not to honestly review the music but rather to make the author appear knowledgeable to others and, even more importantly, himself. I suspect a lot of the delusion is at a subconscious level. Unearth really *thinks* he's on the way to genuine appreciation of a genuine masterpiece. And what prompted that? The high rating at RYM and a bunch of other uber-hip reviews. The reason this straw hipster of mine gives the album a 5 is, I believe, its high average rating, NOT because he really likes it. The straw hipster is a textbook sheep.

Leaving aside the fact that hipsters are, in my experience, generally known for disliking things in order to look cool, I don't really understand the point of all this unpleasant, nasty psychoanalyzing. Unearth's review, admittedly, is a bit overwrought, but...well, it's hard to write about music, especially music as unusual and, yes, exquisite, rare, and supreme as Anima latina, whose beauty and power I certainly wouldn't be able to write effectively about if I listened to it a hundred more times. It is a great album, and I don't know why.

Basically my question is: why does dnieper111 want to question Unearth's reason for loving the album? Judging from the review, Unearth had a genuinely affecting experience listening to the album and wanted to share that. I can relate. Most of the posts on this blog labeled "music" or "tv" or "movies" or "books," and a lot of the other ones as well, are a result of exactly the same impulse. It is true, I suppose, that people will frequently "fake" this in order to present a particular image of themselves--I'm sure I'm guilty of it from time to time, myself--but to my thinking such a practice is, on the one hand, harmless, and, on the other, less likely to occur if people in general become less prone to cynically dismissing descriptions of emotion as mere posturing.

If I say that I had an unexpectedly transcendent moment once, listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie's "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" while walking in the snow, am I bragging about listening to semi-obscure music? Or perhaps bragging about my ability to experience genuine emotion? I'm not sure, maybe I am, but it's true either way. What if I say the same about, say, being one of thousands of people watching David Bowie in a stadium decades after his peak? Surely in that case I'm bragging about something else. If I say that a low quality video of Ike & Tina Turner is powerfully moving to me, why is a certain blogger's immediate response to obliquely accuse me of falling victim to the song's "legend," liking it only because it was a massive flop? That blogger went on to more directly (though not directly enough to give up plausible deniability should it be needed) call me ignorant and stupid, which was unpleasant, but it's that weird psychoanalyzing at a distance that really ended up bugging me. What if people like "River Deep - Mountain High" because they like it? Why must we assume that everything is a hipster pose? Once you start assuming that, it becomes an inescapable circle--because after all, nothing is more of a hipster pose than assuming that everything is a hipster pose. Starting with an assumption of insincerity is not going to take you anywhere good--or maybe I should say that, at least, it's not going to take me anywhere I want to go.

I know I'm not a paragon of acceptance, and I know I frequently make fun of people. Honestly it's not something I love about myself, though I at least try, when doing it, to keep focused on the content of what people are saying and doing rather than on bitchy second-guessing about the secret desire to seem cool that is supposedly driving what they say and do. Again, to stave off any potential accusation of hypocrisy, I know I'm not always good at this. Getting better at it is on my fucking bucket list, OK?

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's an unfortunate thing that people do that I wish they--we--wouldn't. It's something I want to try to do less. There are a lot of norms of human interaction that deeply confuse and depress me, even as I engage in them myself, and this is one of them. I don't really know why anyone would want to navigate a world where every statement of feeling, every expression of emotion, every little "I like this" or "I don't like this," is examined with intent to judge.

In other news that makes me feel like never leaving my house, liberals are misguided, anarchy would be cool, Obama murdered more people, and wage slavery is a system to be opposed. I'll let you know if any of that changes.

Coma

If you are very patient with or, better yet, fond of ambient and drone music, you may be interested in my new album-length track Coma, which I have just posted to my Bandcamp page.

If you don't have a taste for that sort of music, please don't listen to it, as I don't want you to hate me.

Another picture

I imagine the woman in the lower right was just caught at an inopportune moment as her expression changed, and that this was actually like the happiest moment of her life, but to me it looks like she's having a far more appropriate reaction to encountering such a horrific beast:



I would probably flee in terror, too.

(I am, incidentally, working on a real post. I make no promises, however.)

Also

Someone who's handy with photoshop, do something with this picture (which comes to me via Duncan) right this instant.

Just a quote, no commentary, dead tired right now

An anonymous commenter at ioz's:

Well I for one am deeply--deeply!--upset about the fact that David Petraeus's predator drones have burned at least one Koran every time they blew up a residential building in Afghanistan, Yemen, or Iraq. I mean, think about it. Is it plausible that a Taliban Number Three Leader would not have a Koran in his house? That's at least 341 Korans burnt right there! Not to mention all the houses they missiled on the suggestion of someone's neighbor who got sick of hearing their teenage son mangle the solo from Stairway to Heaven at 2 in the morning.

So someone tell David Petraeus to just stop burning Korans! It's inflaming the Muslim world.

The products of my decadent lifestyle are insufficiently pleasing

Warning: if you like album art, DO NOT "upgrade" to goddamn itunes 10. It's pissing me off so much. I'm very particular about my album art, and have expended a lot of effort getting the highest quality images I can possibly find for every one of the many hundreds of albums I have in itunes, and now the largest I can view them in the only navigation setting that works for my purposes is, well, tiny. Fuck you, Apple. This is by far the worst thing you've ever done.

The Police Have Been Wonderful

One of Chumbawamba's two contributions to 1985's Dig This: A Tribute to the Great Strike.

Line of best fit

Melissa McEwan, on the Discovery bomber (all links original):

Thus has the meme that Lee was a leftwing terrorist begun.

But, of course, it's not quite that simple. Lee's manifesto is indeed leftwing insomuch as environmental protection has become associated with the left since conservatives haven't been particularly interested in conservation since Nixon started the EPA. Lee's eliminationist views on immigration, however, are closely aligned with several prominent rightwing anti-immigration groups, and his position on human population control ("NO MORE BABIES!") is, suffice it to say, profoundly anti-choice.

Like most of the other domestic terrorists who have struck recently, there's not a totally cohesive ideology underlying his actions. He is certainly more left-leaning than, say, Joseph Stack, but, like Stack, it's a mixed bag of grievances.

For McEwan, committed liberal, everyone is either a liberal, a conservative, or someone lacking a "cohesive ideology." Now, one might say that lacking a cohesive ideology is a good thing, but that's kind of irrelevant, because James Lee did have one, as anyone reading his manifesto without the blinders of the false left-right divide can tell.

There are portions of his ideology one might agree with or disagree with to a greater or lesser extent (I for one wish he had taken the power structures of civilization more into consideration when deeming all of humanity parasitic; there is a large difference in parasitism between a member of an indigenous society still living on their landbase, someone like me typing away on my computer in my climate controlled house, and a member of the elite, steering the course of war and industry from their climate controlled estate; and also, yeah, the immigration stuff is what I would consider deeply misguided). There are certainly aspects of his methods that leave something to be desired. His specific points of obsessive focus--Discovery, Daniel Quinn--are sometimes a bit puzzling. But to say that his thoughts weren't "cohesive" is simply untrue.

The sycophants of power will always distort and belittle the motives of those who oppose power, and they don't even have the decency to stop when power mows its opponents down. James Lee seems to have had some difficulties, and while I am not exactly opposed to turning the violence of power upon itself, I think perhaps his was not the best way to do it. But that is no reason to claim, or to imply, that he didn't know what he was doing, or that his mind was a mess and so the points he raises can be dismissed. The scales are different, but it's the same reasoning that calls suicide bombers "cowardly," calls WTO protesters breaking windows "violent thugs," or defines anarchy as "chaos"--and chaos as terrifying.

Everyone, to some degree, internalizes the needs of power. It is important, when we see this happening in ourselves (and we should always be looking for this), to root it out and destroy it. Don't define yourself along the left-right split, because the very words are lies. If you have what some would call a non-cohesive ideology, you're doing something right.

Nothing whatsoever, never

Yglesias:

But whether or not Iraq achieves a durable, non-violent resolution to its political conflicts seems to me to have nothing whatsoever with the presence of American soldiers and it never did.

Going to NYC is exhausting...

...especially as a day trip from Providence, and especially in the summer. How people can live there is a mystery to me. My brother's art continues to amaze me, at least.

I have nothing approaching the mental or physical capacity to actually write a post, so instead I'm going to quote the always-lovely JRB of ladypoverty. If you read this blog, I'm sure you read his, but if you're one of those who doesn't read blog comments, you may have missed this:

People have more tolerance for each other when they don't exhaust it all in the daily appeal for life.

The same fools that show such obsequience at the job erupt into a furor at the slightest misunderstanding in the street.

When we spend all our tolerance for one thing we don't have it for another.

Yes, yes, yes, a world of yes.

I hope to be back with more of my own thoughts tomorrow. For now, I am going to fall asleep watching the calmest movie I can find in my house.

Those eyes....

Why is Digby wasting her time with all those silly golfing ads when she could just post a closeup of Boehner's terrifying, terrifying eyes?

That's all. Now I'm going for real.

In lieu of actual posting

I've actually posted this video before, but it's the best damn thing on all of youtube and possibly in the entire world, so I'm posting it again:



Just a startlingly powerful performance in every respect, filmed as perfectly as could ever be hoped for. The Ikette in the middle, incidentally, is P.P. Arnold (and please do click on that link, especially if the only version of "The First Cut Is the Deepest" you know is the shitty Rod Stewart one or, god forbid, the even shittier Sheryl Crow one).

Going to NYC real quick to see my brother's gallery opening, back early Friday if the hurricane doesn't decide to murder Rhode Island after all. I've got lots of stuff I want to write about so I hope it doesn't. The Baronette and I may also have some new music of our own to share soon.

UPDATE Contrary to what a "certain blogger" implies, I'm not a fucking moron; I know this is a lipsynch. Shockingly, the word "performance" can refer to more than just live noise-making. Also, in the future I will be sure to list every single deficiency in everything that moves me, just so that those who are infinitely smarter than me won't feel that they have to. In general, whenever I like something, I will make sure to shit on it. I apologize for all these failings in this post.

Timely as ever

Marisacat put it well, Célinian ellipses, glorious [sic]s, and all:

I am supposed to be all whupset over Beck and Palin and dear neice Alveeda King just disporting themselves all over the Lincoln Monument, on today! of all days!… and I could not care less.

We have killed M L King off so many times, narrowed and tied him down to this one instance in his life, The March on Washington, the “I have a dream” speech, strangled him in his clerical collar… that if stupid over-paid white people (Beck makes 32 mil a year) want to do this… have at it.

As with Bush versus Obama, or Fox News in general versus CNN or MSNBC, the difference between Beck and any given "saner" media messenger is mostly just one of obviousness. Beck is obviously perverting King's "legacy," whatever that word means, which in its way is better than doing it subtly. I don't say not to get upset, if you feel that getting upset will be edifying for you or for others. I just suggest examining whether Beck upsets you more than anyone else who tries to place limits on radicalism, and if so, why. Then, get upset at everyone else.

If, as I see many people suggest, the teabaggers and the anti-mosquovites and so on end up inciting violence (and indeed they may already have, as with that taxi driver), it is a violence that was made available to be incited by the sickness of our cultural programming in general. If Beck is tapping into something, it's because someone put it there, the better to tap it later.

UPDATE: JRB says kind of the same thing as me, plus a lot more, better.

This makes no sense

Digby apparently thinks, all of a sudden, that the reason people started calling Obama a Muslim was so that other people would take their hatred of Obama and start applying it to all Muslims, who they had previously not had any problem with. Or something? I don't know, if anyone can make better sense of it, let me know.

Mehlman on man

When we say that something has "long [been] an open secret," what do we mean? Within a family, I guess it's the kind of thing people hint at, all the adults understand, the kids ask embarrassing questions about, no one actually talks about it, grandma might not know although she probably actually does; the drug addict uncle or whatever.

When you're talking about people in the public eye, though, it means something related but different in significant ways. There, it means that everyone in that person's peer group knows the "secret," and, whether explicitly or tacitly, accepts it, and they all collaborate in keeping knowledge of it from the public in whose eye they are*: Isherwood and Auden didn't run around outing each other, for example. And that's all just fine and dandy, though of course it takes on a somewhat different cast, as all things do, when you place it in a context of power--as with Mehlman.

My point in all this is to say, the only thing Ken Mehlman cares about less than Melissa McEwan's "pity" is the lives of gay people in general. Gay people in his own class have it set, so why should he care? It's good that McEwan "can't imagine the self-loathing, the discomfort in one's own skin, the profound disassociation of self that happens with the subjugation of authenticity behind thin façade, that exists within someone who had the professional life he did," because I can pretty much guarantee you that none of that did, in fact, exist for Mehlman. Neither he nor most of his fellow members of the ruling classes have a problem with his being gay, and for those who do, these problems are overridden by the more important commonalities they share as a result of being members of that class. If only we at the bottom could realize that they feel that way, we could stop telling fairy (ha!) stories about these people, and stop feeling "pity" for them, and start maybe feeling some of that class solidarity ourselves, down here.

Mehlman may be lying when he says that "over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive," but the lie is contained only before the first comma.

In other Mehlman news, Zen Comix made me laugh for like an hour.

*Normally I don't give a shit about dangling prepositions, but that structure popped into my head and cracked me up, so allow me this small pleasure if you will.

William Gibson, Spook Country, several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to Godzilla's first footfall.
-page 4

...Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn't war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.
-page 71

She afforded herself a quick scan of the rest of the clientele. Were a cruise missile just then to impact the corrugated roof of Skybar, she decided, there would be no great need for People to change its next cover.
-page 83

Customer service, part one of probably three

I have a customer service job. All day long (not all week, though; I'm only part time there, thank god) I take phone calls from people who, though they don't think of it this way, are trying to find the best way to give their money to the huge multinational corporation I work for. About half the time, they're irate because something has gone wrong in this system: either my owners have taken a bunch of the customer's money at once rather than over time like the customer expected, or there's been a breakdown in the service that the company I work for provides to cover for the fact that what they're really doing is taking the customer's money.

Due to the nature of my company I work for, the people I talk to are occasionally business owners, but more often they're people like me, low-level people with no power in their organizations just working to make a living. Even when I do talk to the business owners, the businesses they own are small, and usually struggling, and always local; it may be that I would agree or disagree with their "politics" or whatever to greater or lesser extents, but in general, they are people who are trying to make a living while simultaneously at least attempting to provide something of value to the communities they live in, rather than just sucking money out of those communities and investing it internationally so as to fill their own pockets.

The people on the phone aren't my enemy, in other words. But the structure of the job sure makes it hard to keep that in mind.

For their part, when they call angry, they're occasionally angry specifically with someone-or-other in specific who messed something up, but more often they're angry with the company. The company, of course (and this and all that follows applies to all corporations, not just the one I work for), is not a person no matter what legal hoo-ha's been worked up over the decades saying it is. It is instead an emergent property of a bunch of wealthy assholes making decisions in their own self-interest, which obviously is going to result in a whole bunch of policies that run counter to the interests of the customers, who will as a result have to be tricked into thinking that these policies actually favor them. This leads inevitably to a lot of anger.

When the time comes for them to unleash this anger, though, they don't have any method of expressing it to the people it should be targeting (i.e., the wealthy assholes I mentioned above, the ones who make my hourly wage almost every minute of their entire life, waking or sleeping. But they do have the phone number for where I work. So they call me, and yell at me, and I have to take it and act like I like it and convince them that not helping them is helping them. Because if I don't do those things--if I lash back at them, or explain to them why they shouldn't be mad at me but at my owners, or if I explain to them that yeah, what the company does is shitty, or if I actually try to help them, I'll get fired. And I'm lucky to have a job! So I'm not going to do that.

So all this tension has no resolution: the customers flip out at me because they hate the company, and I end up hating the customers because they're flipping out at me. In this way, members of the same class who should be allies become enemies.

In part two, I plan to go further into my side of the conflict, the customer service side. Most likely the phrase "Stockholm syndrome" will be invoked, or at least evoked.

Nota bene

The word uniformed is easily misread as uninformed. Significant, though not as significant as I'd like. I'd rather a word like fatheaded crapface be that close to uniformed, but I'll make do.

Work is hell. Blugginess to resume tomorrow.

Memories

Hahaha, I just suddenly remembered that, late on election night 2008, over an image of the whole Obama family, Brian Williams said, "Well, it looks like they'll be moving into government housing now." What calls this to mind at quarter to nine on a beautiful summer Saturday morning? I have no idea.

Who wants a cat, honey, anyhow?

The great Florence Ballard didn't record much on her own, and none of it ever came anywhere close to touching the quality of her work with the Supremes (even at its best, her solo work succumbs too much to that Vegasy quality that Motown* so often, for some reason, found itself slipping into). But this song is entertaining me right now, so here you go:



*And yes I know her solo stuff wasn't on Motown.

I tried to come up with a witty title but the best I can do is "Shut Up, Jacob Davies"

It's funny that Jacob Davies kicks off his summary of the 20th century with a mention of Africa, because he then proceeds as if the continent doesn't exist. Of course, the mention ("The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa"), in addition to using a really weird noun as an adjective in a just completely strange way that I hate, doesn't have anything to do with Africans themselves directly, and really just serves as a background (factually incorrect background, but background nonetheless) for an element of European history. After all, as Davies tells us in his next paragraph, it's "just a warm up." European colonialism in Africa, just a warm up--because then Europeans started being violent to each other in Europe. I say wow.

There's a lot of use of the words "everybody" and "everyone," for example,

Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit.

And you know, I think it would come as a surprise to the vast majority of the population of the fucking Earth that they "all" were trying to get the biggest guns. Seems to me that was an activity of the elite of the elite, the richest, most powerful members of the richest, most powerful countries. As always, by definition, I mean duh.

"There's a brief period of glorious economic euphoria and excitement in the rest of the world" again, would come as a surprise to most of the rest of the world, especially that continent that I vaguely remember discussing at some point recently. I can't quite remember the name of it. Does anybody live there? I don't think so, so never mind.

The grossest thing about the whole essay is that you can feel this kind of self-satisfied I'm-brilliant air dripping off of the words. Davies clearly thinks he's approaching the 20th century from a perspective never seen before, when really he's just regurgitating the eurocentric racist vision of it that's jammed down all American and European throats from birth.

"I think our children are going to think we are nuts," he says, towards the end if you can make it that far. I sure hope yours do, Jacob.

PS Ha ha ha, read the second comment on the post.

Where it's due, part whatever part two

Probably digby's most genuinely good post ever.

Being civilized means not being able to see anything else as a possibility

A Guardian article about the rise and spread of multi-drug resistant bacteria features a list of scary things that will become commonplace in a post-antibiotic world. And you know, I'm not going to lie, I don't want to live in that world, but there are worse things, you know? And this one is just silly:

Pneumonia becomes once more "the old man's friend". Antibiotics have stopped it being the mass-killer it once was, particularly among the old and frail, who would lapse into unconsciousness and often slip away in their sleep. Other diseases of old age, such as cancer, have taken over.

OK, picture this:

You're old. You're frail. You're near the end of your life. You're going to die sooner rather than later. You're magically given the option of two different ways this death can come:

1. You will lapse into unconsciousness and slip away in your sleep.
2. You will linger painfully for months or even years as your own body turns on itself and grows a poisonous devouring mass that destroys you from the inside out.

I know which one I prefer.

PS I should also point out that although the article is vaguely about a real problem, it's also deeply inaccurate and scaremongering. In case that wasn't obvious.