Summer accommodations (for less than my current rent, too! altho i have 18 roommates.) gonna be editing shit at the lefty broadsheet In These Times this summer and living here in Hyde Park, Chicago. hit me up if you are there and wanna meet up IRL or whatever.
reasons to love “Candy Says” (The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground), even though, fuck, it’s 2013, can’t we shut up about them already? but there’s something kind of fun in just writing about them like any other rock band, setting aside either the “they’re revolutionary!!” or “they suck, overrated” tropes that are so well-worn. i think i’m actually stealing this conceit from C Klosterman who did this with the Beatles but fuck…most of what he says.
i. i know it’s very popular in cultural studies and its non-institutional children (looking at you, rest of Tumblr*) to see “body positivity” in everything Rihanna and Beyoncé touch. and i love their music and i think there’s a lot of truth to that. that said, there is not near as much music about or attention paid to music about the messy reality, the flipside of body-positivity, the reason we need more of it, namely how much it fucking sucks to “hate your body and all that it requires in the world”.
ii. the sly quoting of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” which is so straight-faced that it is neither mocking nor cloying — probably Lou Reed just drawing from the depths of his subconscious. although the juxtaposition of the absurd optimism of that song and the dour tone of this one is probably meant as some kind of dark humor.
iii. i know it’s like a very 60s thing and kind of played out but i’m still taken with songs that can pull of the “unremittingly despairing lyrical content” and “gorgeous music” mesh
*though i’m not a CultStud student, i am the student of a certain prominent figure (not bragging, just saying — i’m not totally allergic to it as a concept.) and i can barely stand the stuff, he’s just a sharp dude. Peter Frase nailed it, speaking specifically of cultural studies about 90s-era TV, but which characterizes too much of it more generally:
The reality behind this seasonally professed lack of culture is the old obscurantist myth according to which ideas are noxious if they are not controlled by ‘common sense’ and ‘feeling’: Knowledge is Evil, they both grew on the same tree. Culture is allowed on condition that it periodically proclaims the vanity of its ends and the limits of its power (see also on this subject the ideas of Mr Graham Greene on psychologists and psychiatrists); ideally, culture should be nothing but a sweet rhetorical effusion, an art of using words to bear witness to a transient moistening of the soul.
Yet this old romantic couple, the heart and the head, has no reality except in an imagery of vaguely Gnostic origin, in these opiate-like philosophies which have always, in the end, constituted the mainstay of strong regimes, and in which one gets rid of intellectuals by telling them to run along and get on with the emotions and the ineffable. In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism (for as it happens, it is these two philosophies particularly that one confesses to be unable to understand) is to elevate one’s blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: ‘I don’t understand, therefore you are idiots.’
But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn’t it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while ‘common sense’ and ‘feeling’ understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don’t explain philosophers, but they explain you. You don’t want to understand the play by Lefebvre the Marxist, but you can be sure that Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in culture) the delightfully ‘harmless’ confession you make of it.
"— Roland Barthes in Mythologies, addressing the curious and noxious phenomenon of anti-intellectual intellectuals (you could update a few of the terms here and come up with a pretty great proto- critique of poptimism.)
Thatcher was a woman. How wonderful; it was a woman that broke the glass ceiling on drowning the poor and toasting the rich before slamming the hatch shut on any other grocers’ daughters trying to “have it all.” It’s as much a comfort to her many victims as Obama’s skin color is to the latest Yemenis roasted by his drones, or as meaningful as the sexual orientation of our infantrymen to the Afghans they brutalize. Never before has a broader array of humanity been more contaminated by the power of nightmares.
“Iron Lady?” The striking miners at Orgreave made their own stainless steel, battling for something more than “modernization” and profit margins. “This lady’s not for turning?” Don’t make me laugh. Ten Irish martyrs starved themselves to death in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh rather than wear the prison uniforms of Margaret Thatcher’s government. A scant four years after Bobby Sands had reenergized the IRA, Margaret had turned into a moderate – signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, her tail tucked between her legs. “The Leaderene?” Sure. Tell that to the African National Congress’s Pallo Jordan:
“In the end I sat with her in her office with Nelson Mandela in 1991. She knew she had no choice. Although she called us a terrorist organization, she had to shake hands with a terrorist and sit down with a terrorist. So who won?”
I’ll concede nothing to this warthog from Hell – not her “accomplishments,” borne off the impoverishment of working women who won’t get a ceremonial funeral, not her “determination” in propping up Pinochet’s sultanate of rape rooms and mass murder, nor her “fortitude” in shaking whiphands with every apartheid premier she could drag in front of a camera. Margaret Thatcher, always sure of herself, never in doubt, can exit this world sure of the one great achievement I will grant: she was instrumental in making the world a much worse place.
Of course, to concede her the transformative, near-omnipotent power given in all her fawning obituaries misses the point. Thatcher was merely, as Byron wrote of the similarly grotesque Castlereagh,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed,
And offer poison long already mixed.
Thatcher did not exist in a vacuum. She won elections. Enough Britons supported her, the same way enough Americans supported Reagan, Clinton and Bush in their effort to turn our economy into a casino. She bugged the cars of labor leaders and sank the Belgrano and shoved her own soldiers into the Northern Irish meat grinder – she kept winning, only felled when a turncoat toppled her.
But she was praised, supported, by a disgusting class of nouveau riche, bottoming out in the City of London and on Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street, combinations of genetic mistakes reconfiguring themselves into a ruling elite. And there were not enough Tony Benns or Glenda Jacksons or Arthur Scargills or Diana Goulds to stop not just her, but the rotten impulses she spoke to in the human heart. Thatcherism was not just the moral depravity of one person; it was a social failure. More, more, more. This was the depth of her deranged philosophy.
How moving it was to see all walks of political life unite to condemn those unseemly, spontaneous celebrations that spread like prairie fire across the U.K. the moment Van Helsing signed the death certificate. What will be said of this class of politicians when they die – their legacies those of the Thatcherite, which is to say, economic terrorism, amorality, and war?
Oh well. There is no Hell for them to go to, only the Hell she left behind. But it can at least comfort us to know that while the tumor she called her heart only stopped beating this week, her brain had deteriorated into sponge cake years ago. She’ll get no cosmic judgment, no eternal punishment, and so it is that the revelation that her “blotter paper” mind had congealed into glue must suffice.
I suppose her heinous children were trying to appeal to the public’s sympathy, disclosing that Maggie kept forgetting her husband was dead, how she’d bawl and gnash her teeth with each retelling, as if it was the first she’d heard of the news.
And it’s a heartwarming story. Maggie Thatcher usually forgot easily about the people she killed. So nice to hear she spent her retirement repeating the stages of grief enough times for all her victims.
"— a totally pitiless and totally right-on obit of Thatcher in American Circus
“i haven’t been able to reach you”
— Emile Cioran, “An Encounter with the Void”. quite apt.
—
Posted this before as an add-on to something but this is a really great takedown of bullshit existentialism/individualism/capital-i Idealism
(Friedrich Engels, Chapter IX “Morality and Law: Freedom and Necessity”, Anti-Dühring, 1878)
As a jealous person, I’m interested in building love and trust with people that does not hinge on sexual exclusivity, because part of my jealousy, and maybe part of the jealously implied in the cultural drama repeatedly portrayed on TV of “The Other Woman,” “The Affair” and the heartcrushing trust-violating meaning placed on sex outside a relationship, is that desire always exceeds any container—and we all know that from experiencing our own desire. No matter how much we love and want and adore and are hot for our partners, we also experience desire outside that dyad, and the myth of romance (one person out there for each of us, find them, love them, buy things with them and you’ll be happy forever), which we’re all drilled with from birth ’til death, makes this knowledge terribly threatening. So the point, for me, becomes recognizing that commitment and love and interest in someone else’s well being does not necessarily include a deadening of all sexual desire for other people, or trying to unlearn the belief that it does. The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth.
And yet, despite everything I’ve expressed here, I also have serious concerns about the push for polyamory amongst my friends. Sometimes I see it emerging as a new sexual norm, and a basis for judgment and coercion. In some circles I’m in, it has become the only “radical” way to be sexual. Those who partner monogamously, or who just don’t get it on a lot, are judged. I also see, perhaps more frequently, the poly norm causing people to harshly judge themselves when feelings of jealousy come up. Having any feelings at all, and especially admitting them, is so discouraged in our culture. We are encouraged to be alienated from ourselves and others, cure ourselves of bad feelings through medication and “retail therapy,” and made to expect that perfection and total happiness are the norm while anything other than that is some kind of personal failure or chemical imbalance. This results in a lot of repressed feelings. Many people in the communities I’m in, especially people who have lived through sexual violence and people raised as women in our rape culture, have a hard enough time identifying for ourselves what is okay with us when it comes to sex—what we want, what is a violation, what our real feelings are—and feeling entitled to express them. We certainly don’t need more messages that tell us that our feelings related to sex and safety are wrong.
I’ve been disturbed to see dynamics emerge where people create the new poly norm and then hate themselves if they cannot live up to it. If they are not perfect at being non-jealous, non-threatened, and totally delighted by their partners’ exploits immediately then they have somehow failed. I have felt this way myself. Frustrated at how my intellect can embrace this approach to sex and yet my emotional reaction is sometimes enormous and undeniably negative. At times, this has become a new unachievable perfection I use to torture myself, embarrassed even to admit to friends how awful I feel when overcome by jealousy, and becoming increasingly distant from partners as I try to hide these shameful and overwhelming feelings.
This doesn’t seem like the radical and revolutionary practice I had hoped for. In fact, it feels all too familiar, like the other traumas of growing up under capitalism—alienation from myself and others, constant insecurity and distrust and fear, self-hatred and doubt and inadequacy. I do not have a resolution for this dilemma. I only have hopes, for myself and others, and lots of questions. How do I recognize the inadequacy of the romance myth while acknowledging its deep roots in my emotional life? How do I balance my intellectual understandings with my deep-seated emotional habits/expectations? It seems like the best answer to all of this is to move forward as we do in the rest of our activism, carefully and slowly, based on our clearest principles, with trust and a willingness to make mistakes. The difficulty of having open relationships should not be a reason not to try it, but it should be a reason not to create new punishing norms in our communities or in our own minds. We’ve done difficult things before. We struggle with internalized oppressions, we chose to live our lives in ways that our families often tell us are impossible, idealistic or dangerous, and we get joy from creatively resisting the limits of our culture and political system that are both external and part of our own minds.
One thing I have figured out for myself in the past few years is that this is a pretty slow process for me. Whenever I’ve tried to dive into polyamory with various partners fast, I’ve felt terrible and often ended up losing my ability to be with them because of how awful I’ve felt about my own jealousy. I hate the feeling of having a double standard and being a monster. So now I’m trying to figure out how to have relationships that are not based on sexual exclusivity, but also where I can be comfortable admitting what is going on for me and not pushing myself to be somewhere I’m not—going slow enough to figure out what works and what doesn’t. It’s not easy and it’s still pretty mysterious to me.
Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it’s the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don’t like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it’s just a really excellent pastime.
I do not have a prescription for successful relationships, and I don’t think anyone should. The goal of most of my work is to remove coercive mechanisms that force people to comply with heteronormative gender and family norms. People often get confused and think that me and other trans activists are trying to erase gender and make everyone be androgynous. In fact, that sounds a little boring to me. What want to see is a world in which people do not have to be criminalized, or cast out of their family, or cut off welfare, or sexually harassed at school, or subjected to involuntary mental health care, or prevented from getting housing because they organize their gender, desire, or family structure in a way that offends a norm. I hope we can build that vision by practicing it in our own queer and activist communities and in our approaches to ourselves. Let’s be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.
"—
Dean Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters”, Make
Valentine’s reading as suggested by Verso’s Twitter feed. This rings really true for those among us who have wanted polyamory/non-monogamy to work and ended up psychically disintegrated by those attempts. I don’t like getting too personal on here but at the very least, my suggestion (as influence by a dictum my friend Eric came up with): don’t try non-monogamy with people who don’t have a critique of capitalism, “choice feminism”, etc. Especially stay the hell away from people who found their desire for polyamory in some kind of dodgy biological determinism (e.g. this facepalm-inducing wave of people insisting that because certain hunter-gatherer, for lack of a better term, societies had onewoman-multiplemen marriages this has something to do with the current attempts to break down monogamy. little more than a horribly ironic recapitulation of the same old Judeo-Christian “fall of man” story, except appropriated for different ends.) Anyways, take a look if you’ve never seen it.
I think the thing that I always forget is that this shit is supposed to be fun and to make you happy and that if it’s not doing that, it’s not right for you. Now, there’s still an argument to be made that if you can overcome certain problems in the present (jealousy, insecurity, etc.) it can lead to you being happier in the long-run. I think the problem is that there’s no boot camp for this shit. We are, in the words of Martin Heidegger (cribbing from Marx, ironically enough), always-already in the world. My insecurity is a function of being raised from an early age to have unhealthy eating habits and consequently being obese until the first couple years of high school, of having a poorly-understood chronic illness, of being unsure how that illness will affect my job-market capabilities, of not-knowing whether throwing myself into the study of the history of political economy and labor organizing will do anything but make employers wary when they google my name. If I have learned anything approaching generally applicable life truths, it’s that there has to be some balance between working for the present and working for the future. I dunno yall. “We are our only saviors” in the words of the Hold Steady. Something like that
been lookin something like this for a while. source at LibCom (for something as DIY and “internet Left” as them, they sure are a pretty great resource, hard to think of many things that are as up-to-speed on both practical and theoretical issues.)
“policing the crisis”, indeed. more on fuck the LAPD from Mike Davis
picture source:
If you 6ft, black, bald, in L.A. right now the hunt for Dorner is real. #ChrisDornertwitter.com/itsmefranswa/s…
— francois(@itsmefranswa) February 11, 2013
just listened to an interview Doug Henwood did with Max Blumenthal about the rise of the Christian Right within the Republican Party and I’m really confused why people still think that analyzing social movements in terms of individual and transhistorical psychological motivations (e.g. “some people just can’t deal with freedom”) is still like a good way of analyzing things. not that I don’t generally like Blumenthal but it just does not suffice as analysis for a long list of reasons. part of the funny thing about the interview is that Henwood at one point kind of goads Blumenthal into saying that his thesis is, in fact, the same thesis that the Bush administration gave about al-Qaeda, viz. “they hate our freedoms.” and then people get bogged down in whether that’s true or not, missing the larger point which is that, even if it were true, it’s not a sufficient explanation because conservative religious traditions have prevailed throughout human history and yet also risen, fallen, had more or less appeal, and those things have to be explained in their historical specificity and that can’t involve some kind of general stipulations about “human nature.”
It’s interesting, too, that Blumenthal explicitly cites Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom as an inspiration for the book’s methodology (assessing the psychological foundations of conservative reactions.) Stephen Eric Bronner, a critical but sympathetic appraiser of the Frankfurt School, takes Adorno/Horkheimer to task for their analysis of the rise of Nazism, claiming that it was an essential result of the Enlightenment’s tendency towards instrumental rationality. That is, indeed, a kind of crank thesis and I’ll append Bronner’s focused/brilliant deconstruction of that from a more historical materialist oriented POV. Fromm gets more of a free pass and I find Bronner’s argument in his favor somewhat compelling but I’m also not sure how penetrating Fromm’s critique of “metapsychology” in favor of “materialist psychology” is if people continue to use him in the ways that he has been used (and FWIW, though Wikipedia is obviously no authoritative source, it describes EFF as, in part, an explication of Fromm’s views on human nature so there’s clearly at least some substantial confusion about Fromm’s views on essentialism, whether he endorsed it or not.) I think Bronner’s critique of Adorno/Horkheimer’s idealist explanation of the rise of fascism could apply just as well, if you changed up the words a bit, to psychological explanations a la Fromm or Wilhelm Reich (admittedly a less serious thinker than Fromm, at least in his later Orgone days.) Anyway, here it is, pp 58-61:
Dialectic of Enlightenment never treats the seminal political
thinkers. There is hardly a word about John Locke, Gotthold
Enlightened illusions
59
Lessing, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, or Tom Paine. The book’s
authors looked farther. Their concern was with the Marquis de
Sade, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Not one of them
identifi ed either with Enlightenment political principles or the
organizations dedicated to realizing them. They were anti-liberal,
anti-socialist, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, anti-rationalist
and anti-historical.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of scientifi c rationality is also
politically misleading. Fascists were never infatuated with
scientifi c rationality or universal categories. They instead made
ideological use of notions like “Jewish physics” or “Italian
mathematics.” Most positivist and neo-positivist exponents of
scientifi c rationality in the twentieth century were liberals like
Karl Popper; some were social democrats like Rudolf Carnap; and
a few like Hans Reichenbach were even once members of the
ultra-Left. Norberto Bobbio, the great socialist thinker and
activist, was surely correct when he noted that contempt for
positivism (not its embrace) was a hallmark of fascism.
None of this, apparently, was relevant. Horkheimer and Adorno
were more interested in the dialectical process that works behind
the conscious intentions of individuals and groups. But their
dialectic lacked historical specifi cation. They never inquired into
the moments of political decision that produced the new
barbarism. Dialectic of Enlightenment has nothing to say about
the Dreyfus Affair, the Russian Revolution, the fascist March on
Rome, or the Nazi triumph. The organizational and ideological
confl icts remain as invisible as the personalities involved. The
connection between totalitarianism and modernity—with the
Enlightenment as its source and instrumental rationality as its
medium—simply doesn’t wash.
It remains unclear why the most advanced capitalist nations like
the United States and England never experienced a genuine
fascist threat while far less advanced nations, like Italy and
Critical Theory
60
Romania, succumbed to the forces of reaction. It is also unclear
why Japan never experienced the Enlightenment. Nor is there a
discussion of totalitarianism from the Left. What occurred in the
Soviet Union was a product not of modernity but the lack of it:
Gramsci actually considered the Bolshevik revolution “a
revolution against Das Kapital ” while Leon Trotsky and Lenin
maintained that the communist triumph was possible only
because Imperial Russia was “the weakest link in the capitalist
chain.”
Orthodox Marxists among the social democratic leadership—not
surprisingly—were clearer about all this than the far more
philosophically sophisticated members of the Frankfurt School.
Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg not only predicted the
emergence of a terror apparatus in the Soviet Union as early as
1918, but analyzed it as the product of economic underdevelopment.
Other scholars would note that in Germany the bourgeoisie had not
yet ideologically come to terms with feudalism when fear of the
proletariat led to its alignment with the reaction.
European fascism was not the product of some prefabricated
philosophical dialectic but rather the self-conscious ideological
response to liberalism and social democracy. Its mass base
everywhere lay primarily in pre-capitalist classes—the peasantry,
the underclass, and the petite-bourgeoisie—whose existential and
material interests seemed threatened by the capitalist production
process and its two dominant classes: the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. Classes identifi ed with modernity mostly supported
political parties embracing a continental form of liberalism or a
social democratic party still formally embracing orthodox Marxism
and its communist rival. All these parties except the communists
were supporters of the Weimar Republic, and all were enemies of
the Nazis who made war on them in word and deed.
Dialectic of Enlightenment casts these real historical confl icts into
a metaphysical fog. Its famous interpretation of Odysseus, whose
Enlightened illusions
61
denial of his identity becomes the only way for him to survive his
exile, offers a case in point. “The sacrifi ce of consciousness is
carried out according to its own categories, rationally.” There is no
turning back. Instrumental reason is necessary to survive and the
forms in which we survive generate our destruction.
Enlightenment is the story of a dynamic whose reifying effects
culminate in the number tattooed on the arm of a concentration
camp inmate. There is an extraordinary sweep to this provocative
argument. But it is predicated on false concreteness and
misplaced causality. Instrumental reason did not bring about
Nazism or even destroy the ability of individuals to make
normative judgments. The Nazi victory was rather the product of
a clash between real movements whose members were quite
capable of making diverse judgments concerning both their
interests and their values.
Fascism was never a foregone conclusion just as it was never
simply a function of modernity. Real movements and real
organizations, real traditions and real ideas, were in confl ict. To
ignore them is to embrace the reifi cation of thinking that the
Frankfurt School nominally sought to oppose. What emerges
from Dialectic of Enlightenment is an unyielding process that
excludes more than it illuminates—precisely because it is neither
determinate in its historical claims nor precise in its political
judgments. The desire to unify qualitatively different phenomena
under a single rubric could only produce historical disorientation
and political confusion. Given his own association with
Stalinism, Lukács may not have been one to point fi ngers.
Nevertheless, there is something legitimate about his quip that
the Frankfurt School watched the descent into barbarism from
its “grand hotel abyss.”
Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
Why is Marx’s theory of value important?
It is important because Marx’s theory of value is the /foundation/ of his attempt to understand capitalism in a way that is politically useful to socialists. It is not some small and dispensable part of Marx’s investigation of capital; it constitutes the basis on which that investigation takes place. if we decide to reject that theory, we are at the same time rejection precisely those tools of analysis which are Marx’s distinctive contribution to socialist o thought on the workings of capital. The debate about Marx’s value theory is, in fact, a debate about the appropriate method of analysis, about the validity of the concepts which are specific to, and constitute the method of, historical materialism. The outcome of this debate therefore has implications far beyond the way in which we understand prices and profit in the capitalist economy. it has implications for the question of how we should carry out our empirical investigations today of the international restructuring of capital accumulation; of new forms of class struggle, of the capitalist state; and of the possibilities for socialism.
"—
Diane Elson, i, “Introduction.” Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, ed. Diane Elson, CSE Books. London 1979.
a bit from my thesis research. i’ve much more good stuff but it takes a while to type up since most of this stuff is in scanned PDF form. but i thought this was worth typing up as a sort of manifesto of why this shit matters.
I’m unconvinced on the merits of Das Racist’s output in toto but “sick of arguing with white dudes on the internet” is the snappiest rephrasing of the 11th thesis on Feurbach since the Old Moor himself
it’s a common intra-left (usually from the hard/socialist aimed at the center or anarchist) critique that the value of “symbolic victories” is far less than people make it out to be. and while I see the value of that critique, I don’t think it pays enough attention to the discursive and communicative aspects of politics.
that said, symbolic victories can sometimes come at a real cost that outweighs whatever gains are made in the “Imaginary” realm of politics, to borrow a phrase from Étienne Balibar. i have a feeling that the lifting of the ban on women-in-combat in the US is one such case. and it’s why — unlike in the case of DADT’s repeal or, say, the healthcare bill — I don’t think I can even express qualified support for a halfway “reformist measure.” and that’s because it’s not even a reformist measure but a means of increasing the (hu)manpower of a military that has a history of doing terrible things and sacrificing its own citizens in unjust and unnecessary war (although, to be fair, this inevitably suggests the question: when is war ever “necessary”?) there is but one argument even worth responding to, which is the argument about economic equity and a need to increase opportunities for women. as a provisional point, this is fair but once you move beyond the terrain of the immediately feasible options for more just economic policy, this falls apart. there’s no reason that we can’t spend that same money on public job creation. and so I can’t see any reason to even give begrudging support for this.
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy…
tonight i saw eat skull fronted by a former member of the hospitals, who took part in recording “hairdryer peace” and tomorrow i’m seeing wolf eyes...
I have a seven hour shift tomorrow with a guy who only listens to jam bands and tells me to smile all the time. Fuck.
Faculty and graduate students got together yesterday at the “University Beyond Crisis”...
you don’t go homo or bi or trans to hell
the expression is “going straight to hell”
wake up america
I made almost 300 beats today
