text:
Quotes from Joe Biden, interviewed by Chris Cuomo on CNN. By common acclamation, this was better than his debate performance.
"I even went so far in the middle of that busing controversy was saying I'd use helicopters if that was necessary to make the point and really got in a town meeting that got very hot. But what the issue is now is for example -- and it was then, voluntary busing, we supported it."
"The third one is do you have an administration through their nonelected officials, Department of Housing decide every school should be equally balanced across the board. That's a different issue." (Neither the "Department of Housing" nor, as he claimed in the debate, the then-nonexistent Department of Education, was responsible for overseeing school busing.)
"I don't -- anyway, I -- but here's the deal, what I do know, and this is good and the bad news, the American people think they know me and they know me."
"Since that occurred, I had the most sought after endorsement for the mayor of Atlanta, a black woman who's a great leader, Mayor Bottoms endorsed me."
"I don't believe there's anybody out there who believes that I have anything other than a keen and consistent interest in making sure every child -- these are all our children."
"This guy is moving to form hate to split, that's the only way he can sustain himself."
"No more NATO. Look, I went to the conference that we have, it's called the (inaudible) conference, used to be. The first speech stood up the chancellor, the former chancellor of Germany stands up, she says we have to go in alone." [Merkel is still chancellor.]
"Why did we set up NATO, Chris? So no one nation could abuse the power in the region in Europe, it would suck us in, in a way they did in World War I and World War II. It's being crushed."
"Look, I come out of the arms control era. Guess what, there's two ways you do this. You work or you defend."
"And that's the reason why you have security, is because we've allowed stability in the region. They get it. But what they're doing now is we're not dealing with China's problem for us. China's problem is they're stealing intellectual secrets."
"They're doing a whole lot of things that make no sense for us to stand still."
"In terms of the economy, Chris, I've been proposing for a long time and look -- I know I'm middle class Joe, I get that part. The middle class built this country. You didn't have Wall Street build this country, how did they do that? You gave people a chance."
"How can you have dignity unless you can live in a neighborhood that's not fouled by the environment and what's going on?"
"And the big idea on education, on health care, on dealing with the environment, I love how, you know, all of a sudden, I wish I had been labeled as moderate when I was running in Delaware back in the days where it was --"
"But the question is, whose issues are best prepared in their wheel house, they've demonstrated they can deal with them?"
"The president when he delegated authority to me from the moonshot to Ukraine, he gave me the authority to make this because I knew where he was."
"A woman came up to me I guess it was, I don't know, a month ago, I guess, I was in New Hampshire, said why shouldn't I vote for a woman? And I said you should. If you think that person is most qualified at the moment, right now, to deal -- I'm not suggesting you vote for a woman."
crispy on July 05, 2019 at 02:58 PM in idiocy, politics | Permalink | Comments (1)
Crispin the YouTube Pundit on the second debate and why Joe Biden should dissipate.
crispy on June 28, 2019 at 06:48 AM in op-ed, politics | Permalink | Comments (1)
My astonishing YouTube mansplanation of last night's debate.
crispy on June 27, 2019 at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Joe Biden, Rattletrap
The video version.
crispy on June 26, 2019 at 05:03 PM in jurisprudence, op-ed, politics, sucking issue | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm going to read/footnote my column for SpliceToday every week on YouTube. I might go back and grab some of my favorites from the last few years as well.
crispy on June 26, 2019 at 05:13 AM in freedom, jive, op-ed | Permalink | Comments (0)
How Thoreau Became a Radical
[piece I couldn't sell]
The Making of a Radical: Nathaniel Rogers and Henry David Thoreau
Crispin Sartwell
When it comes to describing the influences that shaped Henry David Thoreau's prose and his politics as he came to maturity in the 1840s, few sources are usually mentioned beyond his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Virginia Woolf, casually manifesting herself in the drawing room at the Old Manse, 1840, reported that "If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began." The two are obviously close stylistically and philosophically; however, their journals make it evident that despite Thoreau being the younger by fourteen years, the influence ran both ways. If Emerson dragged Thoreau through Carlyle and Coleridge, Thoreau hauled Emerson back into the terrain around Concord, Massachusetts; he brought American Transcendentalism down to earth. He had a persistently radicalizing effect on Emerson's politics as well. In 1838 Emerson described the 20-year-old Thoreau, who soon became a constant presence in his journals, as "spiced throughout with rebellion."
Thoreau's own politics, in turn, were affected by some of the most deeply subversive American political writers, speakers, and thinkers of his time, or indeed of any time, such as the pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott, the radical abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, and - perhaps most decisively - Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, the subject of an early essay by Thoreau in The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical edited by Margaret Fuller.
Rogers was an incomparably radical abolitionist newspaper editor from Concord, New Hampshire, about 60 miles to the north of Concord, Massachusetts and connected to it by the Merrimack River. Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, describes a journey between the towns, "uniting Concord and Concord," though the two men, it seems, never met. Rogers himself has not appeared in book form since a small collection of his newspaper writings was published in New Hampshire in 1849, three years after his death; he persists now only in his influence on Thoreau, whose style, themes, and political orientation he demonstrably affected.
All of these figures had a specific brand of "post-Protestant" politics: they were radical individualists, abolitionists, feminists, anti-racists, and anti-statists. Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" crystallizes not only his own political positions, but those of a large coalition of American reformers in the period from 1830 to 1860. And though this variety of American radicalism emerged contemporaneously with European leftism of the sort we might associate with Proudhon and Marx and is just as extreme in its criticism of contemporary society, the American developments are also quite distinct.
A variety of factors accounts for the neglect of Rogers, though writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Thomas Wentworth Higginson paid tribute to him later in the century. Southern New Hampshire, despite its proximity to Boston, was provincial, and Rogers and his newspaper, The Herald of Freedom, were proudly and insistently local. (Even when he emerged from the hills late in his life, it was to write a column for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune in the persona of "The Old Man of the Mountain," a natural rock face in New Hampshire's White Mountains that finally collapsed in 2003.) Almost all of Rogers' writings took the form of short essays and news items written on extremely tight deadlines; he never completed or even contemplated a book, and rarely polished his newspaper writings into longer lectures or essays of the sort that made Emerson's reputation, and eventually Thoreau's. And Rogers was so very clear about his radical politics that many would have dismissed him as ridiculous or dangerous. Instead, they by and large succeeded in ignoring him.
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers was born in 1794 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, descended (according to a biographical sketch by his friend John Pierpont) from the "Protestant martyr" John Rogers, burned at the stake in 1555 at Smithfield in the reign of Bloody Mary. He was educated at Dartmouth and left a successful law practice to edit The Herald of Freedom and devote himself full time to the cause of immediate abolition. He defined the sort of country he envisioned as "an antislavery society" in which no person could coerce another and in which all people - African-Americans, Indians, women, and industrial workers, among others - were equally free.
Rogers associated close or ecstatic observation of the natural world with his political positions, one of Thoreau's most persistent rhetorical strategies and sources of insight. As Thoreau puts it, Rogers "looks out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics." Thoreau's own authorship returns intermittently to politics throughout (much more frequently and emphatically than Emerson's, for example), and what he says here of Rogers is a good characterization of the stance Thoreau takes up in "Civil Disobedience," but also in A Week, "Walking," and elsewhere. Here, for example, is Rogers, in 1843, just as Thoreau was reading him.
Good farmers are learning that there is a better way to treat their cattle than by blows. The hostler of intelligence and kindness is ceasing to maul his noble horse. They are leaving off the practice of breaking steers and colts, for the reason that it is cruel: undeserved by the horse and unworthy of the employer, and because the whole horse or ox is better than the broken one. Political action is unfit even for brute animals. Is it fitter for man? Is humanity less susceptible of moral improvement than what we call brutality? A politician is but a man driver, a human teamster. His business is to control men by the whip and the goad. His occupation would be unlawful and inexpedient toward even the cattle.
And here is Thoreau in "Walking," using the same metaphor as he launches into his praise of wildness: "Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. . . . I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society." The anti-authoritarian spirit that led Thoreau to say "I quietly declare war on the state," or "I was not born to be forced," or "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards," is fully present in strikingly similar terms in Rogers.
Every aspect of Rogers' politics, like Thoreau's and Mott's, for example, was driven by abolitionism. Such people regarded the ownership of people as a specific evil being perpetrated by their government and countrymen, but also as an image or essence of all evil. They concluded that since no person could own another, each person was the owner of herself. This insight drove the individualist feminism of Mott and Margaret Fuller and provided a vocabulary for demanding the liberation of all oppressed groups. Many of these figures were also absolute pacifists, and their anti-statism followed: they held that government rests on violence and that it amounts to a claim of ownership in people. "We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government," declared Garrison, a hero of Rogers and Thoreau both, and he proceeded to burn copies of the US Constitution.
Rogers is one of the few writers whose prose Thoreau praised without qualification, except to say that he wished he sometimes wrote at greater length. Indeed, Thoreau roundly abused many writers, and tempered his praise even for those he admired most, such as Carlyle; he had far less tendency toward hero or genius-worship than did Emerson. In the early 1840s, Thoreau's style - among the most distinctive and distinguished in American letters, of course - was still taking form, which is one reason his early essays are relatively little-read. As he develops, he finds a model in Rogers, and from that point his writing is at least as influenced by Rogers as by Emerson.
But to speak of his composition [Thoreau writes of Rogers]. It is a genuine yankee style, without fiction,--real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. . . . If perhaps [Rogers] had all the faults, he had more than the usual virtues of the radical. He loved his native soil, her hills and streams, like a Burns or a Scott. As he rode to an anti-slavery convention, he viewed the country with a poet's eye, and some of his letters written back to his editorial substitute contain as true and pleasing pictures of New England life and scenery as are anywhere to be found.
Rogers indeed produced a series of delightful, informal New England travelogues as he described his journeys to abolitionist events, and described as well some of the great abolitionist figures he met there, including Mott and Garrison, but also Frederick Douglass, for example. But even getting stuck at home could bring out a gentle and intense poetry. This is from his little piece "It Rains" (1845):
While I am writing, it is raining most magnificently and gloriously out doors. It absolutely roars, it comes down in such multitude and big drops. There has been but little rain, and our sandy region has got to looking dry and distressed. Every thing looks encouraged now. The grass darkens as it drinks it in, with a kind of delicate satisfaction. And the trees stand and take it as a cow does a carding. You can hardly see the people for the umbrellas, and the clouds look as though they had not done with us. The prospect for the Canterbury meeting looks lowery. Let it rain. All for the best. It is extraineous, but I could not help noticing the great rain and saying this word about it. I think the more mankind regard these beautiful doings in nature, the more they will regard each other, and love each other, and the less they will be inclined to enslave each other. . . . The rain is the great anti-slavery discourse. And I like to have it pour.
"When the reader has finished one of his paragraphs," wrote his friend Pierpont, "the last question he will ask himself will be 'Well, now, what does all that mean?'"
Rogers himself found models for his writing in works such as Cobbett's American Gardener, a beloved guide that went through many editions in the 19th century (and one in the 21st):
Cobbett's Gardener is full of short, every day words which people can understand as readily as they can tell an onion stalk or a cabbage plant. You will find whole lines of them uninterrupted, every one of them as full of meaning as it can hold: the beautiful, strong, old Saxon, the talk-words, words for use and not for show. . . . A young collegian should read it twice a day, till he gets well of his pedantry. Cobbett will cure him if any body can.
By the end of his life, Rogers' politics had become truly extreme, and he was opposed not only to government and the church, but to any form of organization that displayed any form of hierarchy whatever. Many radical abolitionists opposed participation in politics, even voting, on the grounds that government rested on violence. Rogers had gone even further by the mid 1840s, and was described in the parlance of the times not only as an 'infidel,' but as an 'ultraist,' a 'come-outer,' and a 'no-organizationist.' He wound up opposing the existence even of societies dedicated to ending slavery.
On the other hand, Rogers' purity and ferocity are exactly what impressed Thoreau and Emerson. As is appropriate for a newspaper editor, he reserved some of his strongest words for the advocacy of free speech, his own and that of his allies being constantly under threat by pro-slavery politicians and mobs. The abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, for example, was murdered in a pro-slavery riot in 1837, and Garrison had been grabbed from the office of his newspaper in 1835, paraded through the streets of Boston and threatened with lynching. Anti-slavery discourse was explicitly banned in many parts of the country.
The human voice is free of course [wrote Rogers]. It is naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase 'freedom of God' than by such expressions as 'liberty of speech.' . . . Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not to use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust the self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.
Rogers read the initial version of Thoreau's "Herald of Freedom" in the April 1844 issue of The Dial and republished it, while apologizing for the immodesty of doing so (Thoreau added to it, in manuscript, after Rogers' death two years later; the longer version was published after Thoreau's own death). He was pleasantly bewildered by the praise coming from an unknown person in a distinguished periodical, and refers to him as "Henry D. Thoreau, probably a German," which is either an odd confusion or a lame joke. But Rogers, already struggling with the illness that ended his life two years later, praises Thoreau's prose right back, in similar terms, calling the review "elegantly and ably written," characterizing it as "written so beautifully and freshly," and remarking on "the grace and beauty of the composition."
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College.
crispy on June 25, 2019 at 05:38 AM in america, anarchy now, animal rights, books, freedom, nathaniel rogers, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes on April 25, 2019 at 06:19 PM in america, bad qualifications, beautiful things, Current Affairs, cynicism, idiocy, resistance | Permalink | Comments (0)
Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes on April 25, 2019 at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
First shot at using the new Typepad while in another life, using the new Word Press. Whatever happened to making improvements in such a way as to do minimal disruption? Oh yeah, that's right...like Crispin's wrinkled scrotum, best forgotten...
Crispin's recent article on The Philosophy of Gerontology for Middle-Aged Men was not exactly an eye opener...it was something that makes you, as you approach true senior citizen status want to soak your head in bleach so as never to see or smell your own age again, or anyone else's. That said, it's great that he's already worried -- being past the 65 year benchmark already, all I can say is it doesn't get better.
I have staked out base jumping and bear hunting Kodiak Bears with .50 cal Israeli Desert Eagles for my response to diagnoses of Alzheimer's and/or Cancer. Or, ideally, base jumping onto Kodiak Island and then doing the hunting. It will either kill me kind of quickly or I'll be stuck trying to skin and dress and 1200 lb, 10 foot tall bear and packing it out of the wilderness...
wsj: Nothing the Russians or anyone else can do on social media can in itself delegitimize any election.
splicetoday: Male Aging Memoir, Short Version
"Spying' is not the wrong word. But even if it was...(investigate the investigation)
Resounding: The Kendalls (an appreciation of the father/daughter act's classic cheating songs)
guilty of whiteness
crispy on April 25, 2019 at 03:55 PM in me, op-ed, politics, race | Permalink | Comments (0)
My monographs or single-author books in reverse temporal order (sorry about the Amazonishness; if you object, I see why).
Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY)
How to Escape: Magic, Madness, Beauty, and Cynicism (SUNY)
Political Aesthetics (Cornell)
Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (SUNY)
Six Names of Beauty (Routledge)
Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives (SUNY)
End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (SUNY)
Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago)
Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (SUNY)
The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions (SUNY)
Now, I came into this thing with quite the sense of mission: I had to do this, rolling toward Entanglements. Like, I would do this for its own sake, whether it nabbed me a high-end academic career and a bunch of recognition or not. What I've found on the other side of my oeuvre, which might well be complete, is that the lack of recognition really makes me mental (I did have a sort of psychological/professional 'episode' right at the moment I finished Entanglements, the moment I finished my life project), or makes me feel like I wasted my energy, or that I should have stuck to journalism or something. I chew on it all the time and want to lash out; I am pretty bitter, somewhere underneath. And then the next layer: Is that why you were really doing this all along, because of that fantasy of a MacArthur and the title "major philosopher" and a job at Princeton? And if so, how in the world did you (i.e. me) delude yourself so entirely about your own motivations? And how does that real motivation and self-delusion compromise these books? And is it too late to get to someplace else? And how would I do that?
In a sense I did exactly what I set out to do: I realized my dream. But when I had, I saw that it was not actually my dream, or not without everybody expressing their adoration, or laboring to refute gigantical me. Like my life has been a success by the standard I gave myself explicitly, but it's a failure by the standard I actually had. Or in the back of my mind, I always pictured the confetti along with the ideas. That seems pitiful to me, but I can't seem to inch to the next phase. Somehow I don't think trying to generate a fantasy of posthumous recognition is going to do it, though I fantasize anyway that some grad student - soon to be a giant - finds Entanglements on a library shelf in 2070 and I get to be a philosophical Van Gogh. It's not doing me any good to try to convince myself; it's just more betrayal of what I took myself to be.
I mean, it's not entirely incomprehensible, and you can't change philosophy or flip it over, or set it right, if no one reads what you write. And then again, why haven't they, really? It occurs to me in the dead of an insomniac night, that I'm not nearly as good as I thought I was, that the mediocrity of my reception is a true index of the quality of my work. Man there are few darker thoughts available to me, as I experience them. Obviously, though, there could be factors other than sheer quality at work, or even just a series of unfortunate coincidences etc. I am often delighted and impressed with my own cleverness and wisdom as I read my own stuff; but then I would be. What is the proper gauge, for me, of the quality of my own work? This is a very hard thing to know. And can I really be that much at the mercy of an academic philosophy world that I also purport to despise? Who am I, then? Definitely not who I thought I was. Evidently, I'm status-obsessed, which is just gross.
Partly, I've been living this whole time in a fantasy of vengeance/vindication, when all those academic people who dissed or ditched me or tried to ignore me into silence or made my career as I understood it a mere series of insults or gauntlet of humiliations would be filled with shame and regret. Now they're mostly retired, anyway, at best. So again: is this who I wanted myself to be? Is this what I want to be the directing force of the positions I take and the arguments I give? Not at fucking all. But can I stop thinking about it or grinding axes in my head? Not at fucking all either, though if I keep it up long enough I start laughing grimly at the futility of myself and other people's power over my head.
The whole thing throws into question my vision of myself (I've been onstage this whole time, with no audience but an imagined one), and also sort of what I want to believe about human beings: like, I am swamped by the social in a way that I've used all sorts of figures and arguments to deny that I am, slave to a narrative in a way that I denied in these books that I was. It compromises the philosophy too, or looking at it in the most positive possible light, the philosophy expresses an aspiration rather than a reality, though it's always purporting to describe reality.
This part is difficult, but then again it is a beautiful Spring day out there; the fruit trees are coming into blossom. I really need to cultivate that attitude of gratitude and I try. I have a job. I have a beautiful lover. I live in a beautiful place. My kids are well. I'm not actually at war with anyone, even if I feel geared up. It's okay.
I set out to engage in self-promotion with all its urgency and futility, then started reflecting and/or emoting. PS You need to read Political Aesthetics, you doinks!
crispy on April 13, 2019 at 07:08 AM in books, me | Permalink | Comments (3)
recent splicetoday things:
apologizing for whiteness is not the worst idea
resounding: the bellamy brothers (first of a series, reaching back and re-appreciating)
mass shootings as a kind of nihilism (perhaps ideology and, like, social media, are not the problem)
go ahead and have babies if you want (prediction, in 30 years the world will still be beautiful)
how to write an executive order on free speech (a new title ix)
hunting the ultimate game (on campus and congress)
crispy on April 01, 2019 at 05:24 AM in freedom, Music, op-ed, race | Permalink | Comments (1)
The Age of the Imbecile...
O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie -- Don Henley, End of the Innocence, 1989
"I'd bet you've thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: "Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid."You're not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you're not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019
One of the tons of weightless, mass-less but still existent things that cross my field of vision daily is Medium. I like it, because it gives me access to a wide variety of interesting stuff. Kind of a Daily Kos/ Huffington Post for people who have a bit broader perspective. And one of the things I enjoy and learn from is the work of Umair Haque, who seems to be occupying an intellectual space not all that different from Kierkegaard's or Schumpeter or I don't know...Hunter S. Thompson.
I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.
Folks who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise.
I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...
So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Apropos, perhaps?
Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes on March 04, 2019 at 02:23 PM in abstractions, america, Current Affairs, disaster | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'll figure this thing out eventually
The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation
I've spent much of my career on this question of the various relations of representations and reality. It was the topic of my dissertation, which was an attack on the claim that reality is a product of or is constructed by means of or just is pictures or words, a position I associated with my supervisor, Rorty, and with his heroes, including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Dewey. The question of realism in representation (and an implicit argument that representations by and large derive from rather than create the antecedent reality) is everywhere in my work, including essays in End Of Story, How to Escape (actually drawn from the work on Entanglements, then in process), and elsewhere. It is central to my work on race in Act Like You Know and I work through the issues explicitly from many angles in Political Aesthetics. I was writing about it in my high school journals. I do not know why these questions so obsess me!
Some other treatments, from splicetoday:
Looks Like Me
King Meets Zuckerberg
PC Entertainment as Medieval Allegory
The Magical (really, magical) Power of Words
crispy on February 25, 2019 at 06:07 PM in political aesthetics: the discipline | Permalink | Comments (1)
[my pre-emptive apology for all this]
more on the gettysburg trustee situation and the sense of community that we have on campus these days.
Yes, I am absorbing slightly-veiled and not-at-all-veiled accusations of anti-semitism in the email, etc. Can I help you out with some rudimentary points? It is not sensible to ban certain symbols, or to respond to them as though they meant exactly the same thing in every context or in every presentation. So, you could present swastikas with an intention and in a context in which they express ecstatic love of National Socialism. Right. Or you could show a Nazi flag and then set it on fire, for example, or wipe your ass with it. You could be Leni Riefenstahl, trying to motivate agreement with your fiendish propaganda. Or you could be Charlie Chaplin or Mel Brooks, parodying or ridiculing these same symbols and the idiot-monsters who wield them. In the one case, the symbol means anti-semitism, among other things; in the other, the same symbols help create an anti-anti-semitic message.
Nor should we ban Riefenstahl's movies, obviously, or regard screening them as an anti-semitic act. Another potentially non-problematic or actively-good use of these symbols is in documentation. Like, say we were attempting to show the reality of the Holocaust. You would have to screen the whole symbol system too, and everyone does. Bits of Riefenstahl's propaganda films appear in almost every documentary about Nazism, and in every account of its history. You want to know what that Nuremberg rally looked like. You want to know how the Nazis wanted themselves to be understood. Where once they came to adore, now we come to revile. The images do not come pre-interpreted, and they do not come out radiating evil in virtue merely of their sheer shape or something; I really do think people are going straightforwardly supernaturally magical on this.
I just do not regard that swastika, in this context of a bunch of frat boys at a Hogan's Heroes party, as an anti-semitic expression at all. It's a completely different situation and hence meaning than the same symbols would have at a rally of the American Nazi Party, but also they don't actually look the same either. Many people, thinking about this, might be comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking as they freaked out so cruelly. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good.
Now, in order to be a member of community or institution x, you're saying not only that I must produce only the approved symbols in the approved order, but that I must accept a certain overall view about the relation of representations to reality: namely that representations (pictures, films, texts, symbols) are extremely potent reality-alterers. Otherwise I'm a bigot? Seems unlikely really. Now this is really a tough thing to demand of a philosophy prof: accepting a metaphysical system that contradicts the one I've spent the last 30 years building. Really, seriously, I spent 5 years arguing with Richard Rorty on this one. (True, I lost that argument pretty badly; now I'm ready for him though. Ah, too late.) At any rate, I am going to need a list of all the various doctrines that I am called upon to accept, an exhaustive enumeration of all the prohibited ideas, and so on. If there is one target of 'Entanglements: A System of Philosophy,' it is the representational theory of mind. Also I sort of think this world is a real concrete physical environment, not a flicker of images in the theater of the mind, or a narrative or linguistic construction. Sorry?
crispy on February 25, 2019 at 06:20 AM in education | Permalink | Comments (1)
MMA: philosophy vs physics
I do see signs that physics is coming to its senses, or sort of trying to scrutinize its own Hegelian Idealism critically. It doesn't really have the tools, though. Man it's been a long sad tale of bald logical contradictions and 'we're-living-in-an-hallucination' horseshit. A few links from my back-in-the-day attempts to bodyslam.
what's gone wrong with physics
so, so wrong
miserably, horribly wrong. wrong.
did you know that reality itself is the result of an idealized observer stipulated by physicists? (plus they think they proved that by experiment or something)
Stephen Hawking: prince of a guy, miserable philosotaster
The sad thing is that philosophers deferred to physicists as authorities through the whole 20th century, and let them get away with murder, really, even when the jive was uberblatant.
I think the principle of theory choice has been, not: what is the most modest or plausible conclusion we can draw from these particles going through these slits, but what will make outsiders go "that's so cool! that's so trippy!" They're really good at math, though.
crispy on February 25, 2019 at 05:09 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
Hogan's Heroes claims another victim
Me in the WSJ on the "resignation" of a trustee of Gettysburg College due to a yearbook pic of him at a Hogan's Heroes costume party at the college in 1980.
What it's like on campus: everyone is surreptitiously watching everyone else, hoping to catch each other in a lapse (while also rummaging all the yearbooks, old school newspapers, instagram feeds &c, looking for victims). When we fancy we have something, we turn on one another, snarling, and try to mobilize the college to extrude or permanently discredit one another. Students turn on students. Students turn on faculty. Faculty turn on students. Administrators turn on students. Faculty turn on faculty. [I will link or describe all these sorts of cases if you like.] And, unbelievably, presidents turn on trustees, driven to that point by the general snarling. Also the things they're catching people doing are, in many cases, insanely trivial, and the theory underlying the whole thing about the relation of representation to reality is baldly ridiculous. Look, obviously all of this is incompatible with these institutions' stated purposes. The average college campus right now is just precisely the opposite of a community.
Believe it or not, I take myself to be telling people to come together, and back to the basic institutional mission.
I like to imagine what the discussion has been like about the situation at the development office at Gettysburg, and comparable institutions, as they contemplate handing money back for no reason at all. Ringring: "I'd like to endow your new building, but if I do you'll mobilize the whole campus to rummage through every snapshot of me ever taken, pitching me eventually into the dunk tank/septic system. Going with Doctors Without Borders this year."
'Hogan's Heroes' ridiculed the Nazis. To do that, it needed to depict Nazis. I'm thinking that #gettysburgcollege might well have a literature professor or two who could run the students and admin through the rudiments of textual interpretation. Punching Nazis was sort of popular a couple of years ago. And since 1930, ridiculing and parodying them has been a central dimension of attack. Now, evidently, ridiculing and parodying Nazis is verboten, as it were: it's anti-semitic. The approach is puzzling.
Let's say that many people at GC are having thoughts along these lines, and not only in Development. Can they express them? If you were an untenured prof, would you express your reservations? (Unfortunately, timidity does not wear off with tenure.) What would happen to you as a student if you objected to this whole approach strongly? What would people call you? Now, you are creating an atmosphere where everyone pretends to agree. Look around you. I say you don't know whether any of these people agree with you or not, no matter how vociferously they may be nodding along. Meanwhile, the only means you have to address things like this is to provide 'opportunities' for frank, honest, open dialogue. Are you sure you're not just trying to lure people into a misstatement or inadvertent self-revelation, so you can gasp? I might not be attending.
['The sign of the Double Cross']
I'm a bit concerned that y'all aren't fighting oppression or injustice at all, just pictures of it. Quite the waste of energy.
The offending image is very much in the same genre as those above, I feel. Many people, thinking about this, are comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good. Like, why am I having to point this out?
[unpaywalled]
crispy on February 23, 2019 at 12:55 PM in education, freedom | Permalink | Comments (1)
Self-Reliance, Servility, and Mental Health
By Crispin Sartwell
Ralph Waldo Emerson's incandescent essay "Self-Reliance" of 1841 has long been regarded as a fundamental statement of American values, a manifesto picking up where the Declaration of Independence left off. Perhaps you've heard some of the famous bits: "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." "The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of death, and afraid of each other." According to the explicit guidelines of the American Psychological Association, however, the values expressed in "Self-Reliance" are obsolete and pathological.
"Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct," writes an APA committee, in a prose style that enacts its own point and which stands in opposition to Emerson's writing in every dimension. "The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness." Later in the guidelines the committee adds "components of traditional masculinity" including "not showing vulnerability," "competitiveness," and, of course, "self-reliance."
When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and placed great value on dissent and independence of thought, even in cases where one might pay a social price for it. They understood by hard experience that dependence makes you vulnerable, even if we all do need to depend on one another in various ways. They saw value in questioning the norms and authorities by which one is surrounded; they insisted that each human individual is unique and of incomparable value.
For example, many feminists from before Emerson's era through the 1970s taught that women must become less dependent on men. Abigail Adams advised wives on how to become financially independent from their husbands, that is, on how to be more self-reliant. That women in patriarchy could not be self-reliant was one of the central objections to it, and one of the key factors that made resistance difficult.
If you depend on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are currently at the mercy of Donald Trump, though it was very nearly Hillary Clinton. And as Thoreau argued in "Civil Disobedience," if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it.
Emerson's essay is about self-development and self-realization, things that the APA in another mood might praise, albeit in words to which it would be impossible to attend. And it is about the value, for each of us individually and for our society as a whole, of independent thought, a value that the APA has no terms to express. Even more than in Emerson's time, we think in groups or as groups. This makes many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold, or engage in a process of self-deception in which we come to hold them. It turns us into tribes of warring conformists. It is servile. Also, according to the American Psychological Association, it represents a desirable state of mental health. Well, there's no denying the best patients are the most . . . compliant.
By implication, the APA is viciously characterizing femininity, which they must in the nature of things regard as the opposite and complement of the masculinity they attack. They aver that feminine people are dependent, conformist, passive, obedient, disindividuated, vulnerable, opposed in principle to self-sufficiency, hyper-sensitive. Those features would, by implication, be marks of mental health, and an aid to moving toward a decent society. They choose up sides in the gender wars, but it might be more useful to think of the masculine/feminine pair as a complex problem and resource, or at worst a single binary pathology, than as boys-against-girls battle over the nature of mental health. But, down to it, none of this is about health at all, really, or it's only about 'health' as a synonym for 'goodness.'
Though this is perhaps not what it takes itself to be doing, the APA in fact is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Ralph Waldo Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was quite aware of it. These values are exquisitely opposed to one another, another sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it once was. On the other hand, in diagnosing stoicism as a dysfunction, the APA boldly takes sides with the epicureans in the controversy that still attends hellenistic philosophy. I'm going with the cynics myself.
"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature," writes Emerson in his gendered way. "A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you."
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.
crispy on February 16, 2019 at 04:38 AM in psychology | Permalink | Comments (1)
The Truth About Truth
Dan Kaufman and I talk about the nature of truth as understood in philosophy and then about the nature of philosophy, among other matters, on his Sophia show on meaningoflife.tv. I like the way he frames it: from very similar data we draw opposite conclusions. Then again, they may not be so opposite after all. We end up kind of probing about on various matters, while getting the essential structure out fairly clearly, I hope.
I am proud of the work on truth in Entanglements. Lord knows it raises as many questions as it dispenses with. Still, a sort of new start, I feel. It would be hard to really give the whole picture in a vid or in an hour.
crispy on February 12, 2019 at 08:47 PM in philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
What May I Hope?
Gloss on the latest WSJ piece, on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Psychological Association, in a contest for the very soul of America. The APA has already decisively won the contest for the very prose style of America, in which, for example, the passive voice in the long run will replace the active voice, as passive people will replace active people. Thinking of it as a direct inversion of the values of people such as Emerson and Thoreau sheds some light on the real project.
The DSM is a moral guide, or a moral theory, or a moral program. It addresses the questions "What sort of person should I be?" "How should I treat others?" "How should I behave?" "What shall I believe?" "For what may I hope?" Now in this regard it has some drawbacks. It flubs the fact/value distinction, for one thing. The authors do not seem to be aware that they are presenting a moral theory, or at any rate they definitely don't want their readers to be aware of that. It is a bewildering nest of inadequately theorized concepts, hardly even put in relation to one another.
If Emerson attracted and inspired readers with the intensity and beauty of his writing and ideas, the APAs disseminates its values largely as a matter of institutional enforcement. Where Emerson wanted to set your mind alight, the APA wants to set it right, chemically. I wonder what percentage of people who end up consulting psychologists are effectively being required to do so. Emerson was taking only volunteers.
Replacing virtue and vice with health and illness is a merely verbal shift; the concepts perform quite the same task and are intended to shape each and all of us. And coming down to it, I'm afraid the moral prescription is literal: hope for pills.
crispy on February 09, 2019 at 05:37 AM in ethics, psychology | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Washington Post Opinion Page and the CIA: No distance
One of the most disturbing contemporary media zones is the Washington Post opinion page. It is just very very close to the "intelligence community," as Jeff Bezos is building the information infrastructure for American intelligence agencies; the initial contract seems to be worth some $800 million (links below). They've recently hired a former CIA director as a columnist, which strikes me as bizarre; I'm wanting independent voices, myself. Here he calls for Trump to stop insulting the CIA, an utterly dominant theme of the whole opinion operation for years now. "Trump is playing with fire when he insults intel": it sounds vaguely like a threat, coming straight from the heart of the CIA. Is that how the Post editorial board thinks about opinion journalism? The columns of Max Boot - who has written that Morell column word for word for years himself - often appear to have almost been dictated by intel sources. The editorial board itself defends intel continuously, in exactly the same terms that it defends itself.
On many days, it appears to be something like a full annexation. It's partly a matter of regulatory capture: they think they're cultivating sources but the sources are cultivating them. It's a particular danger for a DC news operation, but they seem not to be resisting at all, and it occurs to me to wonder why. When I first started tweeting in this vein, I was like: I just hope that the CIA doesn't store its data with Bezos and didn't follow his divorce too closely, harhar. Did a quick Google, and it's far worse than I could have imagined: the problem is underpinned by an extreme conflict of interest to the tune of billions as the years go by. I'm sorry, I guess I think the Post editorial board should be in a crisis. Let's get this precise: The problem isn't the appearance of a conflict of interest. There is a conflict of interest. The problem is the extremely vivid appearance that this conflict is distorting the journalism.
a few items:
Intel chiefs strike a blow for truth
Reasons to worry
I was in the CIA, stop insulting me, or something bad might happen
"undercutting the intelligence community is literally a life-or-death matter"
The informed assessments of the president's intelligence chiefs disagree with Trump's uninformed or misinformed prejudgments
So then you start going through the foreign affairs columns of Jackson Diehl or David Ignatius or Fred Hiatt, as well as all the editorials, looking for moments where the positions they are expressing are not, more or less, what one suspects are the views of the intelligence establishment, on Syria, say, or Ukraine, or Venezuela. Right now, I'm afraid I'm not seeing any. One problem with being an intelligence official is that you can't publicly express your views. Fortunately, however, you have The Washington Post opinion page. It would be terrible to accuse David Ignatius - who I've read for many years - of not speaking for himself. But the whole way the Post is operating is undermining his credibility and that of everyone involved.
The Post people might ponder how they themselves regard media operations which are evidently very close to the intelligence agencies in their respective countries. They might think about the overall effect of the secret police here and there, now and then, on journalism. Seek the light, y'all.
Washington Post, I am saying this for your own good. I've been reading you since I was a child. My grandfather was a White House correspondent and political columnist for you (and my grandmother your film critic). Ask yourself: what would Meg Greenfield say? Tell the shade of Mary McGrory that you're hiring columnists now straight from Langley.
crispy on February 02, 2019 at 07:37 AM in journalism, surveillance | Permalink | Comments (0)
Lule of Raw
ICE ran fake university in Michigan. The claim that 'no one is above the law' can't endure a moment's honest scrutiny. It is impossible not to exempt the authorities from the laws they enforce. Here, it's laws against fraud. If you arrested all the ICE people involved and charged them with fraud, on what grounds other than 'We're exempt from the laws' could they claim innocence? That's a decent definition of a government: people who are to one extent or another, or in the performance of their official functions, exempt from the laws they enforce: against theft, kidnapping, killing people (in war), etc.. No advocate of the rule of law can, consistently with that position, not be an anarchist. Chew on that.
As I keep saying, people's commitment to the various arguments for and pictures of state legitimacy just steamrollers their rationality. Like you can blandly or inspiringly go 'rule of law' all day, but only by ignoring the roiling contradictions underneath, which are under your nose. It's not about what's true or what makes sense, it's about what people need to believe and what they want other people to believe, in order to control them. Before you head down this road (or down the road of social contract theory, for example), just acknowledge that the apparent appeal to reason, Enlightenment values, and so on, is not at all where this is actually coming from.
crispy on February 01, 2019 at 06:37 AM in anarchy now, crime connoisseur | Permalink | Comments (1)
Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips: They Both Did Well
They Both Did Fine
There was no physical altercation. Each of them, the young man and the old, exercised his right to be there and express his political and religious beliefs peacefully. Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips both did just fine.
As I absorbed the invective coming from both sides, or watched the interviews and different slices of the videos, my sympathy wavered from one protagonist to the other. Slowly it dawned on me: I don't think either of them did anything wrong. Not in the slightest, really. It would not take much to re-see this event as something squarely and decently American.
As many have observed, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are an iconic public space, and you have the right to assemble there and express yourself, so long as you do so peacefully - that is, without physical violence. You have the right to wear a MAGA hat there, or to beat a drum. You have the right to express the traditional spirituality of your group, whether it is a group of Native Americans or of Roman Catholics. You have a right to move around, and you have a right to stand still. You have a right to chant, and a right to smile.
I think Phillips found the MAGA hats of the callow youth offensive, and I think he conceived of his rhythmic response as a way to teach a lesson or even bring healing. I think Sandmann thought that if he just stood there smiling, Phillips would not experience him as threatening. Together, they might have prevented a bit of a wider melee: I see the pair of them as the still eye of the conflict, drawing everyone's attention, and serving in part to keep the various hostile groups apart.
Now, perhaps this is too generous an interpretation, and as many have remarked - and as Phillips and Sandmann have remarked about each other - it is hard to know what is in someone else's heart, harder still on video, harder still after everyone has expressed an opinion about it. But finally it doesn't matter what was in their hearts: they behaved peacefully and expressed themselves directly. One could conceive that simply as a matter of decent citizenship or as healthy public discourse, conducted by drum and by hat.
We should all pity both Sandmann and Phillips for the firestorm they are reaping now. In the familiar fashion of the internet-to-cable-news sensation, their lives are getting ripped apart; they're liable to be more or less in hiding, along with their families and friends. Any discreditable thing that either has done or said is liable to be laid open to scrutiny. The sensation has narrowed both lives down to the image of the stand-off, which everyone reads for their own purposes. Phillips and Sandmann are being used, and perhaps used up.
One of the most frightening things about our ever-growing political polarization is that it limits and shapes our empathies. One side can't possibly sympathize with what Nicholas Sandmann is going through. The other can't possibly sympathize with Phillips. That is an arbitrary and irrational limitation on the humanity of the partisans, and a premonition of future oppressions.
I hope they do get a chance to meet and talk, which they've both indicated a willingness or even a desire to do. Or on the other hand, if they want never to think about this thing again, I understand that too. Meanwhile, we former Americans seem to be scared of political expression, even as we engage in it maximally. People are confused as between hats and weapons, smiles and violence. I'm not sure how you'd make a mistake like that, but I do know why you'd make a mistake like that: just yapping in unison with your demographic, for no discernible reason, toward no constructive goal, bashing your opponents with fiction.
Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann did better.
crispy on January 24, 2019 at 03:05 PM in freedom, politics, speech | Permalink | Comments (1)
splicetoday: Fukuyama described the fictional end of a fictional history. This one is real. (also a quick precis of my political orientation)
wsj: Who do you want controlling your internet, Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? (or here)
splice: copyright is obviously incompatible with the basic values of scholarship
splice: the scandals at lincoln center and the nature of art
crispy on January 16, 2019 at 06:21 AM in academia, aesthetics, op-ed, political aesthetics: the discipline, politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
sartwelliana, 2018
Some of my writing this year, especially for splicetoday:
Music: on my stereo and in my head, a lot of the year was occupied by classic gospel, say 1940-80; gospel music as women's liberation, 80th birthday tribute to the great Shirley Caesar, country enters its postmodern era (2018 top ten), hippie goddesses of the 1970s (Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur, Linda Ronstadt, Tracy Nelson), stoner country (Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel, NRPS), Chrissie Hynde, best pop artist of the last 40 years, happy birthday, 'stand by your man'.
For whatever reason I didn't do a shitload of humor this year, but I did pen a stirring tribute to Philip Roth's obituarists. I tried to rehabilitate my tarnished brand with an apology to America.
I tried to sketch out my basic politics in a triptych: why i am not a leftist, why I'm not on the right, why i am an anti-authoritarian.
Attacks on pc, identity politics, representation etc.: the dead end of demographic politics (wsj), dna and politics, kanye west and susan collins: shredded by intersectionality, "looks like me", 'researcher' announces stunning result: we're all the same, King meets Zuckerberg, pc entertainment as medieval allegory, bad words, the punditry of personal destruction, self-esteem and bauxite, Anna Deavere Smith and the ridiculous reception of Black Panther
Gender: conversion therapy isn't the cure for toxic masculinity (wsj), boys, we will survive, we old dudes should mistrust ourselves, holidays and gender
'Why They Suck" is winding down, but I got to michelangelo, harry potter, bill gates, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Serra.
Religion and spirituality: (see gospel music stuff, above), beckoning god from his fastness, i advocate the doctrine of original sin (nytimes), priestly abuse is central to catholicism .
Personal/philosophical excursions: fall in the south mountain fruit belt, weekend dad, a very short memoir, how to be original, how much distance?, review of james c. scott 'against the grain', george lakoff and the pseudo-science of neuropropaganda (wsj)
Politics, Trump, and so on: perjury factory, fuck me, i'm going to vote democrat tomorrow, apocalypse in the theatrocracy, re-narrating american history is an old persuasive tactic, american institutions have earned our distrust (wsj), two (or three) kinds of dishonesty, slavery, immigration, and civil disobedience, grooving on the world order in danger, america's intelligence coup, the domestic threat to american elections, american politics is filthy, polarization and the counter-factual crisis, how to argue with a young socialist (wsj), i want donald trump to hold me while i cry, politics and geography, children: our treasures our targets, trump and brexit as repudiations of technocracy
How Would You Draw History?
crispy on December 27, 2018 at 07:02 AM in gender, jurisprudence, Music, op-ed | Permalink | Comments (0)
Asking for a Friend...Does Trump's Ass Make Him Look Stupid? Or Fat? Or Both.
An odd part of the fallout from the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram Bot investigation is that a lot of internet publications that depend on outside collaborators can't post various places like Facebook because their content won't pass the Decency Test. Veterans Today is one of those places, and they've been struggling to find the right formula to differentiate from old bad actors and new, possibly more bad bad actors who are a bit more politically correct. I guess that did us in at Veterans Today -- I think that our awarding liars "Motherfucking REMFs" for the extent and grossness of the reality may have been the proximate cause.
Not to worry. Despite losing a lot of retweets and views and various things, we still exist.This is a new piece -- I confess that for someone with a seriously bent sense of humor and a tendency toward satire, the Trump administration is an embarrassment of riches. It's just impossible to write seriously using satire to make points while presenting an argument when you're dealing with this chiseling lowlife. I know that Maddox prefers some varions on Military Monk as a nickname pointing to his dedication, straight shooting integrity, and disdain for comfort and wealth. However, life with Trump for someone in his position probably felt a lot like self-flagellation with barbed wire. Somehow, it just didn't pass the smell test. So, he lasted a helluva lot longer than someone not a Military Saint would have. Trump would have had me at the Bastille Day ceremony.
Anyway, one thing that has been a problem for me is finding the right epitet for Trump, one that mocks but captures his pieous side. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, belongs to the realm of stories where the hero is destroyed by a fatal flaw in his own makeup. Well, Trump is a nexus in and of himself of lots of fatal flaws. Did he ever give or get a blow job from Roy Cohn? Possibly. Knowing Roy Cohn well enough to have a personal opinion about the guy makes him unqualified to be president -- but that might give his base pause. You need to have a really well developed handle on recent American History to know what a louse Cohn was. He was a genuinely evil man; he died of AIDS denying that he had the disease or was Gay in public up until he died. He probably ran a bit of a gay cabal on Senator McCarthy's staff, which the drunken fool wouldn't have caught on to. He was disbarred for various nasty stunts like suborning perjury, witness tampering, embezzlement, and who knows what else...that's who he's referring to when he'd complain he wanted his own Roy Cohn...
I've given it a lot of thought, and had settled pretty much settled on some variation of President Manatee, but realized that was unfair to sea cows. Then I heard someone say Trump is from Queens and I thought, yeah,,,and then Howard Fineman said something about his administration being the most corrupt government since Caligula. Well, I don't think it's close; I think it's probably worse. Of course, Trump hasn't married his horse yet after appointing it to the Supreme Court -- As Gaius "Caligula" Caesar did -- of course, we know that Trump is scared of animals, and I suspect that horses really scare him. And, Caligula did decide to invade Britannia and then had his Army beat the waves with the flat of their swords and fill their helmets with seashells to represent his booty, planning to display this on his triumph.On the other hand, there was the great parade debacle and the "guard the border against the caravans" nonsense, so...close enough.
So, does "the Queens' Caligula work for him? Or does it make his ass look fat?
Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes on December 21, 2018 at 07:01 PM in bad qualifications, deep thoughts, political aesthetics: the discipline | Permalink | Comments (0)
History as Loop Spiral(tm)
important theories of history that broke too late to make the piece.
The loop spiral is an attempt, for one thing, to get rid of the still-whiggish simple loop structure, which presses forward even as it turns back. The loop spiral 'blooms' rather than progresses.
At every moment history becomes more complex, because it accumulates or accretes and never loses events and entities; that is, whatever has happened will never not have happened; history is cumulative. Even if the universe were to collapse into a single point, its history would still be expanding.
art jane irish
Yes it's true; the loop spiralTM also resembles a net, or history as an entanglement. Plus the merchandising possibilities are myriad.
crispy on November 20, 2018 at 07:05 AM in history, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
NYTimes: How Would You Draw History?
SpliceToday: How Much Distance?
Why They Suck: Richard Serra, Tear Down This Wall
(and the why they suck hall of fame)
Fuck Me, I'm Going to Vote Democrat Tomorrow
America, There is Hope (for Country Music)
crispy on November 19, 2018 at 06:09 PM in art, history, Music, op-ed | Permalink | Comments (0)
And deep in Miller's Cave...
Dark old cave, Miller's Cave...
Way down in the state of Georgia/ among the swamps and everglades / there's a big hole in Tiger Mountain/ God help the man who gets lost in Miller's Cave...
Sometimes I think that Wolf Country should relocate to Miller's Cave...
"Of course, our grotesquerie of a president decided that it was horrible that these disasters keep piling up, stoked by a combination of overheated rhetoric, totally unhinged and evil behavior, and perhaps the full moon were detracting from his many accomplishments like…crashing the stock market? Threatening the Federal Reserve, supposedly telling the Chairman not to raise rates or he would get even; then, ok-ing the largest bond action to get over the known monster deficit his beloved tax disaster — err, law — shot in the Federal coffers."
https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/11/02/dispatches-from-wolf-country-memento-mori/
Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes on November 03, 2018 at 08:00 PM in america, Current Affairs, ethics, international | Permalink | Comments (0)


Fixed the door code problem.
Added a re-spawn point at the Stop Off store.
Set propane tank as "debris"
So it's all done now ?
No more explosive watermelons. It is a sad day indeed.
But im happy for nightmare mode!
Is there a console command that can turn off player names without turning on nightmare mode? If not, could you add one in the next patch?
Also is PvP coming next? Can we get some idea of how gamemodes will be implemented for it?
I personally would like that, just to take a stab at these annoying people shouting at us on the Manhattan achievement, for their weird achievement fetish.
PvP is still planned for 1.10 and other than your typical DM/TDM modes, we had a prototype Supply Run mode which pitted two teams against each other in a battle over supply crates; Each team had to scavenge them and bring them back to their own base and fend off attacks from the opposing team.
Are bandits in the PvP mode or will they be added in the normal objective/survival mode and does the national guard make an apparance in PvP gamemode as well. There was a model created before by curtis but it needed to be re-created again because it did not fit the rig properly I think.
Thank you very much for your hard work dev team, and thank you to all the people who helped submit bug reports on GH! We are getting closer to seeing pvp and bandits as each day passes. So exciting!
Then after that... NG's in v1.11?
I assume this is a given but will zombies be present in the pvp? I do like the idea of a CTF where getting the flag rewards you with supplies. Will there be other pvp modes at any point? (DM, TDM, Last man standing, free roam, etc) free roam being any kind of sandbox since the game naturally restocks enemies you'd just need a way to restock supplies and you could have a perpetual open engagement (ally and fight whoever) gamemode.
Players in teams of 4 are pitted against each other to capture supplies and return it to their zone. Adversaries include enemy survivors, zombies, bandits, and national guardsmen.
They have a lot of content to focus on so the other gamemodes aren't going to be made at least as of now.
I do like the idea of a CTF where getting the flag rewards you with supplies.
Yes they will be! as for other gamemodes, we will think of that possibly once we get Supply Run to work properly.
We have long while rejected the idea of freeroam/sandbox gamemodes, they do not fit within NMRiH's taste and won't be achievable with the Source engine, sorry!
Certainly expect that, if we get Bandits to work as properly as we want them, we will easily get the NG done as long as the art is there.
First of all: YAY! FINALLY!
Second: Will there be variations of the crawling zombies? I really like the additional danger they pose if the player doesn't pay enough attention, but I wish they wouldn't just look like they were too lazy to walk, but instead had one or both legs missing, probably bloody stumps where their human legs once were, before they lost them.
These crawlers feel more like roadblocks than zombies. It's weird because their hitboxes feel like they're as high as a skyscraper. That or the kitchen knife suddenly became the He-Man Power Sword. I HAVE THE POWER!!


You Must Be Joking! - Do You Remember?
> You Must Be Joking!
I remember a young Pauline Quirke being on this. They had a resident band in 'You Must Be Joking' - Flintlock, one of whom was Mike from The Tomorrow People.
Do You Remember You Must Be Joking!?
This show was hosted by teen pop group Flintlock and comprised of sketches, songs and news items. I can remember a young Pauline Quirk making an appearance and trying to get pictures of the boyz in the buff! Jim Bowen was a regular too and I think even Mary Whitehouse appeared!


The BSG Trainees Gastro Taster Course aims to provide an insight into the huge diversity and exciting opportunities the specialty provides in terms of training but also as a consultant in the future.
Truth For Today Bible Study Course - Presenting a Course of Bible Studies that unfolds, to show how God sees our world and events taking place around us.
MCN Sport magazine features expert analysis and opinion from the world's leading motorcycle racing journalists, stunning photography and behind the scenes access to MotoGP, WSB and BSB.
Walsall College is an Outstanding provider of vocational courses in the West Midlands offering full time, part time and higher education courses as well as Apprenticeships and Business Training.
Home to a very demanding and challenging 18 Hole Championship Golf Course and highly regarded as the premier municipal golf course in the North of England.
Compton Cross Country Course is set in an area of outstanding natural beauty in the South Downs in West Sussex, close to the Hampshire border between Petersfield and Chichester.
WAMP Institute is offering Digital Marketing Course at affordable price in Delhi-NCR. We also offer Basic, Advance and Master Digital Marketing Course for beginners, and startups.
primaryfrcacourse.co.uk - Mens Branded Clothing & Shoes Sale UK - Low Prices & Fast Shipping.
Welcome to buy fashion men clothing & shoes from Lacoste, G Star, Religion, Nike, Adidas and more brands, such as jeans, hoodies, t-shirts, jackets, polo shirts, shorts, knitwear, track tops and more new men clothing & shoes.
A unique one-year part-time counselling Foundation Course over ten weekends. We have an exceptionally high calibre faculty and a beautiful Central London venue.
Welcome to the Harrogate Festival Choral Course website! If you're serious about singing and enjoy spending time with like-minded people then we have something that might interest you.


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Highway 82 to close for wreck clean up
Nicole Maxwell
Alamogordo Daily News
U.S. Highway 82 between Florida Avenue and the community of High Rolls will be closed between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. on June 18 and Tuesday, July 9 to remove debris from a recent wreck near the tunnel.
The state Department of Transportation, in coordination with the Lincoln National Forest, will remove debris from the May 7 semitrailer crash in which Quinton Mays, 47, of Phoenix died.
More:Crash near near tunnel closes US 82
Mays was driving a 2012 Freight-liner semitrailer when the semitrailer separated from the tanker it was towing and crashed into the north side of the U.S. Highway 82 tunnel.
He had fatal injuries and was pronounced dead on scene.
More:NMSP names driver in U.S. 82 tunnel crash
The work will require the use of heavy equipment and traffic control.
The wreck spilled about 600 gallons of tar into the canyon below the tunnel.
The Tunnel Vista Observation Site was closed May 9.
Drivers should seek an alternate route on June 18 and July 9.
Forest Service officials suggests Fresnal Creek Road for smaller private vehicles or Highway 244 for all commercial motor vehicles, trucks with trailers, RVs and motor homes as alternate routes.
More:Tunnel Vista Observation Site closed
For up-to-date road closure information throughout the state, visit nmroads.com.
Nicole Maxwell can be contacted by email at nmaxwell@alamogordonews.com, by phone at 575-415-6605 or on twitter at @nicmaxreporter.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Customer Service Privacy Policy Affiliate Program FAQs
Flower Care & Info Accessibility Local Delivery
This privacy policy has been compiled to better serve those who are concerned with how their 'Personally identifiable information' (PII) is being used online. PII, as used in US privacy law and information security, is information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context. Please read our privacy policy carefully to get a clear understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle your Personally Identifiable Information in accordance with our website.
When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your name, email address, mailing address, phone number, credit card information or other details to help you with your experience.
We collect information from you when you register on our site, place an order, subscribe to a newsletter, respond to a survey, open a support ticket, provide us with feedback on our products or services, or enter information on our site.
To ask for ratings and reviews of services or products
To follow up with them after correspondence (live chat, email or phone inquiries)
Keep track of advertisements.
Compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interactions in order to offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may also use trusted third-party services that track this information on our behalf.
If users disable cookies in their browser:
If you disable cookies off, it will turn off some of the features that make your site experience more efficient and some of our services will not function properly such as login, ordering, and site customization.
However, you can still place orders over the telephone by contacting customer service.
Third-party disclosure
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information unless we provide users with advance notice. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release information when it's release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others' rights, property or safety.
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Google's advertising requirements can be summed up by Google's Advertising Principles. They are put in place to provide a positive experience for users. https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1316548?hl=en
We use Google AdSense Advertising on our website.
Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on previous visits to our site and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt-out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google Ad and Content Network privacy policy.
We along with third-party vendors, such as Google use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) or other third-party identifiers together to compile data regarding user interactions with ad impressions and other ad service functions as they relate to our website.
Opting out:
Users can set preferences for how Google advertises to you using the Google Ad Settings page. Alternatively, you can opt out by visiting the Network Advertising initiative opt out page or permanently using the Google Analytics Opt Out Browser add on.
California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA is the first state law in the nation to require commercial websites and online services to post a privacy policy. The law's reach stretches well beyond California to require a person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world) that operates websites collecting personally identifiable information from California consumers to post a conspicuous privacy policy on its website stating exactly the information being collected and those individuals with whom it is being shared, and to comply with this policy. - See more at: http://consumercal.org/california-online-privacy-protection-act-caloppa/#sthash.0FdRbT51.dpuf
According to CalOPPA we agree to the following:
Users can visit our site anonymously.
Once this privacy policy is created, we will add a link to it on our home page or as a minimum on the first significant page after entering our website.
Our Privacy Policy link includes the word 'Privacy' and can be easily be found on the page specified above.
Users will be notified of any privacy policy changes:
By emailing us
We don't honor do not track signals and do not track, plant cookies, or use advertising when a Do Not Track (DNT) browser mechanism is in place. We don't honor them because cookies are required to maintain the user's session for login and ordering.
Does our site allow third-party behavioral tracking?
It's also important to note that we allow third-party behavioral tracking
COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)
When it comes to the collection of personal information from children under 13, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) puts parents in control. The Federal Trade Commission, the nation's consumer protection agency, enforces the COPPA Rule, which spells out what operators of websites and online services must do to protect children's privacy and safety online.
We do not specifically market to children under 13.
Fair Information Practices
The Fair Information Practices Principles form the backbone of privacy law in the United States and the concepts they include have played a significant role in the development of data protection laws around the globe. Understanding the Fair Information Practice Principles and how they should be implemented is critical to comply with the various privacy laws that protect personal information.
In order to be in line with Fair Information Practices we will take the following responsive action, should a data breach occur:
We will notify the users via email
We will notify the users via in-site notification
We also agree to the Individual Redress Principle, which requires that individuals have a right to pursue legally enforceable rights against data collectors and processors who fail to adhere to the law. This principle requires not only that individuals have enforceable rights against data users, but also that individuals have recourse to courts or government agencies to investigate and/or prosecute non-compliance by data processors.
Process orders and to send information and updates pertaining to orders.
To be in accordance with CANSPAM we agree to the following:
NOT use false or misleading subjects or email addresses.
Monitor third-party email marketing services for compliance, if one is used.
Honor opt-out/unsubscribe requests quickly.
Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email.
WildFlower Stems + Sundry
1460 Ritchie Hwy Suite 107
https://www.wildflowermd.com


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GAC Pindar appointed Golden Globe Race official logistics provider
By: AJOT | Jun 29 2018 at 10:29 AM | Logistics
Specialist stand-by logistics support for 18 sailors in 'back to basics' race around the world
Les Sables d'Olonne – Fresh from the successful conclusion of the Volvo Ocean Race 2017-18, GAC Pindar is ready for its next challenge as the official logistics provider for the Golden Globe Race which sets off on Sunday (1 July) from Les Sables d'Olonnes in France.
The race marks 50 years from the day nine men set off on the original Sunday Times Golden Globe Race: sailing alone and unaided by today's sailing technology. It took 312 days for Sir Robin Knox-Johnston to complete his global circumnavigation and win the £5,000 prize money. Sir Robin will be at the starting point in Les Sables d'Olonne to see the 18 sailors set off in yachts similar to those used in 1968 and navigating using only the equipment such as sextants, paper charters, wind-up chronometers and barometers, that were available to their predecessors half a century ago.
Throughout the race around the world, GAC Pindar will be on stand-by, ready to swing into action and provide logistics services anywhere in the world if needed.
Golden Globe Race event organiser Don McIntyre says: "The knowledge that GAC Pindar are there to assist the competitors if required will inevitably help the sailors' mental preparations and is of great benefit to us as event organisers. While we will be monitoring the sailors 24 hours a day it is added value to have GAC Pindar's own monitoring service in action in the background."
GAC Pindar Partner and Principal Andrew Pindar adds: "When attempting a challenging ocean passage, it's important to know you have a solid back up team should problems arise; for many sailors this comes in the form of a professional shore team but for those who don't have this, GAC Pindar can fill that gap. We have the experience and expertise needed to run sailing campaigns, manage race yachts and provide event logistics and we are delighted to extend these services to each of the 18 brave competitors starting the Golden Globe Race this Sunday.
"It is refreshing to see so many individuals take up this 'back-to-basics' yacht racing challenge. We wish them all success and assure them that we will be right there for them should they need our assistance."
More Logistics
DHL Express sponsors professional angler Takumi Ito in the 2023 Bassmaster Elite Series
PECO Pallet partners with Optilogic for next-generation supply chain modeling and optimization
Interstate Cold Storage celebrates 50 years of providing top-quality cold storage solutions
Deringer's Bermejo and Langford-Coty among LACBFFA officers
Logistics Plus re-certified as a Great Place to Work for a sixth consecutive year
In anonymous surveys, employees continue to rate Logistics Plus as a great workplace.
Pouch technology and data: the future of optimizing reverse logistics
WARP closes first operational year with a total of $8.1M in funding to enable the future of commerce through tech connected supply chain
Freightify secures $12M funding round to power digital transformation for freight forwarders globally
CMA CGM becomes Official Partner of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games
Graycor completes three Class A industrial buildings at 64-acre Gilbert Spectrum
nuVizz recognized in Gartner 2022 Market Guide for last-mile delivery technology


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Kimberly Horton
Staff Writer and Calendar Editor
Kimberly Horton, Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer for Mercy Hospitals of Bakersfield, believes that life's trials can be either obstacles or stepping stones, depending on how you look at them. "I chose to make mine stepping stones," she says.
As a single mother at age 19 with two small children, she decided she needed to provide them a solid foundation to be successful in their lives. So, she went back to school at Bakersfield College to receive her nursing degree.
"Sometimes there was only enough food for either them or me," she says. "They got full and I went to bed hungry."
"This song reminds us of what God really is..."
She went on to receive her bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing, along with certifications as a nurse practitioner, clinical nurse specialist, and a nurse paralegal. She is currently completing her doctorate in healthcare administration.
As a role model for single and teenage mothers, she encourages them to pursue their dreams and life goals. "Set your path and go. There will always be something that comes up, and you say, 'I can't do this.' Nothing will stop you unless you say it will." Kim advises young mothers. "No one can take away your power, you give it to them."
In addition to her accomplishments as a healthcare executive and nurse, Kim recently added recording artist to her life's experiences. Her first CD, "Music From My Heart," features her songs performed at various concerts and churches throughout California. Her performances also include a guest appearance at the Crystal Cathedral. Her breakout song, "Beautiful," helped to set the tone and inspire her success while recording the other songs on her CD. "This song reminds us of what God really is and conveys how I feel about Him," she says.
"The things about us that are obvious don't make us who we are. It's those other factors and their percentage of influence that influences us,"
In her current position with Mercy Hospitals, Kim has found many ways to enhance the educational opportunities within the community. The Catherine McAuley Society, a philanthropic organization named for the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, funded Kim's proposal to award scholarships for single mothers studying to become nurses. She also secured a grant from the California Endowment for cultural diversity training for health care providers. The training focuses on the uniqueness of the person – life experiences, familial information, generation, socioeconomics, etc.
"The things about us that are obvious don't make us who we are. It's those other factors and their percentage of influence that influences us," she says. "This training is a chance to step away from the labels and get to know the person."
Kim says her greatest accomplishment in life is her family. She has two grown children, Brian and Teasha, and enjoys spending time with her five grandchildren. When talking about her husband of seven years, she says, "Steve is a breath of fresh air. He renewed in me the faith in relationships."
Vegetarian Chili Beans
(Yield 11½ Cups)
2 c yellow onions, chopped
1/3 c green bell pepper, chopped
1/8 tsp Cayenne pepper
1 pkg (12 oz) meatless burger crumbles
15 oz Westbrae pinto beans(with liquid)
1 can red kidney beans(with liquid)
1 can black beans(with liquid)
1/3 c tomato paste
3 T mild green chilies, chopped
tofu sour cream (optional)
fresh cilantro garnish
In a large pan over low heat warm the oil. Add onions, green peppers and garlic. Saute, stirring until onions are soft. Add the seasonings and saute, stirring 2 minutes. Add meatless crumbles, stirring 2 minutes more. Add canned products and bring to a boil. Simmer. Top each bowl with tofu, sour cream and cilantro.
Mothers, Shakers, & Community Makers
Pat Cheadle


This online course will prepare you for the NMLS licensing examination and satisfy the required 20 hours of pre-licensing NMLS education.
MTI's mission is to provide you with the industry's highest quality content and unmatched customer service. We are very confident you will thoroughly enjoy this course and find it to be a valuable educational experience.
A $30 NMLS credit banking fee will be added at the time of checkout. This fee is required for banking your course completion with NMLS.
This was a great class and time flew by. I would recommend to other loan officers.