Why?

By in foolosophy, nietzsche No Comments

Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn’t I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.

So I can’t answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn’t I be interested?

– Foucault

But why do you write? – A: I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a pressing and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me.
B: But why, then, do you write? – A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. – B: And why do you want to get rid of them? – A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to.
– Nietzsche
Yes indeed. And yet, and yet… I find myself bored of reading and writing about politics.

I don’t mean “bored” in the sense of a spoiled consumer whining for a new shiny object to play with, I mean in the sense of having nothing penetrating or worthwhile to say about it in any event, and being unable to keep away from the Ecclesiastes-style suspicion that all of this is a predetermined farce. A conservative Democrat does exactly the sorts of things he said he would do if elected President, and a bunch of liberals progressives who refused to believe their lying ears are now upset at him for failing to live up to the fantasies they harbor about him. The wingnuts I know are hooting that global warming is now proven to be a hoax, and I simply have no desire to try to argue against confirmation bias. In fact, misanthropy relieves me of the burden of even giving a fuck. Go ahead, deny there’s any such thing. Maybe now this ridiculous species will seal its fate.

Hell, I even lack the ability to enjoy the quick sugar rush of lamenting the stupidity of mass culture. Yes, yes, the majority of people are unreflective, maybe even stupid, if you want to be harsh. They always have been. Now, due to exploding population numbers, there’s more dimwitted people than ever before. You can only notice this fact a limited number of times before shrugging and moving on to salvage what you can. The Tiger Woods story is only amusing because of how it reveals the universal, irrational mindlessness at the heart of human nature: no matter how rich, famous or unjustifiably venerated you are, you’re still going to think, “If only I could have that, live there, stick my dick in him/her, then I’d be happy.” Other than that, who gives a fuck? This asshole is famous for playing golf, for fuck’s sake. If you want to actually make golf interesting, put some Sarlacci in the sand traps.

But I digress. All I’m saying is: I need to make more of an effort to find more worthwhile topics to comment on. If I don’t post very much for a while, I’m not dead, I’m just trying to avoid wasting time, watching the same old clown cars driving by.

The Unraveling

By in poetry, the big sleep No Comments

Before the hand
protects the heart
with its tight fist again

– Sam Hamill
Your presence was a thread that kept me connected to my youth, winding back over so many years through the maze of our lives, a constant in a world of ephemera. Now severed, I stand helplessly, feeling lost and old.

Your life and mine were woven together with the thread of countless shared experiences. Now wide asunder, loose stitches hanging uselessly, revealing the emptiness at the heart of existence that our feeble tapestries are meant to hide.

Blurry eyes, bitter hands. Needle and thread, begin again.

Nights of Gethsemane

By in poetry, the big sleep No Comments

I never wanted to outlive you. What do I do now?

Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb,
the wind sucks the world from your senses
like withered leaves.

– Rilke

How to Keep an Idiot Busy for Hours

By in atheism, jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, religion No Comments

Would comment be superfluous? Couldn’t I just sit here and smirk?

But aside from politics, there is the question of whether people who pray the Psalms in this manner stand on any kind of solid theological ground.

Oh, what the hell. There is the answer, too: there is no such thing as “solid theological ground”. It’s an oxymoron. You can worry, if you like, about some sort of internal consistency within the text (and good luck with that when dealing with thousands of years’ worth of writing from countless different authors), but you should keep in mind that you’re doing so within the larger framework of a ridiculous fantasy world. There is no deity, let alone one who smites enemies, and especially not one who gets enraged about people performing abortions when he designed a “natural” system that allows fewer than one-third of conceptions to result in live birth, with the rest ending in early gestation or by miscarriage.

So by all means, encourage these people to pray their empty fucking heads right off.

Le Mot Juste

By in jests japes jokes jollies, music No Comments

From the comments to an Onion A.V. Club review of Wolfmother’s latest, the best one-sentence review of a band ever:

ElDan

27 Oct. 2009 | 6:12 PM CDT

Fantomas sounds like a drum kit chasing a retard down a steep flight of stairs.

Now, I do love Mike Patton in all his weirdness, but goddamn, that’s funny.

In Defense of Bimbos

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, samesecks, tribalism No Comments

After her appearance in which she dubbed King “inappropriate” and attempted to exit the set, Prejean accused the staffer of lying to her, saying King’s producers promised no phone calls. She belittled McAusland saying, “Is the intern talking to me? Oh look at the little intern, look at the little intern trying to explain!”

“I’ve never been treated so poorly in my whole life,” McAusland, who recently accepted an executive producer position at Newsie.com of Media Convergence Group, said.

(via Digby)

Huh. A shallow hypochristian who’s been treated like royalty most of her life because of her looks has no time for the little people. The hell you say. Well, I’m convinced. She’s the lowest of the low. I fart in her general direction and all that.

The thing about the intern reminded me of something else, though…

39
Eric Alterman
Pundit
WHAT LIBERAL DICKWAD? Milhouse is all grown up: He has a goatee, a PhD from Stanford and an online diary where he proclaims his love for Jackson Browne. Liberal bloggers are holding it up like the fucking Alamo, but his run-in with Dennis Miller last month left Alterman looking like he was about to get his head dunked in the toilet for the third time. Even if you agree with him about Ann Coulter and Alexander Cockburn, it’s hard not to root against this smirking, center-left prick who likes his dinner dates rich and famous and his fois gras seared. “He constantly wants to remind you that he’s Eric Alterman,” one of his interns revealed in a rumor-confirming Village Voice hatchet-job, “[and] that he knows a lot of important people, and that you’re a lowly intern.”

Goodness gracious! And as far as I’m aware, Carrie Prejean hasn’t knowingly repeated baseless slanders against Noam Chomsky, or resorted to bullshit Nader-bashing the way Alterman has. And I doubt she makes Bruce Springsteen (or is it Bob Seger? John Mellencamp? All those nostalgia-rockers run together in my head. Their songs all make me think of middle-aged men, Chevy trucks, and shots of prairie grass waving in the wind against a sunset. Anyway, he slobbers all over one of them.) an object of cult worship either, so that’s another point in her favor.

I also had to laugh, given that Digby had just posted something a day or so earlier fawning over the great pwoggie hope Al Franken. Guess what Dennis Perrin can tell us about him?

I’ve seen Franken in action up-close, and he seems to revel in being an asshole. Plus, I’ve been told all sorts of stories about his abusive behavior from various sources, including those who worked intimately with him, his ex-comedy partner Tom Davis chief among them. Tom probably knows Franken better than anyone other than Franken’s wife, and while some of the stuff he told me about his old partner didn’t surprise me, I did wonder how Tom put up with it for as long as he did. Still, the two of them produced some really funny bits on the original “SNL”, so I will give Franken that. But a Minnesota Senator in the mold of the late Paul Wellstone? Don’t make me laugh.

[…]

Well, obviously, she didn’t get it. In fact, the experience rattled her in a way I’d never seen before. And who was her main tormentor? Al Franken! Sharon said that she would begin a character monologue as requested, but before she got 15 seconds into it, Franken would shout in that annoying voice of his, “NEXT.” Franken also talked to other people while Sharon tried to perform, telling jokes and not paying attention to her efforts. Then he would stop, clap his hands sarcastically, then grunt “Got anything else?” After maybe 10 or so minutes, the audition was over, and Sharon was led out while Franken completely ignored her. She got her first serious taste of the pricks who run much of American comedy, and it deflated her.

Good thing we enlightened liberals progressives know how to keep someone’s personal churlishness separate from their thoughts and ideas, huh?

The point is this: Prejean was asked, for some incomprehensible reason, what she thought about gay marriage. She gave her opinion —

“I’m a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

D’oh! My mistake! That was Barack Obama in an interview with the Chicago Daily-Tribune, so, uh, that makes it totally different! Anyway, Ms. Prejean gave her opinion —

“Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.”

— which, to my coarse sensibilities, is so mundane and anodyne as to be worth no further attention. Last time I checked, beauty contestants didn’t influence anyone’s politics or make decisions regarding public policy. All people really want to do is watch them sashay around in bikinis. No one gives a fuck what they think about anything. No one would even remember this if a certain gossip-blogger, notorious for being a gigantic asshole (and a dishonest one at that) hadn’t gone ballistic about it. And here we are, still hearing about this trivia like it matters, and hearing about her personal behavior as if it has a fucking thing to do with civil rights for gays. She gets to look like a victim of uptight p.c. bullies to those who follow politics, and after her nude photos and videotaped self-diddling, she could probably run for president and win with the 18-24 year-old male turnout alone.

Bravo, everyone. Bra-vo. I take it it wasn’t enough you helped make Sam the Plunger a fixture in the news for months on end by dissecting his every inane utterance? Well, at least this shiny object is easier on the eyes, I guess.

Haunted by the Laughter of Silenus

By in nietzsche, the big sleep, world football No Comments

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon.”

– Nietzsche

Terrible news in German football:

Robert Enke, the Germany goalkeeper, lived with the daily dread of his depressive illness being exposed and the fear that it could end his career, his widow said yesterday.

“He didn’t want to seek professional help any more and he didn’t want it because he was afraid that it would all come out and that we would lose Leila,” Enke’s widow said. “It was the fear about what people would say about a child with a depressive father. And I always told him, ‘Don’t worry.’ Right to the end, he cared lovingly for Leila.
“I tried to be there for him, said that football is not everything. There are many beautiful things in life. It is not hopeless. We had Lara, we have Leila. I always wanted to help him to get through it.”
Her tears flowed when she accepted that her husband’s suicide was a kind of personal defeat. “We thought that we could do it all, that with love everything was possible,” she said. “But sometimes it’s not enough.”

Love, fame and fortune — none of it ever is. And for someone filled with insecurity and self-doubt, performing on a world stage in front of an often-fickle, judgmental audience is a level of immense pressure most of us can’t even imagine.

U.S. Out of North America

By in jests japes jokes jollies, race, the cult of multi, waiting for the barbarians No Comments


Funny:

“We are glad that Barack Obama broke up the white male monopoly on the White House, but we were not looking for a change in the occupant of the White House from white to black, we were looking for change in foreign policies and domestic policies,” he added.

I’m glad to see that naïveté, at least, truly is colorblind. What a great country it is, where we’re all free to dream that a solitary great man, or woman, or transgendered developmentally disabled person of color, will somehow get elected and proceed to act in opposition to the system that nurtured and produced them.

I Tried This at Home

By in bread and circuses, gender, music, ohferfucksake No Comments

Aside from a fascination with the idea of killing women, Rammstein has another thing in common with Manson: Both were linked, however dubiously, to the Columbine massacre because the shooters were believed to be fans of their music (although that turned out to not be the case with Manson). In the genre of puerile, unimaginative, attention-seeking rock music, the dead woman motif seems to be experiencing a revival, so to speak. It yanked Manson out of cultural irrelevancy for a fleeting moment of media attention, and last month it helped Rammstein’s album hit No. 2 in Europe and No. 13 in the U.S., a groundbreaking success for the band. Apparently dead women don’t hurt record sales.

– Tracy Clark-Flory

Uh, more precisely, over-the-top pictures of women pretending to be dead on the cover of an album by a band known (by those who have devoted more than two minutes to learning anything about them) for not taking anything seriously, least of all themselves, don’t hurt record sales. I suspect a few actual dead groupies discovered on the bus would put a serious dent in the band’s touring plans, to say the least.

But leaving that aside — the album cover “helped” them get to the top of the charts? How do we know this? Could it be that their fans, who pretty much know what to expect with each new record, just bought it anyway, and would have bought it even if they had pictures of rainbows and unicorns on the cover? And how does one picture constitute a “fascination” with the idea of killing women? Dear gawd, don’t anybody let her hear any Slayer lyrics.
Most of all, I like the gratuitous way she brings up Columbine apropos of nothing while grudgingly allowing that they don’t deserve to be tarred with that; it’s just, you know, she’s just saying. Okay, you might not share my disgust over this sort of thing, so, um, what about this, huh? A couple of psychotic teenagers liked their music too! Who cares if that’s utterly irrelevant? Misogyny and, um, other bad stuff, booga booga!

Copracrasia

By in waiting for the barbarians No Comments

The reason’s simple, and the same as it was during 9/11: they think soiling oneself is a sign of patriotism, and consider those who pants are not full of shit to be traitors.

I was just thinking after I heard the news that it’s been a good, long time since Americans have gotten a chance to experience a really intense pants-shitting. Well, here we are, bedunged, berayed, bescumbered. If you aren’t safe surrounded by soldiers and weapons…
IOZ already summed up my feelings on the matter. Now I’m just curious when John Derbyshire is going to castigate the victims for not counting the number of rounds fired before charging the shooter en masse.
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