N'Oubliez Pas La Raison

What I Miss About Maryland

Hate, Hate, Hate, You're a Fucking Hater

Matthew Franck is a hater. I was listening to this wanker on NPR yesterday, while I was on my way to get some delicious Taco Time brand tacos and had one of my what I like to call "yelling at the radio" fits.

His basic premise is that we gay marriage supporters call the haters "haters" because we have no real arguments to support gay marriage. Let's have an honest debate, he says. Honestly, I've been listening to the "debate" about gay marriage for some time, so by default I am thinking that this hater is filled with the hate, so he better start off bringing some serious non-hate arguments to justify his anti-gay equality stance.

Instead, he starts from the premise of gay marriage is just wrong, wrong, wrong. To back this up, he points to the wisdom of the American people. They think gay marriage is wrong, so it pretty much must be wrong, so therefore those opposed to gay marriage cannot be haters. This is when I start shouting at the radio as I drive down the Interstate designated 5.

Matt then bolsters his "wisdom of the American people" argument with the "since the beginning of time" argument. At this point, I begin wondering if I have been so caught up in my own hate that I have missed the fact that I was somehow teleported to Eastern Washington and I am listening to some yokel with four tin cans and a transmitter give me a little God's country education. But no, I am still on 5 and headed to Springfield for those delicious tacos. And listening to the National People's Radio which for some reason decided to give this fuckwit 15 minutes of airtime to spew his wildly ahistorical bullshit.

So, in a short span of time we have the "'Mericans don't like it, so it's can't be good" argument and the "this is how God has always wanted it" argument. My favorite bit came when he had to the answer the dreaded "If marriage is only for the purpose of having men and women fuck so they can make Jesus babies to be raised safely by a mother AND! a father [as God intended. I will give Matt this, he didn't resort to any biological determinist crap, which must be tough, because it's sitting right there] then why do we let old farts and the barren get hitched?" question.

Tears of rage turned to tears of laughter as I took the new Beltline flyway exit to my hometown [former Eugenians would not recognize the Gateway exit anymore. Seriously, when you come back out here you will find yourself paraphrasing Burne with a little "My God, what have they done?"], as Matt combined America and God to come up with the argument that marriage, since the beginning of civilization itself, has been for the purpose of hot man on woman action and, while it might be true that old folk can't produce babies, their sweaty old-person fucking is in line with the "principles" on which marriage is based, so it's okay, but the gay fucking can never produce children, not even in "principle," so cannot be legally sanctioned with society's highest honor. This is the way Americans want it.

This line of argumentation forces me to picture a young girl uptalking her way through this argument.

"Um, like marriage is for, like um, making babies? And, like, my grandma can't have babies? But she should be allowed the legal protections and benefits of marriage because her and Mel, they like, have sex like you would if you were going to make a baby? Or could do it that way? So, like, it's the same principle as baby-making sex? So it's cool. But the gays? They can't make babies? So they shouldn't get be allowed to get married or anything."

So yes, society has decided that the only people who have the right to marriage are those that fuck in the heterosexual style. This is not hate. This is, well, ummm...you see, more than 66% of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, and since the beginning of time...

The tacos were delicious. I had three.

Hot Stove

Who cares if old J.B.
Is monarch of the sea?
I'm not afraid if his Free Trade scoops all my biz from me.
I seek a greater fame,
And get there all the same.
I knock creation to all tarnation at the Glorious National Game!

Pigeon Shit

1. (At least) 3 examinations yesterday.
   That night I dreamed of buying sneakers.
   
2. Wishing for a real War on Xmas.
3. OG-ing again again.
4. Unrequited blogger.
   
5. Maybe gonna turn on the amplifier, now.
   

Prisonshift

1. Box Elders, Alice and Friends. If this, and not Crooked Rain, 'd followed Slanted and Enchanted, it'd've been less surprising. Gtrs, bs, drum and organ. Songwriting born punk but trending rock, sad stories for lyrics.
   
2. Dental hygenist/shrink/nutritionist, all dancing with me today before Jesus lets me set down.
   
3. Writing on this blog - and not the regular one - in hopes nobody/somebody's reading. A familiar, but embellished, speechlessness and/or gagging has m'befallen.
   
4. I thought I'd known depression by December 2008, but that was numpin. Wait til you actually get the things you want from your life; then you'll know the unhappiness, seasickness and slow dying that come with vivre sa vie.
5. Your gut expands and distends, your chest sours and waking approximates a bloody sneeze. You make a list of people you love the most and become progressively horrified for them and their proximity to you.
6. Spirits and demons take on a rhetorical utility.
7. Reading Blood Meridian, which is a hoot and big time life-affirmer.
   
8. Aqua aerobics also this AM! Damned if we won't have an aggressive internal monologue amidst all the me time therein.
   

Prisonship Twi-ddle-dye-dees

1. Elevated liver enzymes.
   
2. Julie Klausner on TBSOWFMU
3. My 2nd-or3rd red Stax cup from the Soul Museum, filled with sub-room temperature coffee and expired 1/2+1/2 dregs.
   
4. Having seen Thee Oh Sees, the Gories, Teenage Fanclub, Superchunk, Nobunny and Bob Mould in the last coupla months.
   
5. The Poulantzas Reader.
6. Cheaply Priced Blue Note lp reissues, such as Hank Mobley's Workout.
7. Poulantzas: "I was able to avoid conceiving of the different instances (in particular the political, the state) as being by nature and pre-existing, in essence, their meeting together within a precise mode if production." This is what he calls the "regional theory," his elaboration on Althusser's idea of "relative autonomy."
   
8. my first ever for-real toilet punk-ish, killed by desk-ish sounding song for my imaginary punk band, Thee White Vote. Lyrically the inspirations are from The Exorcist and Paul Muldoon. It's entitled, "Captain Howdy Has a Shack."
   

Weigel : Tea Party Patriots Against the Tax Cut Deal [UPDATE: and RedState!]

Weigel : Tea Party Patriots Against the Tax Cut Deal [UPDATE: and RedState!]

And so Charles Krauthammer and Grover Norquist have company in opposition, albeit much more muted than opposition to, say, cap-and-trade.

This is the first "tell" we've gotten yet re: how the tea party will take to compromise-y, everybody's dirty-y life in governance. But note that last bit about how their oppo towards cap-and-trade is much more do-or-die, apparently.

Bottom line? Only tiny ideological minorites really care about deficits and spending enough to choke on tax cuts and/or constituent services. It's just that vast majorities appreciate the discourse of deficits cuz it allows 'em to talk about 1,000 other t(h)ings and s(t)uff and p(e)ople.

Pawlenty: Public unions 'exploiters' - Jennifer Epstein - POLITICO.com

Pawlenty: Public unions 'exploiters' - Jennifer Epstein - POLITICO.com

“Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt,” Pawlenty wrote in an opinion piece.

Working families' wages have been systematically pushed down by whom since the 1980s (- aka, shucks, circa PATCO)???? By you and yours, dick. You think public employee unions are the reason working families suffer under neoliberal tax policy? You dolt.

On the Relative Autonomy of the Capitalist State

Poulantzas

“[attributes] to the capitalist state a precise role as political organizer and unifier, and as a factor for the establishment of the “unstable equilibrium of compromises,” which role is constitutively connected with its relative autonomy. Two directions that are nothing more than two aspects of a single approach. The separation of the economic and the political provides the general framework, depending upon the different states of capitalism (this separation is itself liable to transformation) for an examination of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state – with the concrete form taken by this autonomy depending upon the precise conjuncture of the class struggle at any one time. For this separation of the economic and the political is itself nothing more than the form taken by the constitution of the classes and hence it too is a consequence of their struggles under capitalism.

Pwismship Tin-vin-toddies

1. Stationed at home in Michigan, snow day.
   
2. Crass agit-prop framed on the office wall.
   
3. Blacktop Ikea utilito-desk speckled with paper clips and stems.
   
4. Wedding pics.
5. Zwan memorabilia.
   
6. Dillion Jaguar copy > EH Small Clone > Fender Deluxe tubes
7. File cabinet on wheels
8. Paper-covered dissertation journal/sketchbook. Prominence of Poulantzas therein. WFMU, Goner, In the Red stickers.
   
9. Rob Smith's recent show at Ditch.
10. Superchunk, Majesty Shredding.
11. A deep, wide pile of New York Review of Books ' to further examine -- though their writing about the tea parties and le Right en general has been kinda weak, truth told.
    

Any Socialism Cannot Go Around, But Must Go Through, this Precept

Like a three-hole-puncher. We need to help bind this kind of thinking up.

Q&A With Shipping News’ Jason Noble

Q&A With Shipping News’ Jason Noble

We have to be advocates for art and music, and despite the myth, very few bands or record stores make much money. They just want to work with music they love. So it’s really up to us. That goes for small labels, book stores, publishers, printers and anyone working to keep independent thought alive. The environment in the U.S. is very hostile and short-sighted right now. We need to speak up for “the other” and question anyone that is embracing corporate/pseudo-religious conservative extremism. Once again, it’s a scary time. We just had an entire election cycle where no one even mentioned that we’re fighting two wars! It was all about assigning blame and attacking people, for being an immigrant or “socialist” or anyone requesting decent treatment. I understand why people get duped by these outrageous claims and shoddy promises by the right wing. (And to be fair, the liberals have their share of inconsistencies and foul-ups.) Local culture, when it is active and engaged, makes us more tolerant, more informed and less likely to be filled with irrational fear. And records sound better than mp3 files.

Laclau, "Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity"

If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocabulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of a political competition. It is this final failure off society to constitute itself as society - which is the same thing as the failure of constituting difference as difference - which makes the distance between the universal and the particular unbridgeable and, as a result, burdens concrete social agents with the impossible task of making democratic interaction achievable.

Racial Propositions (excerpt) - Daniel Martinez HoSang - University of California Press

In case you were wondering, this's what I've been thinking about lately as Advisor B and I hustle towards finally a-finishing our Tea Party papier. In addition to writing the best book about the larger cultural and racial stakes of the ludicrous initiative process that I have been able to glom, Hosang's also translated the "invisibility" of the hegemonic political subjectivity du jour into something goddamned see-able :

Political whiteness describes a political subjectivity rooted in white racial identity, a gaze on politics constituted by whiteness. This concept draws from and extends both George Lipsitz's observations about the "possessive investment in whiteness" and Cheryl Harris's critical account of "whiteness as property." Whiteness, Lipsitz argues is "possessed" both literally in the form of material rewards and resources afforded to those recognized as white as well as figuratively through the "psychological wages" of status and social recognition detailed by W.{ths}E.{ths}B. DuBois. Harris similarly describes a "valorization of whiteness as treasured property," recognized by the law and enforced by the state, which produces a "settled expectation" that its beneficiaries will face no "undue" obstacles in claiming its rewards. Whiteness, she explains, "is simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest, it is something that can be both experienced and deployed as a resource."

The concept of political whiteness describes how these norms, "settled expectations," and "investments" shape the interpretation of political interests, the boundaries of political communities, and the sources of power for many political actors who understand themselves as white. It does not simply describe the interests or politics of "white people," which after all are necessarily varied. It instead concerns the process by which some political claims and interests come to be defined as white. James Baldwin described an "American delusion" fostered by whiteness that leads people to believe "not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers."Like whiteness in general, political whiteness is a subjectivity that constantly disavows its own presence and insists on its own innocence. It operates instead as a kind of absent referent, hailing and interpolating particular subjects through various affective appeals witnessed in claims to protect "our rights," "our jobs," "our homes," "our kids," "our streets," and even "our state" that never mention race but are addressed to racialized subjects.Political whiteness is, in one sense, a widely studied phenomenon. Scholars and observers have long sought to explain the relationship between white racial identity and political behavior and action. In most accounts, however, white racial identity is viewed as fully realized and defined, constructed outside of the field of politics. Conflicts like ballot measures merely express its preordained interests. This account, by contrast, does not view political whiteness as a fixed, a priori identity that simply becomes expressed through political conflicts. Carmichael and Hamilton's argument certainly holds true: there are deep "traditions" of racism embedded in diverse institutions and structures that shape the contours and trajectory of white political identity at any given moment. But white political identity is hardly static; it also becomes transformed and renewed through struggles such as ballot initiative campaigns.

The Hegemonic Character of Political Whiteness
Political whiteness bears two characteristics that are central to all hegemonic formations. First, as cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams explains, "the hegemonic has to be seen as more than the simple transmission of an (unchanging) dominance. On the contrary, any hegemonic process must be especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposition which question and threaten its dominance" because a "lived hegemony is always a process." It must be "renewed, recreated, defended, and modified" as it is "continually resisted, limited, altered, [and] challenged by pressures not all its own."California's racialized ballot measures reveal precisely such a process at work. Taken together, they demonstrate the contested formation of political whiteness, a gaze on politics that is characterized by both continuity and change. Rather than viewing these ballot measures as primarily concerning the rights of various racialized minorities, we can understand them instead as contests over the political authority and "settled expectations" of whiteness itself.A central assertion of this book is that the political forces that opposed civil rights and racial justice policies are the ones that have best understood the malleable nature of political whiteness, and have constantly tested the ways they could adapt and incorporate new ideas, values, and experiences. Their opponents, by contrast, rarely attempted to challenge political whiteness as a fundamental identification, treating it instead as an inexorable force of political life.Williams's second point about hegemonic formations concerns the question of opposition. By definition, ballot initiatives are viewed as contests between opposing political projects, which presumably do not share similar ideas, commitments, or values. But Williams argues that the very power of hegemonic formations derives from their capacity to shape the terms on which they are opposed: "nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic: that the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture."

Union disclosure unlike other groups' - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

Union disclosure unlike other groups' - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

"[U]nions are [501](c)(5)s and don’t disclose...is that the business as usual? Or does that make them shadowy?" Jim Dyke, one of the GOP consultants on the board of American Crossroads, asked on Twitter today.

There are elements of this comparison that make sense. The same collapse in campaign finance restrictions that allow unlimited corporate spending allow unlimited union spending.

But when it comes to disclosure, talk of unions is a red herring. While they aren't required by the FEC or IRS to disclose donors, a separate piece of federal law, the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, requires that unions disclose all sources of income that adds up to more than $5,000, a requirement overseen by the Department of Labor. As a result, unions disclose more than many political groups about their internal operations, and certainly more than than do 501(c)(4) nonprofits like Crossroads GPS or 501(c)(6) groups like the Chamber.

Fundamental attribution error - Psychology Wiki

Fundamental attribution error - Psychology Wiki

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias, correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what "kind" of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person. This default assumption leads to people sometimes making erroneous explanations for behavior. This general bias to over-emphasizing dispositional explanations for behavior at the expense of situational explanations is much less likely to occur when people evaluate their own behavior.

The term was coined by Lee Ross some years after the now-classic experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris. Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

Unions Find Members Slow to Rally Behind Democrats - NYTimes.com

Unions Find Members Slow to Rally Behind Democrats - NYTimes.com

“They’re always effective,” he said. “The union leadership is wedded to the Democratic Party. But what we’ve seen cycle after cycle is the membership demonstrates real independence and votes independently of the union bosses.” (According to a national exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky, 60 percent of union members voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and 37 percent for Senator John McCain.)

Weigel : The NRCC and the Coming Republican Majority

Weigel : The NRCC and the Coming Republican Majority

Kevin McCarthy, the Energizer Bunny who gets credit for recruiting most of the party's best candidates, is probably going to be the party's whip. That would pole-vault him past Mike Pence, the conservative darling who is mulling a run for president or governor of Indiana in 2012. Right now Pence is the third-ranking member of the House leadership, a position won in no small part because conservatives wanted to reward him after the Bush years and his failed post-DeLay leadership bids.

Democrats are hoping against hope that Republicans will fight amongst themselves if they take the House, but the most likely scenario is a Boehner-Cantor-McCarthy leadership team with Pence remaining as the cheerleader whose utterances are not quite considered reflective of what the party is doing.

Tuff rocks for Mike Pence, non?

Steve Early, "This Labor Day, Let's Salute All Union Stewards -- and Their Cutting Edge in California"

Steve Early, "This Labor Day, Let's Salute All Union Stewards -- and Their Cutting Edge in California"

The real heroes of what's left of the labor movement are not people with full-time union jobs, union-furnished cars and credit cards, and union benefits that dues-paying members don't get anymore.

That's the first fucking sentence of this fucking article. Wow, let's salute union stewards by denigrating union staff. Fabulous. One more thing, while we're saluting union activists and insulting staffers and staff work - the two are linked zero-sum style, I suppose? - can we give an erotic massage to old-ass Baby Boomer "New" Left fossils? We can?!? This isn't Labor Day, it's fucking Xmas!

I will probably finish the rest of this article and like some of what it has to tell me. But just now I'll thank Steve Early, who joins Robert Gibbs in providing exactly the fodder I need for my dissertation chapter about the paid and unpaid, the recognized and unrecognized work of union staff. Eat fucking shit, Steve. And get used to eating it. You were wrong about the Revolution and you're wrong now.