Barney Frank to Queers: Make A Goddamn Phone Call

He's right.

Still in the Tank for Obama?

About what might be regarded as a mistake by the Obama Administration, one "RadicalCoolDude" chastised me in the Moot, insisting "there is nothing wrong in pointing out he made a big mistake."

To this I replied, naturally enough, "Who ever said otherwise?"

"RadicalCoolDude" (who regularly makes pseudonymous appearances in the Moot to accuse me of Obamabotry and also to blame the Obama Administration for GOP obstructionism when he is not accusing Obama of stealth-corporatism or terminal stupidity or dishing out the latest variations of Rahmsputin handwringing), responded to my question precisely as I imagined she or he would do, that is, by insisting that it is I who has said or suggested otherwise, by not leaping on the Obama-bashing bandwagon too-cozily and too-eagerly inhabited by too many who occupy the leftmost precincts of the US political map where I myself -- cheerfully out-and-proud anti-corporatist anti-militarist anti-racist queer-feminist vegetarian atheist democratic socialist that I am -- reside, as it happens.

Quoth "RadicalCoolDude":

My point is that some of us would take your regular defense of Obama more seriously if you simultaneously acknowledged his major mistakes instead of always seeming as if you are bending over backwards to portray him as a master chess player always 3 steps ahead of us rubes...

To this I really must say, that all this "RadicalCoolDude" has said is complete and utter horseshit.

What I "seem" to say according to "some" (that is to say pseudonymous online coward "RadicalCoolDude") has no connection to what I actually say.

I guess I don't doubt "RadicalCoolDude" honestly believes that I am in fact indulging in hero-worship and nth dimensional chess and blah blah blah when what I am actually doing by my own lights is simply trying to grasp how actually possible progressive policies might proceed -- and might even be proceeding, occasionally, appearances to the contrary sometimes notwithstanding, given actually-existing senatorial and other legislative procedures, and electoral and demographic limits, and movement republican insanity, and relentless media misinformation, and an actually intelligent but quite non-demonic quite non-superheroic straightforwardly center-left President.

President Obama, as I've always been the first to say, is to my own political right. But he is palpably more progressive nonetheless than any president since FDR. And it would be quite wrong to infer from such a statement that I mistake Obama for a leftist, proper -- I leave such fantastic attributions to the Teabaggers.

The fact is that I have criticized plenty that Obama has done, from mis-steps and mis-readings of the politics of lgbtq issues to over-rosy assumptions about the neoliberal economy to heartbreak about his continuation of Bush's criminal war-making (say otherwise about my criticisms and you are lying, reader dear, plain and simple; think otherwise and you are lying to yourself, plain and simple -- which isn't that interesting to me on the face of it, such deceptions are boringly human and usually easy enough to forgive and forget, but it remains for you all to do the soul searching necessary to grasp whatever it is that is fueling these deceptions, since that, to the contrary, is a matter of some interest to me).

But whatever my criticisms, I do indeed refuse to truck in Dem-GOP equivalency theses, Obama as stealth-corporatist paranoia, or in forms of bashing by means of which the left divides and demoralizes itself to literally no practical purpose, out of childish impatience and narcissistic self-indulgence. To assume an analytic vantage from which one becomes indifferent to differences that make a difference is too often to lose the capacity to make a difference.

Again, I won't doubt "RadicalCoolDude" and other critics of her or his perspective really believe they discern in my writing this naive hero-worship they regularly attribute to me, and feel so weirdly personally slighted by for whatever reasons. But I am here to tell you, "RadicalCoolDude" and cohort, that I simply do not believe what you are attributing to me -- and I should know, now, shouldn't I? -- and, more to the point, these conclusions you are drawing are simply not entailed in my analyses.

I can't help but wonder just why it is "RadicalCoolDude" can't seem to move on to something more constructive than pushing me to "admit" what a calamity the President presumably is for the left? As opposed to what, exactly? Why on earth be so hellbent on indulging in bloated histrionic castigatory arias directed at the first President in generations who has any kind of chance to nudge the terrain for once in anything like a direction suited to the ends "RadicalCoolDude" presumably prefers?

I beg her or his pardon, but I wonder just who it was who ever promised them a rose garden?

I get it that I like Obama more than some of you do. Although far from naive about what his center-left campaign meant for my own priorities, and far from naive about the flabbergasting catastrophe he was saddled with and the institutional quicksand of polarized incumbent corporatized terrain in which he would somehow have to try to do whatever he and we with him could, against staggering odds, I admit I cried when he won the Presidency. I wept to find possible what I somehow imagined impossible right up to that moment. I don't think that is hero-worship and I don't think it blinds me to mistakes.

So, yeah, I don't think Obama's evil, and I do think he's smarter and better and more progressive than any other President so far in my life time, and so on... and his obvious mistakes and failures and frustrations neither change my mind nor even particularly surprise me. I think all of that is pretty obvious, to be honest.

One wonders just what it is exactly that "RadicalCoolDude" wants from me when he decries my insufficient hostility to the President? I am happy to report that this sort of weird demand does not seem to me to be quite so prevalent in the left-netroots as it did much of the first year of the Obama Presidency, when the online left was struggling to get its sealegs and make the novel transition from the epic effort of facilitating progress by blanket condemnation of the Republicans in power to the uglier effort of facilitating progress by pressuring Democrats in actually-relevant ways now that they, and also we, are in power and hence must take a different kind of responsibility for what is happening in our names.

I daresay like most celebrities or prominent politicians who manage such a level of sustained attention and authority there has to be something a bit skewed in Obama's psychological makeup. It is for this reason, among others, that I think it a rather bad idea to lose oneself in Great Man formulations of the substance and force of historical struggle in the first place, which is rather amusing given what I'm being accused of here. But, come what may, I can hardly hold whatever weird drives have undoubtedly propelled Obama into his inhuman power position against him, given its utter ubiquity and structural necessity. Again, he seems to me less awful by far than any others who have found their way to that swollen summit in my lifetime and many others who seem to want to follow him there in years soon to come -- of course, your mileage may vary.

I hope Obama is more effective in his second year, and I hope his team's conspicuous talents at campaigning translate to Democrats retaining Congressional majorities in the mid-terms, and I hope that governing in a more vociferous campaigning mode might actually yield better framing of Democratic efforts and more progressive policy outcomes than we've had so far. My sense is that some healthcare reform must pass that Democrats can run on, and jobs have to be a priority. Human needs and electoral demands seem to align right about now. We'll see what happens. I'd rather have Obama in the White House than anybody else on offer at a time like this. Sorry if that's not what you want to hear.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Republican Party

"Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money." -- RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Man of the People

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Republican Party

People who cannot even spell the word "vote," or say it in English -- [applause] -- put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama…. So the race for America is on, right now. The President and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it…. Some things we can deal with in just a political way -- which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture -- and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don't! [Applause] That's who we are! That is who we are! And if you don't like it, don't come here! And if you're here and you don't like it, go home! Go someplace else! -- Tom Tancredo, addressing the National Tea Party Convention! (Highlighting of Tancredo's recommendation of armed insurrection in the service of a white-racist christianist "Constitutional" (somehow) dictatorship in the US was added by me, just in case you didn't quite grasp what you were reading there --d)

This Crooks and Liars link has full video of the speech for them as has the stomach for it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Republican Party

I'm just excerpting some of the most flabbergasting results of this widely discussed polling. Much more available here. The crosstabs are here, and they indicate extraordinarily monolithic consistency in the responses, generationally, geographically, and so on, among self-identified Republicans. Nate Silver discusses these at great length here.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 1/20-31. Self-identified Republicans. MoE 2% (No trend lines)

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?

Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?

Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?

Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?

Yes 53
No 14
Not Sure 33

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?

Yes 31
No 36
Not Sure 33

Should Congress make it easier for workers to form and join labor unions?

Yes 7
No 68
Not Sure 25

Do you support the death penalty?

Yes 91
No 4
Not Sure 5

Should same sex couples be allowed to marry?

Yes 7
No 77
Not Sure 16

Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits?

Yes 11
No 68
Not Sure 21

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?

Yes 8
No 73
Not Sure 19

Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?

Yes 77
No 15
Not Sure 8

Do you consider abortion to be murder?

Yes 76
No 8
Not Sure 16

Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?

Christ 67
Other 15
Not Sure 18

The Professor Brothers Help Keep Amor Mundi More Positive

MundiMuster! Sign the Petition to Demand All American Presidents Hold Regular, Frequent, Public Question Time Sessions With the Opposition Party

Sign the Petition

In an age when political and policy discussions are often crammed into soundbites, President Obama and the House Republicans advanced transparency and honest debate with their unprecedented live, televised question-and-answer session on January 29. Since then, people of all political persuasions have been talking about the value of what's being called "Question Time." It's time to start a new American political tradition. We, the undersigned, call on President Obama and the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress to hold regular, frequent, and public Question Time sessions between the President and the opposition party.

Sign the Petition

More on the Idea of an American Tradition of Regular, Public, Unscripted Question Time With the Opposition

You know, it hasn't always been this way, and it need not always be this way, and the country would benefit immeasurably if it were no longer this way, but for now and for too long to be a Republican has meant too often to be a stupid scoundrel, possibly an actually insane person, and very probably an outright asshole.

While it is obvious that in the short term Question Time can only benefit Democrats given how intelligent, charming, commanding and generous President Obama tends to be in such situations, and given how readily this gives the lie to the GOP narratives that depend on fantastic declarations that Obama is instead a fulminating Comminazi incapable of uttering a word without a teleprompter and all the rest of that nonsense.

But it is the longer term benefit of a Question Time tradition that I find far more exciting. I think the institution of the Presidency, but also quite straightforwardly, I think the institution of the Republican Party could only benefit from what it would mean to know that no Republican with Presidential aspirations could avoid the awareness that she or he would be expected as part of their job to face policy questions under real-time public scrutiny from members of the opposition party on a very regular basis, with no handlers, with no scripts, with no net.

In your heart you know that George W. Bush, the Killer Clown, would never have run for the Presidency, nor would his cynical handlers have contemplated trying such a thing, if it were known that there was a firm tradition and expectation that every President, as part of his job, would face frequent, public, real-time televised, unscripted question and answer sessions with the opposition party -- that is, an expectation so strong that the damage to Presidential capital in shirking the tradition would be as devastating as the worst that could happen in Question Time itself. It is hard to imagine that, freighted with such expectations, the McCain campaign would have risked inflicting, off the cuff as it were, an atrocity exhibition like Sarah Palin on the American people via a one superannuated and grinch-wizened heartbeat away from the President Vice-Presidential pick.

I don't doubt that like everything else this would be gamed and gotcha'd here and there, but I also think there would be a real tendency to make such sessions reasonably cordial and substantive over the long term, for fear of backfires, fact-checking, and a vulnerability to looking petty or disrespectful or, frankly, stupid if one indulged in bad behavior.

I think we would all benefit -- Democrats and Republicans alike, citizens and non-citizens alike -- from an American Presidency that demanded this particular skill-set, whatever the party in the White House.

When the Founders crafted the Executive Branch many worried at the time, and many others often since, about its susceptibility to taking on an imperial coloration. They were clearly right to do, although they hardly could have predicted the role of mass-mediated celebrity as a vector easily as facilitative to such an imperializing Presidency as the vector enabled through the Executive's constituted and now ever-ramifying War Powers.

Question Time, it seems to me, would function as a countervailing mass-mediated check on the otherwise only-consolidating celebrity-aura conferred on the President, who in her or his singularity and uniquely national electoral mandate almost irresistibly assumes the status of the face of a nation whose agency resides not in the White House in fact but instead in the hundreds of millions of American people whose government this is of by and for, peer to peer.

Dispatches from Libertopia: An Anthology of Wingnut Chestnuts and Democratizing Remedies

My Futurological Brickbats anthology epigrammatically dissecting and deriding Robot Cultists and corporate-militarist "futurists" has been such fun I've decided to scour my longer writings for comparable brick-bats aimed at white racist corporatist militarist christianist Movement Conservatives and market fundamentalists more generally

I. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the people.

II. Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, and corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is announcing his plans.

III. Anti-tax zealots are the ones who think that civilization is the only free lunch.

IV. To declare that money is speech is to ensure that only money talks.

V. To declare that corporations are persons is to ensure that actual persons are serfs.

VI. One will never go far wrong when confronted by a self-described libertarian in America simply to assume that by this term they mean to say they are a Republican who wants to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest.

VII. Gay Republicans are white guys for whom homophobia is experienced primarily as their heartbreaking exclusion from white-racist patriarchal capitalist privileges to which they feel themselves otherwise perfectly entitled.

VIII. "Free Market" ideologues always begin as a criminal conspiracy and always end as a suicide pact.

IX. Any “big-tent” organization big enough to accommodate right-wing ideology will soon be a big tent empty of almost anybody but right-wing zealots. Any conversational space that actively solicits contributions from right-wing voices will soon be a conversational space in which few but right-wing voices are heard.

X. However much they insist on their difference from conventional conservative politicians no American-style market libertarian argument will ever have any life in the actual world except to the extent that it is appropriated by conservatives for conservative ends.

XI. Staunchly "anti-war" market libertarians tend to be sublimely indifferent to the extent to which modern war-making is an essentially entrepreneurial activity.

XII. The only way to end modern wars is to make war-making unprofitable. It would be curious indeed to mistake free marketeers for allies in such a struggle.

XIII. Nobody who believes society to be a war of all against all will ever truly collaborate in the work to end all war.

XIV. Freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others.

XV. The difference between investment and speculation is the difference between a promise and a scheme.

XVI. Wherever the prose of pricing prevails the poetry of meaning is menaced.

XVII. It is curious the number of Republicans who claim to disdain vast corrupt soulless bureaucracies but who celebrate multinational corporations.

XVIII. The wealthiest one per cent of the world population seem to imagine themselves indispensable. One wishes they would test this article of faith by going away.

XIX. There is no such thing as a natural market.

XX. "Homo Economicus" is an altogether mythical being, and given that he would be a dangerous sociopath were he to exist this is a good thing, too. One need only turn one's attention to the damage done by those entities in reality that come closest to incarnating the fiction of "Homo Economicus" -- that is to say limited-liability corporations -- to see the proof of this.

XXI. Those who begin in a declared belief in "spontaneous order" end in declaring orders they believe should be obeyed immediately.

XXII. Those who would dismantle all democratic government and those who would demand good democratic government will point to many of the same instances of government abuse, corruption, malfeasance, and violence in making their separate cases, but it is only a fool who in noticing this would mistake them for allies.

XXIII. In a world in which we are all of us beholden to accomplishments and problems we are heir to but unequal to, as well as implicated in the facilitative and frustrating efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, it is delusive in the extreme to imagine oneself the singular author of one's fortunes, whether good or ill. And so, only in a world in which the precarious are first insulated from the catastrophic consequences of ill-fortune in which we all play our parts can we then celebrate or even tolerate the spectacle in which the successful indulge in the copious consequences of good fortune in which we all, too, have played our parts.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXV. Pre-emptive war adventuring is to legitimate defense as hyperbolic financial speculation is to substantial production. It is no accident that pre-emptive war would suffuse public discourse in an epoch of bubble-economics. War hysteria and irrational exuberance are kindred pathologies.

XXVI. Those who declare taxes to be theft either forget or fail to grasp that it is taxes that pay for the maintenance of those institutions on which legitimate claims of ownership or theft depend for their intelligibility and force in the first place.

XXVII. Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, violations of our freedom so much as indispensable enablers of freedom -- and hence they are a precondition for the constitution of the very experience of the "voluntary" on which notions of the involuntary depend in the first place.

XXVIII. Taxes properly pay for the administration of basic needs that ensures the scene of consent is non-duressed by deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. Those "libertarians" who declare whatever passes as a market outcome voluntary and nonviolent by definitional fiat -- whatever the conditions of relative deprivation, inequity, insecurity, ignorance, or misinformation that duress its terms in fact -- reveal themselves to be poor champions of an impoverished and profoundly uncivilized notion of "liberty."

XXIX. Ours is a world so sensibly arranged that it is only the ones who could afford to pay for everything who are assured escape from paying for anything.

Dispatches from Libertopia: Colorado Springs Edition

"Free Market" ideologues always begin as a criminal conspiracy and always end as a suicide pact.

Obama's "Bipartisanship"

I want to repeat something I often said in the early months of the Obama Administration, when so many were perplexed to the point of apoplexy by Obama's endless "bipartisan" gestures which were met by whomped-up Republican rage at high-handed Democratic "exclusion" anyway, and by the fact that the stimulus was filled with Republican pork that purchased next to nothing in Republican support, and by the endless outreach to Republicans that met with historically unprecedented obstructionism and recourse to filibuster threats and stonewalling on appointments at all levels, the long Senatorial detour through the bipartisan Gang of Six that yielded Teabagger August and derailed healthcare, and so on.

I don't actually believe that Obama has any illusions about real possibilities for bipartisanship with Republicans in this historical moment. He may not have counted on quite this level of insanity from the GOP, given that it really is unprecedented, though I daresay there was enough madness on the campaign trail to give him a preview. And I do not think he expected quite the level of incompetence and dysfunction that is on display in the Senate now (I am assuming the derailment of his timetable and the signs that he didn't expect a Public Option in the Senate package, but expected it to find its way in through conference with notional bipartisan votes in both Houses really did send the process out of Obama's preferred path).

But, again, I don't think Obama has any illusions about the possibility of real bipartisanship with the current crazytown form of the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with those who believe Obama's "bipartisanship" noises represent his naivete or, worse, are signals of a "stealth corporatism" that gives the lie to his hopeyness or exposes Democratic and GOPer "equivalence" and all sorts of comparable comic-book constructions of the scene folks spit out at me online from time to time in such discussions.

I believe that Obama's "bipartisanship" names something in which he really does believe in an aspirational way that actually doesn't connect up that much or that often to concrete policy decisions at all -- even the ones that look like giveaways to the GOP that purchase him nothing in the way of reasonableness or goodwill from the Teabagger Express and the GOP's lumberhead luminaries. (By the way, I don't think it takes a "mind-reader" to ascribe such beliefs to Obama -- I am inferring such beliefs from my study of many of his public speeches, of which I happened to read an unusual number while helming an independent study on Obama's rhetoric for a Berkeley Rhetoric undergrad and also while preparing for one of my courses this term in which I have assigned quite a few Presidential addresses alongside polemics on political economy since the New Deal.)

I do think Obama believes that America needs (at least) two functional political parties that invigorate policy debates and keep figures in authority relatively honest and yet can work together most of the time to solve shared problems within a shared sense of basic facts but in the service of importantly different values and regional emphases. I believe this myself, by the way. I think Obama models this in his speeches in the hope that he can mobilize it from its palpable non-existence into eventual existence. I also think he is providing Republicans an escape hatch from the present madness of this Teabag consummation of three decades of Movement Conservatism, declaring himself ever ready to work with more reasonable Eisenhower types who kinda sorta don't exist anymore in the hopes that such types might take form and then take him up on it and so form the kernel around which a comparatively non-insane future GOP might eventually spring. By the way, I don't think Obama necessarily holds out much hope for this, any more than anybody else should who takes a long look at the depths of madness and dishonesty to which the Republicans have now sunk, but I do think it is part of what is afoot when he conjures up his bipartisan vision of America and, after all, why the hell not?

But far more important than this aspirational bipartisan discourse, I believe that Obama grinds his way joylessly through the bipartisan motions, virtually without payoffs and in the face of fairly relentless exasperation and derision from both the right and the left for pragmatic political reasons above all else.

Although Republicans pretend that Obama isn't listening to them even as he turns to them over and over and over again (and, even more hilariously, even though Republicans -- with the indispensable assist of corporate media outlets that broadcast this narrative without calling the GOP on it -- pretend that Obama isn't "listening to the American people" when he tries imperfectly to do what overwhelming majorities of the American people want him to do and elected him to do, none of which looks very much at all like the things the GOP wants to say "the American People" want even though only a minority of scared ignorant white racist evangelicals actually want what they are selling), this isn't a narrative that can stand even the slightest scrutiny.

Obama seems to have calculated that by reaching out repeatedly and conspicuously to Republicans throughout his Presidency he can insulate himself from perfectly predictable Republican talking points to the contrary, and in a way that is likely to make at least some Republicans pay for their expected obstructionism. That is why the White House "bipartisanship" discourse has always gone hand in hand with the Pelosi House discourse deriding the Republicans as "The Party of NO." Taken together, this establishes and provides the context to pin responsibility on Republicans and stave off likely losses given the inevitable frustration of hope that was sure to follow upon the impossibly high expectations that freighted the Obama Presidency from the beginning, coupled with worries about historical challenges to incumbents in the party in power after its candidate wins the White House.

I believe that Obama's "bipartisanship" discourse was an investment the beginnings of the payoff of which was the State of the Union (in which he wasn't able to tout the Healthcare reform accomplishment he wanted, and yet he is widely perceived as giving Democrats their mojo back nonetheless) and then his impressive showing in his Q and A session in the lion's den later that week. This was the beginning of the 2010 campaign and it showed. Obama has established a credible position of "bipartisan" effort from which to pin obstruction on Republicans where it largely -- but not entirely, given the Conservadem menace -- belongs. Earlier Obama efforts to hang the GOP on the hat-hook of Limbaugh's unelectable but profitable hate-radio empire (for which he was widely and wrongly criticized across the blogosphere), were eagerly and very foolishly embraced by the GOP in its Teabag episode, and this exercise in avid self-marginalization may stave off a 2010 worst-case scenario (loss of the Senate) while setting the scene to bear real fruit in 2012 (Congressional majorities large enough to domesticate Conservdems at the margins of the Caucus).

By way of conclusion, I can't help but also point out that an enormous amount of race-discourse is getting smuggled through the filter of this business of Obama's "bipartisanship." I don't think one has to be playing 11th-dimensional chess to ascribe the sorts of pragmatic calculations I do to Obama's rhetoric -- since, among other things, Obama is absolutely aware of the rank racism that is bubbling up in the cauldron of GOP complaints about his "arrogance" and about getting "lectured to" and not "listened to" by Obama (as who in their right mind was not aware that Teabagger August was a scarcely stealthed freakout about race for which Healthcare was at best a prompt) as now he "pivots" into the necessarily more public antagonism of a campaign year with the old straight or closeted white guys of the Republican Party and the, er, "Real Americans" of the Southern swamplands and tornado-torn turflands they represent by proxy when they are not partying hardy in the sinful Cities they usually privately prefer when they aren't in front of microphones lying their lies.

Too many who accuse Obama of going too slow or even of stealth-obstruction as he takes pains to outflank and soft-sell the obstructionist GOP seem to forget that among all the other things he is trying to do, the "biracial" Obama is forever delicately navigating and pressuring America's abiding and ongoing racist legacies and insanities and violences. A lot of that work is getting disavowed by the left as much as by the right in these discussions of the motives and effectiveness of Obama's "bipartisan" efforts.

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A Higher Percentage of Americans Believe Guardian Angels Are Real Than Know the Fact That No Republicans Voted For Health Care Reform

Given the implications of the latter, it is to be hoped that the former are right.

(They're not.)

Quick Cheer to Oregon

Deep in the weeds with teaching duties -- the Tuesday fourteen hour marathon is pretty obliterative, and Wednesdays I have MA Theses to read, so I suspect mid-week is going to be pretty low posting volume this Spring term -- but I did want to offer up three cheers to Oregon, who have turned the tide of faux-populist anti-tax neo-feudalism that has prevailed so idiotically and catastrophically for a generation, and scored a first victory for true populism, and progressive taxation to pay the price for the general welfare and better government without which modern civilization is impossible. The stunts (among them a stunningly stunted Democratic campaign) that put Naked Scotty Brown into a Massachusetts Senate seat for a couple years, shrinking by one seat the control by significant majorities of Democrats in both Houses of Congress and the White House might be what passes for The Big Story among millionaire Washington insiders and vapid punditocrats, but those who are looking at Massachusetts rather than Oregon to read their tea leaves in have some real shocks coming.

Want To Be A Democrat?

Do yourself a favor, devote a little less than half an hour of your day to listening to the audio of the speech delivered by FDR to the DNC in 1936 accepting the nomination of his party for what would be the second term of his presidency. The speech, often described as "A Rendezvous With Destiny" contains the famous passages in which he declares war on the "Economic Royalists" in the spirit of a patriotic re-invocation of the Revolutionary War on the English Royalists in 1776, a war he describes as a struggle to preserve democracy in a world of industrial concentrations of wealth and abstract financial instruments (not to mention fascism) undreamed of by the Founders. You will be stunned at its relevance, and proud of the Party in whose name and spirit and image we need to push our representatives if they and we are to be equal to our own moment of planetary precarity and Corporate Royalism.

Spending Freeze!

You thought it was bad when Jane Hamsher teamed up with Grover Norquist, well now that Obama has done it, too, all hell will break loose! dun-dun-DAH! You gotta love a formulation roll-out so disastrous that the Administration flacks and walk-backers on the teevee are offering up as reassurance variations on, hey, don't worry, it's the opposite of what it sounds like, he doesn't mean it, it's empty verbiage! Nice choice -- presumably either Obama is taking up the idea that lost McCain the Presidency and gave Hoover the credit for making the Depression Great -- or he's just pulling crap out of his ass that he doesn't mean in order to appeal to Republicans who think he's a Satanic Comminazi no matter what he does. You got to hand it to them these last few days, that's some sweet messaging there. Not that our online sky is falling brigade doesn't exacerbate every stumble into an earthquake in two seconds flat anyway. As it happens, I actually don't think this "spending freeze" getting floated sans real details means the direst of the dire things it is being described as meaning, inasmuch as saving the promised 250 billion dollars over a decade doesn't square with Hoover-scaled Budget-hawk cluelessness of the kind signalled by phrases like "budget freeze" so much as squaring with the sorts of efficiencies Obama already managed in this year, stimulus package and all. So this is of course obviously earthshatteringly stupid -- what else could it be, natch -- but possibly not quite as earthshatteringly stupid as the earthshatteringly stupid thing it appears to be. I suspect this is just the latest rather inept episode of White House messaging going zanily depressingly interminably awry since Naked Scotty Brown gave the Republican minority that is still a minority a magical "majority" in the eyes of both parties and preening punditocrats for some odd reason one apparently needs to be a millionaire Washington insider to understand. I guess we'll understand more after the State of the Union and as the actual details arrive next week. If Evan Bayh looks pleased, we're all fucked. I'm pretty sure that's the tell.

"Oh, Won't Somebody Listen to the American People?"

I must say I personally find almost as distasteful as the ridiculous Naked Scotty Brown interlude itself the fact that so many Democratic insider-types seemed to think a Senate seat was their private property, "Ted Kennedy's Seat," untouchable. Massachusetts elects Republican governors all the time, where does that kind of complcency come from?

Just because Republicans call it "Taxachusetts" doesn't mean it's actually, you know, a forever guaranteed Fighting Liberal Oasis.

Come to think of it, I honestly don't know why Democrats feel compelled to accept Republican narrative and spin on literally every imaginable thing.

Even now they allow Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell to quack about how Democrats "aren't listening to the American People" even as majorities of the American people express their clear and loud outrage at the failures to give them what they actually voted for, in part because Republicans aren't listening to any but a miniscule marginal minority of greedy rich people and a noisy scrum of racist-christianist wingnuts.

viaThink Progress

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), on Meet the Press yesterday, said, “the message in Massachusetts was absolutely clear. The exit polls that I looked at said 48 percent of the people in Massachusetts said they voted for the new senator over health care.” McConnell added: “The people are telling us, ‘Please don’t pass this bill.’”

This “referendum” on health reform meme has become near-conventional wisom, with the media and even some Democrats echoing it. But a new Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll undermines this assertion. The poll suggests that while the election was a “protest of the Washington process,” it was not a rejection of progressive policy. Only 11 percent of voters, including 19 percent of Brown voters, want Brown to “stop the Democratic agenda:”

-- 70 percent of voters think Brown should work with Democrats on health care reform, including 48 percent of Brown voters. [Yeah, that'll happen -- good thinking, Massachusetts. --d]

-- 52 percent of voters were enthusiastic/satisfied with Obama administration policies. [Way to show it, guys! --d]

-- 44 percent of voters believe “the country as a whole” would be better off with health care reform, but 23 percent believe Massachusetts would be better off. [No wonder they voted to make it less likely. --d]

-- 68 percent of voters, including 51 percent of Brown voters approve of Massachusetts’ health care reform.

-- 58 percent of all voters, including 37 percent of Brown voters, felt “dissatisfied/angry” with “the policies offered by the Republicans in Congress.” [Well, by all means, reward bad behavior if you want to discourage it, er, okay. --d]

I get it that many liberals left small home-towns for the big city and left behind ignorant youths for educations in college or the University of Life, but that doesn't mean the ignorant mean-spirited know-nothing hayseeds you left behind are "The Real America." America grew up, too, America moved to the Big City, too, America got its education, too. This is a secular multicultural nation aspiring for equity in diversity and a social democratic government that works. Republicans are weird stupid intolerant traitors who want to live in a corporatist-militarist-christianist tyranny. Stop being nice to them until they stop behaving like crazy greedy ignorant assholes.

If It Smells Singularitarian... Then You Can Be Sure There's a Scam In the Vicinity

The good geeks of io9 ask Could This Be the Beginning of the AI Revolution? The answer is no, and therefore quite as close to yes as the AI Revolution will ever get as far as anyone now living is properly concerned.

Update -- uh, yeah, I know the io9 folks are in on the joke, that's why I directed folks' attention to it.

If the Left Netroots Are Not Part of the Solution Then, Like It Or Not, They Are Part of the Problem

What BooMan Said

It seems to me that the progressive blogosphere is useful to the Democratic Party and liberal interest groups [when it functions as] a free source of media counterinformation to the crap the corporate media spews out on a 24-hour basis. But, [it seems] the progressive blogosphere is actually more concerned with amplifying critiques of the Democrats because the Democrats are unwilling and unable to feed and tend to their base. So, we're now more a part of the problem than we are part of the solution. [Note, he said "more," not "only." --d] Some people have a degree of self-awareness about this situation, but the majority do not. Yeah, it would be great if the Democrats were more willing and able to do the types of things we advocate, since most (but by no means all) of the advice we provide is solid. But since they're not doing it, we're just piling on and helping to demoralize the troops.

This isn't a recommendation of uncritical enthusiasm for Democrats who are doing so many stupid, wrongheaded, lame things at the moment, as I expect it will be taken to be in the usual manner.

But it is a reminder that activism is a matter of education, agitation, and organization.

When we are talking about the partisan politics and legislative processes through which actually-possible most-progressive sausage is made by the guys we ourselves elected and are responsible for, however distasteful and disappointing they are, in a world of monolithic Republican obstructionism, shaky majorities, and media minsinformation, [one] our criticism, to be helpfully informative, to be usefully pressurizing, should remain a bit more, let's say, educational in spirit when it is directed to those who are closer to our side than their opponents are -- [two] our critical organization should generate pressure to do better, rather than divide and demoralize to no practical purpose, it should remain keenly mindful of tactical realities and the differences between the short and the long term, the practical and the ideal -- and when [three] criticism, even valid criticism, takes on the coloration of agitation it is very easy for it to amount to functionally abetting opponents whatever it calls itself given the structural reality of two and only two actually-possible political parties, one of which happens to be literally dangerously and criminally insane however lame the other one is.

At least that's how it seems to me. I think the left netroots (to overgeneralize) in this time of Democrats rather than Republicans in power is just as righteous as ever, but less helpful than it should and could be, and frankly kinda sorta has to be if there is to be any hope for our country.

California Ideologist Stewart Brand Coughs Up the Usual "Heretical" Hairball of Futurological Conventional Wisdom

I read an article attributing to futurologist Steward Brand "heretical" views that were presumably shocking given that Brand is an "icon" of the environmentalist movement, but which seemed to me not only not shocking but not even the least bit surprising. I started tossing off an annoyed post explaining why I felt this way and soon discovered it had grown to frightful proportions, and so I have divided it into three separate parts.

The first part, Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology, written while I was still feeling annoyed explains why I am ambivalent about describing Stewart Brand as an "icon" or "godfather" of environmentalism (although of course he has as much right to describe himself an environmentalist as anybody does, more than most do in fact). I would describe Brand as a futurologist, and I think his "heretical" views are pretty much neoliberal-futurological conventional wisdom, and I think he is part of a larger movement of California Ideologists and digirati and technophiles about whom it is actually obfuscatory rather than clarifying to describe them as greens or libertarians or hippies, even if they are connected to these movements and subcultures. While I still stand by what I wrote here, I think there is probably more snark than substance in it.

The second part, Surveying Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany, actually addresses itself directly to the four claims attributed (I am assuming accurately) to Brand which triggered my annoyance in the first place. By the time I got to this part I have to admit that I wasn't particularly annoyed anymore, and the discussion seems to me more substantial there. I don't doubt that, as is usually the case, interest in what I have to say will diminish directly in proportion to the diminishment of the snark.

The third part, All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance draws from the foregoing a more general case that provides a more systematic formulation of a point (captured in the title) that I often declare here on Amor Mundi, but rarely elaborate as much as I should. By the time I arrived at part three I will admit that I had lost all interest in Stewart Brand and had become intrigued by the theoretical ideas that had churned up to the surface in the process of writing the preceding sections. It was at this point that I realized I'd been writing for over an hour and that my post had become yet another of my sprawling scattered speculations. That's when I decided to try breaking it into separate parts for a change, and hence the present experiment.

Continue to the Next Part?

Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology (Part One of Three)

Want to Start at the Beginning?

At least Susie Weldon seemed to find "shocking" and "heretical" the following absolutely conventional futurological chestnuts:

One of the “godfathers of environmentalism” was in Bristol on Monday with a message that most greens will find both shocking and heretical. Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience at St George’s, Bristol: There was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; Cities were greener than the countryside; Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population. Brand is widely regarded as one of the great visionaries of the environmental movement. Now aged over 70, the American was invited to Bristol as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas.

If I may speak for at least this Green, I would personally characterize Brand's comments as, first of all, not so much shocking as just wrong, and even rather dumb as wrong ideas go. Furthermore, this litany of corporate-militarist articles of faith seem to me the farthest thing from heretical, but to constitute precisely the sort of thing a futurologist like Brand would say, the sort of thing futurologists all say all the time and with perfect robotic mind-numbing predictability.

This is the same Stewart Brand, after all, who handwaved about how world-changing the MIT Media Lab was, that incubator of the "digirati" who brought us irrational exuberance and the so-called "Long Boom" (didn't happen, won't happen), who co-founded that braindead brain trust of corporate-futurological "scenario"-spinners, the Global Business Network, and who thinks what amounts to an architectural folly in Marie Antoinette's Versailles, The Clock of the Long Now, will constitute a revolutionary intervention into the status quo rather than signaling so complacent an inhabitation of the status quo that were the revolution to arrive at his shore (I believe he lives on a tugboat, which is admittedly rather cool) he would likely mistake it for some kind of middle-aged middle-class yuppie triathlon of Marin-type bleeding ponytail hippie-sellouts.

Since I devote so much of this blog to deriding superlative futurology and connecting it to neoliberal retro-futurological developmental discourse, I can't help but add that this is the same Stewart Brand who wrote a forward warning about not falling for "technofixes" by way of hilariously recommending the superlative futurology of drex-tech nano-cornucopiasts as panacaea for all ills Unbounding the Future (didn't happen, won't happen).

Here's a taste, from the breezy buzzing opening passage of that hyperbolic little number: "Nanotechnology. The science is good, the engineering is feasible, the paths of approach are many, the consequences are revolutionary-times-revolutionary, and the schedule is: in our lifetimes."

The Case: "Science!" "Feasible!" "Revolutionary-times-revolutionary!" "In our lifetimes!"

The Verdict: Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

You know, there's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.

I must say, contra Susie Weldon, that I have never regarded nor heard of any other environmentalist who regarded Stewart Brand as one of the "godfathers of environmentalism," despite teaching historical surveys of environmentalist theory and politics to hundreds of students, most of whom were quite a bit more dedicated to the subjects and the practices of environmentalism even than I was.

At least, I now see, Weldon's got Newsweek on her side in this estimation. I realize now that Weldon's piece is something of a latecoming aftermath of a media blitz associated with the launch of Brand's latest book (which I haven't read, though I have read a few others).

I don't mean to diminish Brand's actual standing and celebrity in saying I don't consider him an environmental eminence…

Look, The Well was plenty super groovy (but it will still be actual democratic politics and not the spontaneous order of information wanting to be free -- information doesn't "want" anything, after all, it's we who do, peer to peer -- that preserves and expands actual freedom online)…

And, hell, I enjoyed reading Whole Earth as much as the next geek back in the 80s in the same way I enjoyed reading OMNI and would later enjoy WiReD and later still bOING bOING, zine and blog but, you know, without confusing science fiction with science or techno-determinism with developmental social struggle…

And, come to think of it, I actually do teach the release of the NASA photograph of the whole earth as seen from space as the beginning (together with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) of the contemporary regulatory-progressive phase of environmental movement -- the first phase being conservationist and actually conservative…

But I simply do not agree that Stewart Brand is an environmentalist "godfather," given that folks like Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Naess, Mollison, Bookchin, Carson, Foster, Maathai, Shiva are among the proper claimants to such a title, I do not agree that he has been anything like a deep or original environmentalist thinker, or that he has been either a radical or even pragmatic (a word he has taken up lately, I notice) agitator, educator, or organizer of actually democratizing environmentalist politics. (And any wags out there who want to point out that Stewart Brand has done a hell of a lot more for the environment than I have ever managed myself do get my cheerful even eager agreement on that point, along with the polite recommendation that they stick to the point at hand.)

Although I don't doubt that Stewart Brand is a truly nice and interesting and well-meaning fellow and a joy to be around (I can only imagine the stories he has to tell given the company he's kept), the fact remains in my view that he was and remains a California Ideologist, through and through, one of many corporatists who confuse so-called cyber-culture with counterculture, one of many beneficiaries of class and race and gender privilege who confuse hegemony with spontaneous order and confuse their vantage from that hegemonic summit as a kind of insight or personal accomplishment, one of many edge.org and TED Talk kinda guys who confuse self-promotion and PR with thought, one of many futurologists selling retro-futures in the name of "The Future."

One has to take great care before describing California Ideologists as hippies or greens or lefties for the same reasons (often for exactly the same reasons) as one has to take great care before describing American libertarians as libertarians rather than simply Republicans who want to smoke pot in peace while they enjoy the unearned class privileges the "Universe Provided" them.

Continue to the Next Part?

Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany (Part Two of Three)

Want to Start at the Beginning?

Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience… [First:] There was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. [Second:] Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; [Third:] Cities were greener than the countryside; [Fourth:] Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population.

And so, to return to Brand's litany of drearily predictable futurological "heresies," let me be as harsh as possible in the hope that vehemence might chisel its way past the rigidly enforced good cheer and self-congratulatory faux-contrarian and can-do crapola in which retro-futurists inevitably enshrine and en-shell themselves as they hawk their latest books.

First --

It seems to me that presumably "hardnosed" dismissals of hope for mitigating climate change are only issued in the final analysis by hard-hearted bastards who cynically believe that climate catastrophe will not truly visit itself inside the high walls of gated suburbs behind GWOT-militarized Homeland moats in which they reside together with everyone they really care about, but will exact its toll instead always only on the same endlessly overexploited regions of the world that already suffer genocidal devastation via treatable but neglected diseases and famine and drought brought about by catastrophic climate change in the already-arrived catastrophic future, all mediated and facilitated by arms proliferation and structured debt settlement and imposed market discipline to prolonged yawns from the people of the "Civilized World" in between occasional spectacular self-messaging charity benefit concerts.

People who entertain even the mild expectation that global pandemics incubated in the slums of our neoliberal planetary "future," here and now, and climate change refugees and warlord gangs armed with the blessing of the NRA, and the horrifying deprivations of energy and resource descent and its wars will arrive on their actual doorstep don't waste time earning "street cred" with vapid Villager journalists by making tough-talkin' pronouncements (pronouncements that, no doubt co-incidentally, provide handy rationalizations for multinational energy and industrial-ag corporations to indulge in profit-making megascale "geoengineering" "bioengineering" and centralized-state-industrial nuclear projects in the name of "environmental remediation" after a century of profit-taking destruction of the environment much of the time spent denying the plain facts of the matter) that we are "beyond hope" or "past the tipping point" or "beyond politics"… No, people who believe they personally confront catastrophe do whatever they can, however they can, with whomever they can, hopelessly or not, to do what can be done to save their lives and the lives of the ones and world they love so long as they remain alive to do it.

Second --

Nuclear power isn't "clean energy" in any factual sense and so describing it as "the only way we can provide enough clean energy for the world" is a lie -- or, to speak more accurately, it is an advertisement. Corporations, you will recall, have the right to lie in advertisements, since to deny this would be to curtail the flows of money that are the only real kind of speech on the part of the corporations that are only the entities that qualify as real people.

I personally believe that a smart grid of five hundred million commercial and residential solar rooftops supplemented with dozens of thousands of square miles of in-field and offshore windmill co-ops and coupled with a public works project retrofitting and LEEDS certifying public buildings and schools and homes across the country could transform the United States into a renewable civilization offering a model for China and India and all the while revitalizing our neoliberal devastated and immaterialized economy (for which digital-utopian futurologists like Brand provided breathless rationalizations, by the way) into a unionized empowered middle-class nation (the kind of equitable and diverse nation and economy that enables to bloom and flourish the kind of hippy subcultures and everyday creativity California Ideological futurologists like Brand like to think they celebrate and champion even as they blithely kick out their indispensable social supports), and in a way that costs less and takes less time than installing a nuclear archipelago would all the while decentralizing rather than shoring up central and incumbent authority, and in a way that leaves no long-term radioactive legacy for future generations to curse us for.

Third --

While it is true in the abstract that dense cities can provide efficiencies in principle that overcome unsustainable consumption of land, resources, and energy, this result is only possible when efforts are made to ensure open spaces, natural services, and local ecosystems remain intact to cope with the added stress and waste and use of urban populations, efforts involving planning, regulation, oversight almost none of which takes place in actually existing cities, with the consequence that actual cities, unlike the abstract cities offered up in futurological generalities like the one Brand chirps about here, are the farthest imaginable thing from "Greener than the countryside."

In fact, such utterances sell unsustainability through the conjuration of an abstraction that does not connect to actual reality -- and worse still could never connect to reality given the way futurology tends at best to redirect concern with actual substance into insubstantial abstractions and wish-fulfillment fantasies and at worst is freighted with outright anti-governmental and anti-regulatory biases that actively disable our collective capacity to address shared problems in a responsible and intelligent fashion at all.

Fourth --

Once again we are treated to a generalization, this time called "genetically modified crops," to which monolithic generalization is then falsely attributed a uniformly positive outcome "feeding the world's growing population" on the basis of which a kind of political position, namely, that these "crops" "in general" are "necessary," is championed.

Let us set aside the enormously relevant fact that we already know runaway population growth is far from inevitable and can be immediately addressed the moment one empowers women in patriarchal societies with even minimal financial resources and social support on the basis of which they take control of their lives and their reproductive health, and also by providing accurate and reliable knowledge about reproductive health and access to family planning services.

Literacy, family planning, a financial stake, and equality before the law for women as well as men is the solution to overpopulation, not blanket celebrations of multinational corporations and energy-input-intensive irrigation-intensive petrochemical Industrial Agriculture and their genetic-branding genomic-enclosure IP-strategies, if Mr. Brand will forgive my saying so.

I am far from denying that quite a lot of what might be described as genetic modification can indeed be perfectly beneficial -- selectivity and hybridity have been part of the cultural archive of agricultural cultivation (the words culture and cultivated are etymologically connected after all) since well before that culture was transmitted through writing technologies, and sustainable agriculture and especially polyculture practices have only to benefit from sound genetic science as from other relevant science.

What is most troubling to me about the conjuration of the hyper-generalized abstraction "genetically modified crops" in Brand's futurological chestnut is that it is indifferent to many of the genetic modifications that are designed not to improve nutrition or disease-resistance or insect-resistance or the like, but instead to promote short-term profitability in the usual ways corporate logic dictates, either by dismissing or externalizing possible costs and risks by devoting insufficient critical scrutiny to the manifold longer-term or wider-scale impacts of modifications or even suppressing problematic results, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, by deploying modification instead simply to create or consolidate artificial brand dependencies (Roundup-ready crops and seeds with terminator genes that eliminate traditions of seed-saving and seed-sharing that have defined agriculture for millennia and provided some measure of autonomy for family farmers and small-scale community agriculture, much of which is incomparably more sustainable than Industrial-Ag and provides nutritious food no longer available through Industrial-Ag) with no discernible impact on the quandaries of global poverty or mass starvation which presumably provide Brand's pretext for championing this generalized "modification" abstraction in the first place.

As with "Green Cities" championed in the abstract as a way of evacuating the actually fraught environmental politics of actually existing cities, "genetically modified crops" championed as Brand does in general evacuates our engagement with the actual substance of grasping and weighing the developmental risks, costs, and benefits of different modifications to different stakeholders in different contexts.

This leads to a more general charge I regularly level at the futurological mindset, that it is a politics that functionally de-politicizes the substance of technodevelopmental struggle, and in a way that structurally benefits incumbent interests and hence is functionally conservative even when it is advocated by those who imagine themselves or at any rate portray themselves as progressives.

Continue to the Next Part?

All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance (Part Three of Three)

Want to Start at the Beginning?

I want to return by way of conclusion to the last point in the preceding analysis. Stewart Brand is reported to have made a decontextualized claim that "cities are greener than countryside." I believe that this claim is precisely analogous in its decontextualized generality to the claim he is also reported to have made that "genetically modified crops," treated as a monolith indifferent to the endlessly many variations that such modification has and can take, are "necessary to feed the world's growing population."

Assuming that these reports are accurate characterizations of positions of his, I want to talk a little more about the politics of such claims, and of the retro-futurist politics I would say are exemplified by Brand's typically futurological gesture in making them.

To say that "Cities" (offered up as some broad decontextualized and in fact non-contextualizable and anti-contextualization mode of abstraction) are "greener than the countryside" when of course the overabundant majority of actually-existing cities absolutely are not anything of the kind, and to say so just because one can imagine cities in the abstract that could be in principle manage such a feat is to tell a kind of lie, it is to engage in an act of deception.

It is to lie, plain and simple. This needs to be faced for what it is.

To say "cities are greener than the countryside" even though there is no reason to think any actual cities are anything like even being on the developmental road to incarnating such principles, all the while offering up nothing that translates to realizable concrete policy prescriptions through which actually-existing cities might actually arrive at such a state in a time frame relevant to the lives of the living people to whom one is making one's celebratory appeal, is worse than to lie, it is to participate in a kind of scam.

This too needs to be faced for what it is.

While it is bad enough that countless people are too ignorant or too complacent or simply too distracted by the demands of survival in the world of neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-military precarity to grasp the relevance of climate change and resource descent on their own prospects for survival and flourishing in their lifetimes and the lifetimes of their children and neighbors and fellow earthlings, peer to peer, futurologists are actually directing their own cheerful vacuities to precisely the audiences who do manage to know enough and care enough to grasp that there are real problems that confront us all, but then work to redirect these concerns away from actual agitation, education, and organizing into patterns of complacent consumption and passive wish-fulfillment fantasies in the service of the ongoing profit-taking of incumbent interests, corporate, military, and industrial-statist.

Can you imagine a more irresponsible or outrageous occupation for actually thoughtful and articulate people to indulge? Another disturbing fact for us all to mull over.

Let me connect a few dots while we are thinking this over.

I believe that the futurological gesture illustrated through the conjuration of "Green Cities" as a mirage behind which actual cities vanish, and in which advocacy for the resulting futurological mirage becomes a second-order mirage behind which the actual politics stratifying the ongoing life and change of actual cities for their actual inhabitants is likewise made to vanish (mostly to the benefit of those who prefer that the status quo remain immune to contestation) is precisely replicated by the same gesture in one futurological domain after another…

As by those futurologists who misdirect the grasp that in our Anthropocene Epoch, human-caused climate change imperils the dynamism of feedback-mechanisms that constitutes the actually-frail biosphere, deranging it into a glib generalization that corporate-military-industrial incumbents might "solve the crisis" of pollution through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Geoengineering" that resists actual specification…

As by those futurologists who misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about the useful or toxic or costly properties of nanoscale biochemical interventions and processes and materials, deranging it into a glib generalization that "science" and "innovation" might "solve the crisis" of poverty or scarcity or even aging through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Nanotechnology" (or "nanofactories" or "utility fog") that resists actual specification…

As by those futurologists who misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about network security and the brittleness of legacy software or the user friendliness of expert systems, deranging it into a glib generalization about the proximate arrival of some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "AI" or "postbiological superintelligence" or a post-historical "Singularity" that resists actual specification…

As by those futurologists who misdirect attention from the quandaries of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions, and their confusions for policy makers seeking to provide reliable knowledge to facilitate informed consent and equitable policy in the face of proliferating viable lifeway possibilities, deranging all this into a glib generalization about a non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "enhancement" (as though there were any actual or possible consensus as to what constitutes an enhancement to whom in the service of what ends to the expense of others) or, even worse, into a glib generalization about the arrival of a postulated dreamed-of or dreaded "Post-Human" Species, Homo Superior.

Not to put too fine a point on it, in every case the futurologists evacuate substance and replace it with faith-based initiatives and wish-fulfillment fantasies that redound to the benefit of incumbent interests mostly in the service of prevalent authorities (this remains true even for those futurologists who are superficially or even earnestly devoted to progressive and radical left politics, since the reactionary effects of futurist, that is to say, always retro-futurist, ideologies and movement-formations are structural even when they are not intentional, though for plenty of self-identified futurologists the reactionary politics are plenty intentional as well).

To declare oneself a partisan in a politics that is defined by a terrain that is simply "for" or "against" technology, where technology is an abstraction indifferent to the ways in which it is only in their different deployments that techniques and devices demonstrate their political valence, is to engage in a politics that takes as its point of departure a de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.

To declare oneself a partisan in an abstract political movement "for" or "against" any of the primary topical preoccupations of the common or garden variety futurologist, "Cities," "Nanotechnology," "AI," "Longevity," "Singularity," "Geoengineering" is always to evacuate of substance the actual stakeholder politics through which every detail and development of every relevant "technique" or "device" or "outcome" is researched, tested, published, elaborated, understood, taught, regulated, priced, marketed, implemented, distributed, taken up, repurposed, poeticized, narrativized. The futurologist is engaged in a politics of de-politicization, abjuring the field of technodevelopmental social struggle, the actual field of technoscience politics, for an indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasies and moody evocations of dread and desire, for a passive almost anesthetized consumption of a generalized spectacle of development on terms provided by incumbent interests whose stakes can never be assumed to be shared by the rest of us.

I have pointed out at length that extreme sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology like the transhumanists, and extropians, and Singularitarians, and techno-immortalists are actually organized formations of faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasy translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the this-worldly present for sub(cult)ural inhabitation of "The Future" shared by the faithful and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species (usually either enhanced, cyborgic, robotic, or an altogether alien AI-Godhead).

Futurological discourse in the more prevailing and mainstream forms that suffuse neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-military public global development discourse may not exhibit the titillating photogenic weirdness of the superlative and sub(cult)ural futurologists, but it is to be noted that they too tend to indulge in market fundamentalist and techno-determinist pieties comparably immune to critical scrutiny and thrive on the denial of wordly material reality, much preferring to enthuse about financial instruments and leveraged buyouts over investments, brands and logos and attention economies over goods, marketing and promotion and services over production, frictionless digital networks and currency exchanges and informational flows over human needs and environmental limits.

While the Extropian Transhumanists, say, were honest, or foolish, enough to actually declare outright that they imagined themselves, somehow, to be members of a "movement" to end both death and taxes -- I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether through this declaration they announced most clearly their infantilism, their stupidity, or their insanity -- I think that a deep and damaging denialism about existential limits and personal vulnerabilities drives more prevailing futurological developmental discourses in much the same way.

Richard Florida's Fresh Squeeze

Yet another neoliberal developmental-futurological bullshit artist who managed to convince the narcissistic dumb-dumb elites who run everything (and the wannabes who run their errands) he was a guru by telling them what they wanted to hear in terms even they could understand that made them feel good about themselves while they continue idiotically and joylessly to destroy the world.

One Wonders What Andre Bauer's Grandmother Had to Say About Rabid Animals?

South Carolina's The State, found via Talking Points Memo:

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals." Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting… that included state lawmakers and… residents.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Pick Sides

Republicans of the full-on fulminating "Movement Conservative" ascendancy* want the United States to be transformed into a continent-scaled hybrid of the worst of South Carolina and most vulgar of Dubai, a corporatist-militarist-christianist neo-confederate neo-feudalist concentration camp under their permanent control.

That's what gets described as "Real Americans" and "Values Voters" and "Free Enterprise."

Democrats, when we are being honest about it, want the United States to be transformed into a more equitable, more diverse, more dynamic European style social democracy where everybody is healthy, educated, and able to collaborate in real measure to the American dream that we will leave the world better than we found it.

That's what gets described as "Dirty Fucking Hippies," "Uppity Women and Uppity Negroes," and "Effete Elite Pinko Commie Faggot Aesthetes."

Two versions of where we have been, where we are, and where we should be going.

Pick sides. And then act like it.

* These folks, we must remember, neither represent the majority of the Republican Party historically, nor, one hopes, its whole present membership, nor, one can be sure should they have a chance to long survive as a viable national party, a significant measure of its future... I say this as a person of the left who wouldn't be a Republican even in its most reasonable moments, but who might have voted for one here and there without qualm.

The Lies of Futurologists

If you look at the world today and see "exponentially accelerating progress," you are absolutely hopeless.

If you look at the world today and see "aborning superabundance," you are absolutely heartless.

This sort of vulgar, ugly, eager death-dealing Yankee-Doodle futurology has nothing to do with optimism, it has nothing to do with pessimism; it has nothing to do with "can-do" spirit, and just who lacks it or fancies they have it in spades.

It has nothing to do with "spurring innovation" or "providing foresight" or "celebrating imagination."

It is nothing but the earth-shattering futurological dead end and dark horizon where relentless cheerleading and hyperbole and scheming salesmanship condense in a quicksand of deception and self-deception so profound that the substance of history and futurity, peer-to-peer, and the light of the present world are utterly eclipsed, minds made minerals, liberty made gravity, hope made loot, life made death.

The lies of futurologists constitute the only singularity the futurologists will ever inhabit.

Obama Takes On the Republican SCOTUS Scumbags

Cue the right-wing "populists" insisting the SCOTUS scumbag decision (it was 5-4) is a triumph for freedom since, after all, only money is speech and only corportions are real people. And then cue the "teabagger left" insisting Obama's push-back against the SCOTUS scumbags is all just smoke and mirrors behind which he is stealthfully securing his ongoing seeeecret eeeevil corporatist agenda...

Nevertheless, the politics of this are right, the timing of this is right, the framing of this is right. This is all good.

We can only hope that Obama's recent pivot to anti-corporatist populism on the bankster fees, the financial consumer protection agency, the push-back on the SCOTUS scumbags -- together with the predictable reflexive anti-populist Republican response to these moves -- will actually become a narrative with which we can turn around the apparently scary mid-term prospects for Democrats grappling with catastrophic foreign and domestic Republican and Bush legacies that were not correctable (even if better handled than they were) in the time-span allotted by American attention-spans (prospects made worse by the flabbergasting ineptness and tone-deafness of the healthcare reform process given the structural constraints on reform that anybody who can spell "Republican Obstructionism" should have seen from miles away and planned for).

"People Are Stupid"

In yesterday's Moot, "Jackie" posted an earnest and exasperated comment:

It's funny how I have this last year balked at being involved at all in politics because it seemed too overwhelming for me... And yet now I realize it was actually a hidden feeling inside that silently told me -- "It's okay, things will work themselves out, people are not that stupid." No, no, no, no, now I understand completely -- people ARE that stupid... I felt like 'the people' somewhat redeemed themselves by electing Obama and democrats in congress, but now I realize that it really just came down to a 'which candidate made them feel good' election, just as in Massachusetts, just as with every single damn election in the country.

I understand this reaction very much, I would be lying if I denied I ever feel exactly what "Jackie" is saying here. But there are a few things we might to pause to consider when we feel this way.

First, we're people, so this implies we're stupid, too. I'm certainly willing to concede this point, at least to a point, you know, with caveats (especially if "stupid" is functioning as a sort of shorthand for the sorts of predictably irrational thinking some "behavioral economists" are starting to take as seriously again as Keynes did). Typically, this is the sort of claim from which we tend incorrectly to exclude ourselves in the making of it, in a way that blunts its actual usefulness, such as it is.

Second, polling has demonstrated time after time, for decades on end, on issue after issue after issue, that majorities of American citizens (people, all) are far more progressive on actual policy questions and social and cultural issues than are their so-called representatives (whether Republican or Democrat). To the extent that the attribution of stupidity to them is premised on their political backwardness and ignorance, at least in some key areas it is important to remember that it is not the people but the self-appointed "gatekeepers" and "elites" who dictate to them and pretend to represent them who seem laggard (and inevitably braggart).

Third, corporate media functions more or less as an ongoing misinformation campaign and also Republicans are forever gaming the system to mislead and disenfranchise majorities -- which doesn't make people so much stupid as they are manipulable.

Fourth, I think it matters most of all that Congress is full of millionaires representing millions of non-millionaires, and also that America more generally is full of privileged people who have been insulated by their privilege from the actual consequences of their actions. Again, "stupidity" might not be the best shorthand for grasping the structural relations between such privileges and the stupid things people have hitherto gotten away with doing because of them.

But of course it's easy to see why that is a word that is ready to hand. Believe me, I see the appeal. I don't want to leave the impression that I am criticizing "Jackie" for saying this, so much as empathizing and hoping to provide a context from which to find hope in the midst of evident and reasonable frustration. I've only excerpted part of "Jackie's" comment, which went on to say that progressives have hard work to do for which neither wishful thinking nor demoralization are any use, a sentiment with which I heartily agree.

Naked Scotty Brown Twofer

Many are enjoying the spectacle of stupidity Naked Scotty Brown is already making of himself, a sign of things to come in months to come. But it is worth noting that Brown not only exhibited his stupidity when he said "I'm a history buff," and then proposed "I love the Museum of Natural History" as evidence. We all await eagerly whether in answer to the question "What magazines do you read?" Naked Scotty Brown will reply: All of them.

But I do want to point out that this is actually a twofer:

Brown's answer represents one early brick in the wall he will continue to erect brick by brick between now and 2012 that render him too much an embarrassment to the reality-based citizens of Massachusetts to keep him in the Senate (unless Democrats manage a comparably idiotic campaign, which one must always concede is a too palpable possibility).

But his answer also manages in its affirmation of that Witch's Sabbath of Scientific Diabolism the Museum of Natural History to provide an early brick in the wall he will continue to erect brick by brick between now and 2012 that render him, in his effort to be a recognizable adult person and functional politician in actually-sane Massachusetts, too compromised to the militarist-christianist wingnuts of Massachusetts and elsewhere to keep him in the Senate either.

Blame Obama! Blame the Democrats! (Or, You Know, Grow Up and Get More, and Better, Democrats in Office)

Senator Obama voted against confirming both Roberts and Alito for the Supreme Court, because of their extreme views.

So, those of you who want to pin this one on your paranoid fantasy of a stealth-corporate somehow magically Bush-equivalent or Clinton-equivalent President Obama are even more than usually out to lunch.

This 5-4 decision was the utterly predictable success of the Corporate Five who voted exactly as they were meant to vote by the Republicans who put them there for this very purpose: namely, to declare Unconstitutional any effort to curb the God-Given right of rich folks to buy all future elections for their parochial benefit whatever the will of the people through recourse to limited liability corporations at their command.

More, and Better, Democrats is literally the only way forward. The only alternative to More, and Better, Democrats is violent revolution, and that's not my path (and I see little evidence that those who disdain my path are actually revolutionaries either, rather than narcissists who want to pretend that demands are somehow achievements and then be admired for it).

America has beat the Robber Barons before, we can do it again. Movement Conservatism was a multigenerational effort out of the midst and aftermath of the New Deal, and American progressives who will be of any use at all have to think in comparable terms, patient, relentless, dedicated, keeping tactical skirmishes in perspective, hoping all the while that climate change, resource descent, political pressure in a post-US-hegemonic planetary order, digital media, and p2p formations create conditions under which the installation of an equitable, diverse, sustainable, accountable, social democracy here in the United States takes the Dean/Obama generation of Democrats less time than the dismantlement of the New Deal took the Nixon/Reagan generation Republicans.

By the way, if I hear another person comment superciliously "so much for Republican hostility to 'judicial activism'" as if that is all one has to say to settle the matter I feel like I am going to scream. Yes, Republicans lie. They lie and lie and lie. They have to lie, because majorities don't want what they want and so they have to lie endlessly about everything they are doing all the time. They are lying, greedy, cowardly, stupid, hypocrites. They don't care that we can wittily expose their facile deceptions and gambits. Republicans are the worst people in the country, they are awful, rampaging assholes and they hate democracy, they hate their own country and want to turn the country into a corporate-militarist-christianist feudal tyranny. That's who they are.

More, and Better, Democrats, people.

More Democrats means less Republicans. Even lame Democrats put not-Republican asses in the seats in Congress. If you aren't spending your time excoriating and embarrassing Republicans and demoralizing and dividing Republicans you are wasting your time, you are living in a dream world. Never shit on a Democrat (disagreements are obviously fine, reasonable criticisms make us stronger) unless in doing so you are literally replacing him with a Better Democrat and in an actually demonstrable way.

Better Democrats means better Democrats who fight Republicans as the evil army of corporate-militarist-christianist wannabe tyrants they actually are. We really do need [one] to challenge incumbent Democrats with Better Democrats in any districts that are actually more liberal than the voting records of their presumed representatives; and we really do need [two] to run Best possible Democrats in "unwinnable" districts in order to educate, agitate, and organize on every inch of American turf and struggle to win hearts and minds of every American citizen; and we really do need [three] to direct intense efforts at campaign finance reform, instant runoff voting to give third parties an actually viable role in this country.

A second Obama term will likely mean two more Supreme Court appointments, and that is enough to turn the tide in the Supreme Court, even if only one retirement is drawn from the Corporate Five. That we would have a progressive Supreme Court right now would have been more than enough to justify the lamest lame Kerry administration, you know. People should remember these sorts of things.

Set Your Doomsday Clocks to Stun

Supreme Court declares Corporations the only citizens who count, Democrats lose their minds over the election of Naked Scotty Brown, the left blogosphere convenes circular firing squad, Teabagger minority of lunatics party like it's 1999. Everything is always idiotic and terrible, but today is just a total embarrassment.

Massachusetts Bloodbaftermath

Bravely pseudonymous "RadicalCoolDude" (ah, the internet!) snipes a bit at me in the Moot:

What I find sad is how during the past year you have spent soooo much time this promoting this narrative which portrays Obama as The Most Progressive President Ever (rather than the Clintonian compromiser has he turned out to be) and the Republican Party as a relic going the way of the Whig Party (despite how mainstream political discourse was letting the GOP off the hook for the mess they left us) all the while criticizing and ridiculing anyone who dared to question said narrative to sound a warning about the debacle that was sure to come... Perhaps the bright side for readers of this blog is Dale Carrico finally coming down from his ivory tower to really listen to what other people are saying. -- Your Peer

What I have always said is that Obama is the most progressive President since FDR. And I still consider that to be as true as I ever did.

What I have also always said is that the Palin/Rush/Teabagger phase of the Movement Republicanism consummated in the Killer Clown Administration is not sustainable as a National Party in the secular multicultural America that actually exists and puts them in the position of either alienating the crazytown Base who are the only ones still listening to them and sending them cash in the name of rebuilding themselves as a National party but at the cost of losses to many of the most powerful Republicans now in charge, or allowing their party to marginalize itself into a regional neo-Confederate rump that is not viable for long as a National party. And I still consider that to be as true as I ever did.

That's not revisionism or spin, that's simply what I have said over and over. It remains my general take. You may choose to read that as me declaring Obama godlike or declaring the GOP impotent, but that has nothing to do with anything I have actually ever said.

Since the President isn't a superhero who imposes his will unilaterally into policy and law it shouldn't really be that difficult to grasp how literally unprecedented monolithic Republican obstructionism (an explicit strategy publicly repeatedly and even gleefully affirmed by the Republican leadership) gives de facto veto power over all legislation to every one of the sixty/fifty-nine Senators who presently caucus with the Democrats, including a non-negligible minority of them who are conservative in key policy areas, some to an extent that makes them nearly as obstructionist as the Republicans themselves.

Under such circumstances, Gandhi or King could be President and fail to do better than Obama has done this year, whatever magical thinking if I were King of the Forest scenario you are spinning to the contrary. This wouldn't make them Clintonian triangulators (a word I am using in preference to your choice of "compromisers" because I can't imagine you really disdain all compromise, inasmuch as compromise is actually the substance of all politics worthy of the name), however emotionally satisfying it might feel to say so given the frustrations of democratizing struggle in the belly of the beast.

Of course there will skirmishes that progressives lose, of course Republicans can game constituted procedures, special elections, vapid media outlets to obstruct general welfare and win occasional races (indeed Republicans should prevail in some places, even in their present debased state, given that their agenda reflects the actual preferences of substantial majorities in some benighted places), but none of that detracts from what I take to be the demand that Republicanism reorient itself to accommodate American secularization and diversity in a world less inclined to treat it as the Big Dog on the planetary scene and in which sustainable and social democratic institutions and practices look to be the only way for America to overcome its palpable vulnerability to becoming a failed state while at once contributing to the destruction of the world via climate catastrophe, gluttony on the downslope of resource descent, proliferating arms, and universal vulgarization.

My point is certainly not the cartoon viewpoint of declaring Obama "impotent" in the face of the phony Democratic Senatorial majority. My point is certainly not the cartoon viewpoint declaring Obama to be as much to the left as I would want him to be when he remains the center-left figure he always was (he's to the left of Clinton in both his actual rhetoric and in the substance of his actual policy recommendations). My point is not the cartoon viewpoint of pretending Obama has made no mistakes (as I have said, the stimulus was too small in consequence of a too rosy understanding of the state of the economy, his lgbtq politics have been shaky at best and awful at worst, his escalation in Afghanistan and miredness in W. terror-wars keeps one up at night in its nightmarishness, among other things).

But neither do I approve Obama-Clinton equivalency theses any more than I do the even more idiotic Obama-Bush equivalency theses one also sometimes hears among folks whose long-term political aspirations are as far to the left as are my own. The facts don't justify them and politics premised on them make no sense, or at best confuse theoretical declarations with tactical considerations to no useful purpose.

I find your final move of crowing about me coming down from my "ivory tower to really listen to what other people are saying" fairly flabbergasting. It's not that I don't listen to what you and many others who disagree with me are saying, it's that I listen and disagree. My disagreement is based in reasons I specify, which is the way I indicate my awareness that I am addressing peers.

I think it is magical thinking to believe "talking tough" could achieve consistently and substantially better outcomes than Democrats have done, given the facts on the ground, and I think it is probably magical thinking to believe there was substantially more that could have been done in this first year to get the Killer Clowns "on the hook" for their crimes and lunacies than we have done (I do hope for and still expect more accountability to come for war criminals, war profiteers, financial fraudsters -- although I doubt it will take on the purple coloration of my occasional revenge fantasies on this score).

I can see that it hurts your feelings to hear such assessments from me, since you apparently take them to constitute "ridiculing anyone who dares question" what I take to be true for the reasons I offer, statements and reasons of mine which are exposed via publication to disagreement and ridicule thereby quite as much as anybody else's. I don't quite understand why you seem to think I find disagreement with me particularly more "daring" than my "daring" to disagree with anybody else. That's what we are all doing here I would have thought. Perhaps this is an issue better left to a therapist or personal confidante.

I do think any person of the left who feels vindicated or pleased by the Brown victory is foolish in the extreme, and to the extent that they want to portray themselves a person of the non-revolutionary left and actually engaged in democratizing politics such cheer looks to me actually irresponsible.

I was displeased in the extreme by the Brown victory, although I was not surprised by it once I learned over the last two weeks about the specifics of the relevant three campaigns in question. Brown will seek re-election in two years, you know. It remains to be seen if he will alienate his Teabagger/clueless Independents base by actually governing as a Senator in Massachusetts and hence open himself to loss to a stronger candidate or better campaign from the Democrats in consequence, or if he will go the star-maker route of La Palin and Rush, raising hell by spewing delusive narratives that render him a "star" so unserious as to be less electable by the day.

It's too early to tell what will happen, but one has to be able to grasp the actually-relevant circumstances that actually articulate the possible in a campaign for office in a particular place or in a policy-process as it plays out in a State legislature, in a Circuit or Supreme Court, in the House, in the Senate to think about it usefully. One then lodges one's thinking within one's wider demographic, ideological, aspirational maps and narratives. You have to walk and chew gum at the same time.

My impression is that much of the left blogosphere has a steep learning curve to scale when it comes to understanding the difference between the politics of blanket condemnation of racist Christianist corporate-militarism in power when Movement Republicans are in charge and the far more difficult responsibilities and tactics and heartbreaking pain of keeping ones eyes on the prize (equity in diversity, a literate, healthy, secure society, and a participatory, accountable, consensual republic) while struggling intelligently and forever frustrated for piecemeal changes through the convulsive ugly sausage-making of Democrats in charge, in a divided demoralized enraged polarized pampered ignorant stratified stakeholder republic with flawed institutions across every layer of governance.

Mass Debacle

Well, the bright side is that Democrats don't have to pretend to have a supermajority that never actually existed and that caused them to be endlessly blamed for not achieving widely desired outcomes (by the American people and by most Democrats as well) that were simply impossible because of the de facto veto power of the most conservative Senators voting with the Democratic caucus. I would like to think that the palpable irrelevance of the loathed Joe Lieberman will remove his ugly face from its constant presence on my tee vee, also. But, even so, it's disgusting and pathetic beyond words that this vapid style-over-substance faux-populist crap campaign put a male centerfold in a Senate seat representing educated, secular, liberal Massachusetts (even if it is only for two years).

Today's Random Wilde

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Realism, Idealism, Narcissism in the Politics of Democratization Here on Earth

About Obama's reasonably good proposal to fine the biggest financial institutions to get back taxpayer dollars that bailed them out despite their irresponsibility and in a way that introduces the first of what one hopes will be many structural and regulatory dis-incentives to the re-emergence of such reckless institutions and practices I wrote on Saturday: "Not bad at all."

I went on to comment:

I have no doubt that Republicans will roar incoherently about socialism while at once whomping up anti-governmental populism fed by the very abuses and distress Obama seeks to address here, meanwhile the left, rather than supporting the President, will accuse him of being a Bush-lite stealth corporatist even before Congress fails to implement this minimally reasonable intervention, pretending that the failure of a carefully crafted compromise somehow provides evidence that whatever incomparably more radical intervention they happen to advocate in the abstract (as Obama himself surely would prefer more radical interventions in the abstract as well, having both a brain and a heart as he does) would somehow have a better chance to get implemented than the moderate intervention that can't get through.

In the Moot, an annoyed "Mathmos" sputtered in reply:

Ah, those dang shrill pouty leftists and their Naderite deadenderism. What I wouldn't give for them to frame and see and think about things the way I do. If only they were capable of putting actual Democratic political results in the context of a personal, involved understanding of Obama's true intentions, as I do. If only they feared the indecorous stints of Republican dominance enough to embrace Democratic Third Way politics as the sole Realistic/ Pragmatic/ Sensible/ Serious/ Possible alternative, as I do. If only they understood that a political wing is defined not by steadfast adherence to political aims, and the pressuring necessary to achieve them, but by the very subordination of those aims to the organizational interests of the Party brandishing the right cultural markers, as I do, etc.

Now, for one thing, since I do regard myself as a leftist -- being, after all, an anti-racist anti-corporatist anti-militarist gender-queer feminist green social democrat who advocates universal single payer healthcare, a universal non means-tested basic income guarantee, free life-long public education, and democratic world federalist governance -- it does feel odd to me to find myself distinguished from leftists in such formulations. Also, I will cheerfully concede that I do indeed wish that leftists who agree that some of these are desirable outcomes as well as sharing with me a sense of "the left wing of the possible" given the circumstances that actually beset us would "frame and see and think about things the way I do." Surely that follows rather naturally from the fact that I actually mean what I say and say it because I hope it is useful in the way of getting at those outcomes given where we actually are? Why would this be treated as some stealthy attitude on my part demanding sarcastic exposure, or even the least bit surprising in fact?

I agree with the pseudonymously-monikered "Mathmos" (how brave the Internet makes people!) that "[s]teadfast adherence to political aims and the pressuring necessary to achieve them" is indeed what defines the proper activist left. I just know that "pressure" doesn't mean stamping your foot and pouting at reality. "Pressure," to be efficacious, has to be attentive to actual context. Otherwise, one's "steadfastness" is just theatre, and claims to "radicalism" too readily become indulgences in narcissism.

"Mathmos" falsely claims that I am advocating Third Way politics which I happen to disdain as a matter of fact (I am assuming "Third Way" is being used in the sense actually deployed by the Clintons and DLC politicos as well as by Blair's Labour), presumably because they think anybody who struggles to connect ideals to outcomes in a pragmatic way must be a Clintonian triangular. This is false and even cartoonish, but by all means "Mathmos" should stick to it if it makes them feel better. There's quite a lot to feel miserable and distressed about in the present state of US and global politics, so who am I to steal from the "Mathmos" such wee self-deceptions as get them through the night, I suppose?

As for "Mathmos" declaring that I advocate "subordination of [left political] aims to the organizational interests of the Party brandishing the right cultural markers" I am eager to see some evidence in any of my writing for this. I advocate challenges to Democratic incumbents whose voting records are to the right of their constituencies, I advocate running candidates in "unwinnable" districts in the interest of longer-term progressive education via campaigning, and I advocate the institution of instant runoff voting district by district (we recently won it here in Oakland where I live, for example) to render third-party candidacies non-spoilers as they certainly do function in the actual world as it is actually instituted here and now. None of those stances squares with an attribution to me of preference for "cultural markers" over political substance. Given that "Mathmos" seems to be defending disdain for pragmatic possibility in favor of strident manifesto-declarations, I am inclined to direct precisely that charge their way instead. I am intrigued to know what "cultural markers" I am presumably preferring to actually democratizing efforts at education, agitation, and organization.

"Mathmos" also falsely claims that I pretend to read Obama's mind when I simply deny he's a seeeecret eeeevil Bush-lite corporatist just because he can't unilaterally impose his progressive will in an actually diverse, actually undercritical polity whose governance is organized by separation of powers at every layer. This doesn't mean he gets a free pass for everything he's done (for example, I think the stimulus should and could have been larger and that a too-optimistic assessment of the economy yielded a mistakenly scrawny stimulus that didn't translate into enough jobs, and I also think he has been both clumsy and pointlessly slow in addressing DADT and DOMA out of a misreading of both the mainstream cultural landscape in the US and that of his own base on lgbtq issues), but none of this causes me to mistake Obama for anything but the most progressive President since FDR which I still think he clearly is in both his words and actions. And I do indeed believe painting Obama otherwise is both straightforwardly wrong on the facts but also reveals an unrealistic understanding of political reality that does nobody any good, whether they agree with me or not about what is desirable in the abstract in the way of democratizing aspirations.

The reality of literally unprecedented monolithic Republican obstructionism in a Senate with a filibuster is that every Senator among the 60 who caucus with the Democrats (a non-negligible minority of whom are very conservative in some of their views) has veto power over any legislative efforts, and many are willing to use it opportunistically or in the service of actually conservative ends. Media sensationalism and complacent adherence to conventional wisdom as set by incumbent interests also skews access to reliable information about policy outcomes and the stances of actual officeholders in ways that amount to voter disenfranchisement via mis-information and fraud in what remains a notionally representative democracy.

That is reality. You can pretend digging your heels in and demanding more radical outcomes is somehow more achievable than the moderate ones that can't get through the DC slaughter house, but that doesn't really make sense to me. You can decry my own honest efforts to grasp what the left wing of the possible actually looks like or to assess Obama in light of what I take to be possible as my own stealth corporatism or cynicism or whatever, but that doesn't really make sense to me either.

When I discuss Republicans (or for that matter, futurologists) in a snide way it is usually because I think they are lying in a facile way or being egregiously stupid and my tone reflects that. I don't really think "Mathmos" thinks I am being either deceptive or dumb, however much they disagree with me. If all the "Mathmos" ultimately means to communicate is that we disagree with one another about what is possible for the left or for a left President under the present circumstances, and that I think pointlessly strident unrealistic demands are demoralizing and divisive rather than invigorating for actually practically democratizing left politics, I think all that is fairly obvious.

Teaching Resumes

Spring term begins tomorrow, and it's going to be another long hard slog, I fear. At Berkeley I'm teaching two upper division seminars, one "Homo Economicus" reads the canon of mannered stage comedies in mostly the 17th and 20th centuries as documents of the shifting urban institutional terrain and urbane psychic terrain of modern-capitalist political economy and the second "Altars and Alters to the Market" an itinerary through polemical Movement Republican and various democratic-progressive polemical texts from the New Deal to the present. At the San Francisco Art Institute, I'm teaching another variation on my "Green Theories, Green Practices, Green Identities" course and also shepherding the present cohort of MA students to the finish line for their Theses and Symposium presentations. Every single one of these courses is enormously rewarding on its own terms, but I'll admit that taken together the attentional work load is pretty overwhelming. Tuesdays will definitely be my craziest day -- I have to be out the door by seven to get the train to the City and then the bus to campus on time for a three hour seminar, and then I've got a few hours to bus to BART my way to UC Berkeley, grab a bite, preside over office hours and then teach two one and a half hour seminars back to back, ending at seven pm, which gets me home with Burritos from the Rockridge taqueria Cactus by eight o'clock in time to crash in front of the tee vee. I've got three hour blocks of teaching on Wednesdays and Thursdays, too, but I'll be able to sleep to a reasonable hour and still have a reasonable amount of time for reading and class prep, so that shouldn't be so bad. We'll see.

State of the Senate

Until we rein in the obstructionist filibuster,
Instead of governance, we get endless silly bluster.

TPM Monday Morning News Roundup:

Speaking at a fundraiser in Florida on Sunday, Vice President Biden slammed the new prominence of the filibuster, Politico reports. "As long as I have served ... I've never seen, as my uncle once said, the constitution stood on its head as they've done. This is the first time every single solitary decision has required 60 senators," Biden said. "No democracy has survived needing a supermajority."

Party ID

When I hear a declaration
of Republican affiliation
I thereupon assume
there's an asshole in the room.

Presidential Address Today

Not bad at all. I have no doubt that Republicans will roar incoherently about socialism while at once whomping up anti-governmental populism fed by the very abuses and distress Obama seeks to address here, meanwhile the left, rather than supporting the President, will accuse him of being a Bush-lite stealth corporatist even before Congress fails to implement this minimally reasonable intervention, pretending that the failure of a carefully crafted compromise somehow provides evidence that whatever incomparably more radical intervention they happen to advocate in the abstract (as Obama himself surely would prefer more radical interventions in the abstract as well, having both a brain and a heart as he does) would somehow have a better chance to get implemented than the moderate intervention that can't get through.

Would You Hit It?

So, Corporate Media CAN Show Dead Civilian Bodies In the Streets...

...so long as they weren't murdered by Americans with bombs and guns.

Good to know.

Futurological Brickbats

The technological, properly so-called, is more stylish than it is truthful.

Many more here.

Futurological Brickbats

Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.

Many more here.

Things To Forget If You Are A Republican Contemplating Haiti

The Movement Conservative "think-tank" Heritage Foundation has a helpful suggestion concerning aid to Haiti:

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

No doubt the Killer Clown would do a heckuva job aiding Haiti. The title of the Heritage Foundation statement, flabbergasting enough, is "Things to Remember While Helping Haiti." In a surprise move, the statement also manages to spend more time demagoguing about Castro and Chavez than documenting the actual human catastrophe in Haiti. One wonders what grisly privatization schemes these Shock Doctrinaire conservatives have in mind when they speak of "bold" responses. The mind reels.

MundiMuster! Sign MoveOn's Petition Against Efforts to Block Obama's Enforcement of the Clean Air Act

Sign here.

A new sneak attack in the Senate could block much of the progress President Obama's made on global warming and force him to adopt President Bush's climate policy.

The vote is set for next week, and at this point it's too close to call. If it passes, it will be a major setback for clean energy and global warming.

Sign here.

Honest Injun'?

PoliticalWire:

RNC Chairman Michael Steele called for Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to step down as U.S. Senate majority leader "in the wake of revelations of Mr. Reid's remarks in 2008 about Barack Obama's skin color and dialect," the New York Times reports. Said Steele: "There's a big double standard here. When Democrats get caught saying racist things, you know an apology is enough.

Uh huh. As usual, the GOP (which feeds on American racism like its life depended on it -- and it does) accuses anybody who notices racism as racist for doing so. Losers.

MoDo's a DoDo

Honestly, why is anybody willing to pay Maureen Dowd to write her endless high school yearbook pseudo-psychologizing crapola? Obama isn't Spock (if only), and if you or anybody else elected him to be your Daddy and make all the Bad Dad booboos go bye-bye that is honestly something you should take up with your goddamn therapist (see how easy and empty such moves are?) rather than slathering it into the world's eyeballs under the heading of commentary or analysis or whatever the hell that is supposed to be .

And while I'm on this tear, how can it be that we spend months talking about batshit crazy paranoid fantasies about non-existing totalitarian "death panels" when we should be talking about actual healthcare reform, whomped up pseudo-scandals about climate-scientist e-mails while the earth veers toward genocidal climate catastrophe, hysterical ticking time bomb thought-experiments when Geneva Conventions on torture were actually being violated in our names, Obama's failure to "change the tone" while the GOP literally announces its plan to obstruct Obama in historically unprecedented ways and then does precisely that? Why are we always talking about the issues we are actually engaging with through these fucked up proxy discussions? Why do factual disputes (most of which really do involve questions and problems that would benefit from real dispute) always get deranged by these completely non factual matters?

There are no death panels (unless unscrupulous for-profit denials of coverage count as such), there is no version of catastrophic climate change that doesn't involve hundreds of millions of unnecessary human deaths, there are no justifications for the actual criminal acts of torture that happened in our names, nobody thinks pundits on tee vee are cute and nobody with any intelligence thinks Washington is best understood as a re-enactment of junior high school.

Just. Stop. It.

Transhumanists Are Not Just Wrong, They Are Revealingly Dishonest

In a recent piece transhumanist James Hughes writes:

I want to seriously examine… how the failure of techno-utopian hype has sometimes produced an anti-scientific backlash. I want to take seriously the idea that “superlative technocentricity” performs an anti-democratic ideological function, that promising techno-fixes for social problems can be used to distract from immediate social needs and injustices. More darkly yet, I want to discuss how the techno-utopians’ association with eugenics and totalitarianism set back both democratic and scientific progress in the 20th century.

These are all good things to take seriously. That's why I write about these very topics so often on Amor Mundi.

But let me say three things about the fact that James Hughes is saying these things now and in this way:

First, nobody has to join a Robot Cult to assume a more critical perspective on technoscience issues or upon the historical vicissitudes of technodevelopmental struggles (and please remember that criticism isn't just "code" for uncritical Luddism, negativity, pessimism, or cynicism). Nobody has to join a Robot Cult to become a scientist or an engineer or a doctor or a science scholar or a technodevelopmental policy wonk. Indeed, if you want to have a progressive impact on the distribution of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits and support a more secular, equitable, diverse, technnoscientifically literate culture and public policy I daresay one of the first things you would want to do is get as far away as possible from the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology. You would do far better to just get training in the relevant field that interests you (by the way, if you are a coder that doesn't make you a scientists, especially not any kind of biologist, and if you are a gamer that doesn't make you a coder let alone a scientist), and to the extent that you want a theoretical or organizational analysis to contextualize technodevelopmental issues and your place among them I propose that you would do well to engage in and with works arising out of STS (the acronym stands either for Science and Technology Studies or sometimes describes the imbrication of Science-Technology-Society), or become acquainted with Environmental Justice analysis or Permaculture practices. Although one has to take care to avoid corporatist hype and digital-utopianism here and there, New Media theories and a2k and p2p analyses can also be good places to explore to a point. Bioethics is even more of a minefield, saturated with hyperbolic bioconservative and transhumanist tropes and too often beholden to neoliberal imperatives, and I am hesitant to recommend it as a particularly useful location in any general kind of way for critical intervention or purchase (I regret that, and blame transhumanists as one of many causes of this problem).

Second, if a very few Robot Cultists say comparatively more reasonable things on technocultural and technodevelopmental topics than most of their fellows do, isn't there a point at which these objections and qualifications begin to function more as public relations efforts to make what is unreasonable seem more palatably reasonable to "outsiders" than efforts to make what is unreasonable more reasonable among "insiders"? James Hughes in particular has devoted enormous energies to peddling his "transhumanist" sub(cult)ure as a socially democratic movement despite its explicitly reactionary origins in the irrationally exuberant anti-governmentality and techno-utopianism of the Extropians and incredibly persistent market libertarian and right-authoritarian (eugenics, technocracy, technofix apologetics for incumbent interests) viewpoints suffuse its organizational and rhetorical culture to an extraordinary extent to this day. Hughes might protest this (just as market libertarians protest the proper identification of their politics as right wing rather than buying their preposterous line that they are "beyond left and right"), but he is clearly aware enough of the problem to try to paper it over with misleading surveys in which a whole constellation of weird right-wing ideologies that like to pretend they are not right-wing (Postrelian Dynamists, upwingers, libertopians and the like) dis-aggregate the transhumanist right cohort as against a monolithically construed left to create a false impression of a left-leaning culture more generally. His recent efforts to thread a needle between claims that his sub(cult)ure uniquely champions Reason and "The Enlightenment Project" against irrationalists like those effete elite aesthetes in Literature Departments (historians of enlightenment discourses will be intrigued to be taught by the Robot Cultists that there is just one Enlightenment Project in the first place, let alone that a handful of boys-with-their-toys calling themselves "transhumanists" are The One True Enlightenment's anointed Priests) while at once trying to soft-peddle this hard line by offering up conciliatory gestures here and there to communities of faith that accept the separation of Church and State and to those critics on the left who have long forcefully exposed the pretensions and authoritarian vulnerabilities of reductionist and purely positivist accounts of reason. To the extent that Hughes wants to pretend his more nuanced characterizations of rationality, such as they are, manage to be representative of transhumanist-identified people more generally he is indulging yet again in public relations spin doctoring as he has long done in rationalizing the ineradicable rightward-skew of transhumanist political discourse. I have to say Hughes is on especially thin ice in this area, inasmuch as he has had what can at best be described as, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude toward many critiques of reductionist and objectivist understandings of reason, and has been quite cheerful to jump on know-nothing bandwagons excoriating the "relativist menace" of pomo humanities scholarship, a bugbear better suited to the fulminating Culture Warriors of the right eight times out of ten (although Hughes is far from the only person of the left to make this particular error in casting about for a villain to account for a generation of ineffectual left politics in the US). Quite apart from all that, I have to circle back to an earlier point again here, namely, that nobody has to join a Robot Cult to assume a more pragmatic or constructivist vantage on enlightenment discourses, or to appreciate the value of, say, the Frankfurt School to the analysis of bureaucratic administration or mass-mediation in our technoscientific society. Indeed, the Robot Cult Caucus is close to the last place anybody in their right mind would turn for such a perspective. The question remains why Hughes' selective appreciation of political, historical, epistemological nuances few of his fellow transhumanists have the wit or concern or patience to share with him leads him to rewrite transhumanism in the image of his unrepresentative view for public consumption rather than leading him to question whether or not these deranged Robot Cultists are his proper fellows in the first place? Can the pay and media attention of being a relatively sane fish in a pond of crazies really be satisfying enough to make that calculation a sensible one?

Third, you will have noticed that the idea of "superlative technocentricity" is quoted in Hughes' formulation. What is not indicated in his piece is that I am personally the one he is quoting in that phrase. "Superlative technocentricity" is not just some general notion floating around that is generally interesting to science and technology scholars that he snatched up from the ethereal zeitgeist, it is a central term in an elaborated critique of transhumanists, extropians, digital-utopians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and nano-cornucopiasts involving countless thousands of words written over a half decade by yours truly and nobody else. Just as you will find transhumanists soft-peddling their membership organizations as "technoprogressive think tanks" using terms and even extended formulations skimmed directly from writings of mine, I presume they will now offer up criticisms of the "superlativity" exhibited by members of rival Robot Cult sects with which they happen at the moment to be squabbling in an effort to demonstrate their own comparative "reasonableness." The level of dishonesty exhibited in these indirect non-engaged engagements not to mention opportunistic appropriations of my writing are truly pathetic. You can be sure that I do not protest the fact that I am not being properly credited by the transhumanists when they make their selective uses of my terms, formulations, and analyses in an effort to sanewash their sub(cult)ural Program for the benefit of better educated or more mainstream progressive audiences or in their intersectarian skirmishes for dominance within the tinpot fiefdom of their marginal movement. No, I don't think it does me particular credit to be taken seriously by Robot Cultists in the first place and so it is not such "credit" I seek from them. I just think it is a symptom of the bankruptcy of their discourse that they resort to these shabby appropriations. It is especially dishonest that while transhumanists, oh, I mean "technoprogressives" scoop up congenial formulations from my writing, they never apply themselves to the questions and problems I address directly to them in the very pieces of mine they mine for their selling points.

The title of this post accuses that "Transhumanists Are Not Just Wrong, They Are Revealingly Dishonest." I have made it clear why I think at least some high profile transhumanist-identified figures are revealingly dishonest. As to why I say they are wrong, may I recommend the six short posts in my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism, or, if you are a real glutton for punishment, the sprawling archive of posts (it's now up to sixty two entries) corralled together in The Superlative Summary? (I find it is more useful, by the way, to read the pieces in the Summary from last to first, from most recent to most distant.)

The Taser and the Waterboard: Is the Tide Turning on America's Culture of Torture?

The first thing to say is that the uncivilized idea that police should be able to torture people with tasers to make their jobs easier is directly connected to the uncivilized idea that interrogators should be able to torture people at the waterboard to make their jobs easier.

The second thing to say is that every single minute devoted to questions about whether tasers yield effective compliance or waterboards yield reliable information is a minute in which we are not talking about the absolute unacceptable evil and illegality of these practices and hence facilitating them (even if one is siding with sane experts in insisting that tasers are unsafe and recklessly overused and that information obtained through torture is notoriously unreliable).

The third thing to say is that the 9th Circuit Court's recent decision to limit taser use seems to be rippling wholesomely outward already, impacting law enforcement training programs, just as the Obama Administration repudiation of torture is a welcome thing.

The fourth thing to say is that since the taser ruling limits but doesn't ban the device (and of course the taser is just one of a whole constellation of questionable "non-lethal" policing techniques and devices, chemical, acoustic, radioactive, digital ominously proliferating in defiance of Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly), and since those responsible for torture have not been prosecuted for their war crimes we are far from addressing the dangerous authoritarian substance of these techniques and their rationales in anything like a consistent or sufficient way.

But perhaps we can discern a promising turning of the bloody tide here?

God's Crappy Agents

via Think Progress:

God, I really believe, has placed me here for a reason because who else and why else would you do this unless there’s something inside of you that says right now you need to be here to do this?

As with many comparable statements made by Dubya the Killer Clown during his catastrophic tenure in the White House, I have to assume that Steele's declaration that God has to have put him where he is represents a fragile circuitous sanity-preserving confession that even he realizes how utterly incompetent, surreally inappropriate, and completely out of his depth he is, that one really has to posit something like the workings of providential machineries to make any kind of sense of the position he has assumed, else he might literally start screaming and run for the hills flinging feces in an absolute abject wild-eyed panic.

Today's Random Wilde

Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

John Lennon Helps Make Amor Mundi More Positive

For Those Who Have Asked For A Pic of Me and Eric Together

Ulysses Twitterized

via Sadly, No!

sdedalus0610 Mulligan is teh fat. Drinks 2nite w/Bloom. His wife fcks dudes when he's out and screams "YES, YES" like banshee when she cumz LOL

I'm holding fast to my curmudgeonly assessment that -- apart from its usefulness on those rare occasions when moment by moment reportage is warranted -- twitter is a brain-breaking brutalization of common sense and common cause and commonwealth.

MundiMuster! Sign the PFAW Petition Calling on the Senate to Confirm Dawn Johnsen

Sign the Petition

The White House announced today that President Obama will renominate Dawn Johnsen, his choice to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), along with other nominees whose confirmations were obstructed by Republicans last year. In a late December political maneuver, GOP senators refused to allow the nominations to remain on the executive calendar, forcing the President to resubmit their nominations when the Senate reconvenes later this month.

The renomination of Johnsen -- the Obama nominee who has waited the longest for a vote -- is especially noteworthy. Currently a professor at Indiana University School of Law, Johnsen is extraordinarily well-qualified to head the Office of Legal Counsel. She served for more than five years in that office during the Clinton administration, including as its acting head for more than a year. She has the bipartisan support of both her home state senators and from former heads of OLC from both political parties. Senior officials from every administration since Gerald Ford's have endorsed her nomination.

"President Obama made an excellent choice in Professor Johnsen to lead OLC, and today he's shown his willingness to stand on principle and call the Republicans on their attack and delay tactics," said Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of People For the American Way. "President Obama's decision today is a refutation of the GOP's efforts to spin this eminently qualified nominee as a controversial choice, and he should be applauded. Professor Johnsen's legal scholarship, her integrity, her substantive knowledge, and her commitment to this nation's security and to the rule of law will serve this country well once she's confirmed."

In a recent analysis, People For the American Way documented the new records in abuse of the filibuster set by Senate Republicans, who have forced time-consuming procedural votes on dozens of legislative matters despite broad bipartisan support.

"Despite being presented with an obviously qualified group of nominees, the GOP has plumbed new depths in delay and obstruction in the Senate-especially in preventing the President from filling crucial administration positions," said Baker. "The GOP seems intent on delay, delay, delay, no matter what the cost to the nation. The Senate should move quickly to confirm these nominees."

People For the American Way is collecting petitions calling on the Senate to confirm Dawn Johnsen. You can see the petition language here.

Republicans' Michael Steele Conundrum

Do they opt to look stooopid for keeping him around?

Or do they opt to look raaacist for dropping him?

(None of this is to deny that Republicans as a cohort are in fact both considerably more stupid and more racist than Americans in general. Clearly, they are.)

Special Bonus: Check out PoliticalWire's Top Ten Michael Steele Quotes. "Crazyness."

Crazy Talk in the Times of Terror

Given how many more Americans die each week at the hands of murderers than have died in the decade-long Global War on Terror, why is it that the abiding reality of murderous criminality has not inspired us to relinquish our civil liberties and the rule of law?

Actually, of course, Republicans do indeed whomp up fear of violent criminality to justify ever more intrusive surveillance at home and ever more draconian sentencing practices, even when the rate of violent crime is declining. But even so, the point remains that fear of terrorist violence that objectively kills fewer Americans than peanut allergies or deer crossing rural roadways is causing us to divert our entire national will into flabbergastingly costly literally unwinnable wars without intelligible missions across the globe, bankrupting our nation to no discernible purpose, all the while undermining our democratic ethos at home, accommodating free citizens to the ethos of martial law, state secrets, violations of civil liberties for reasons of state, invisible budget priorities, hierarchical chains of command.

Nobody would ever propose we dismantle the police and the criminal justice system even though every single day many Americans are failed by them, and yet the prospect of anyone, anywhere, however remote, being the victim of terrorist criminality seems to inspire an existential panic so sweeping that many Americans howl to embrace in the face of it the kind of authoritarianism they had been willing to fight to the death for generations.

Come to think of it, given how many more Americans have died in the illegal immoral wars and undeclared wars and occupations inspired by terrorism than have died at the hands of the terrorists themselves, why is it that the fear of death that seems to have inspired the Global War on Terror hasn't inspired a comparatively greater horror of the war itself that is so much deadlier than the terrorism that provoked it?

"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"

Bloggerheads has an interesting exchange up between the always fabulous but far-too-kind-to-transhumanists Annalee Newitz and one of the transhumanists she is far too kind to, James Hughes.

They cover a lot of interesting ground in their conversation, and I found that Annalee especially said lots of stuff that had me nodding my head sympathetically. I so rarely agree with anybody as much as I tend to agree with Annalee that that experience itself is nicely edifying. Nevertheless, one of the things that excited me most in their exchange was something Annalee said that I think I disagree with.

At one point she said in a rather offhand sort of way that "science fiction is the entertainment wing of futurism."

As somebody who has been devoted to science fiction ferociously all my life but who frankly abhors futurology, Annalee's subsumption of science fiction under a futurological wing was a window on a really alien mapping of terrain that preoccupies me as intensely as anything I can think of.

And after all, what queergeek doesn't love an alien contact narrative?

I certainly would never want to put words in Annalee's mouth, but I can say a little about how I would personally relate science fiction and the futurological to suggest how her phrasing here might be at odds with my own.

My own glib variation on Annalee's phrase would be to say that boner-bill commercials and ads for the armed forces involving CGI laser platforms zapping debris out of the path of orbiting satellites with the caption "It's Not Science Fiction" better represent the "entertainment wing of futurism."

In my view futurology is always selling a kind of reassurance to incumbent interests that "the future" (which I forcefully distinguish from futurity) will be an extrapolation or amplification of the terms of their own parochial present. That futurism and futurology function primarily as a genre of reassurance -- even if sometimes in a disasterbatory mode in which incumbents get to stew in what usually looks to be a high state of arousal in their worst pet apocalyptic fears, their own private Room 101 -- is suggested to me already in the very notion that one could append to the radical contingency of futurity ("future is a process, not a destination" as Bruce Sterling rightly scolds) an -ism or an -ology, of all things, in the first place.

Futurology, it seems to me, is just another variation of the familiar swindle in which we are bamboozled into mistaking the profession of a wish or promise or unwarranted prediction for an asset. In futurism as in an enormous amount of corporate sales, promotion, and public relations discourse one is parted from one's money or deranged in one's wants by the projection or prediction of some hyperbolic hope or anxiety idientified with "the future," typically a straightforward extrapolation or amplification of key terms of the parochial present.

As I have remarked elsewhere, I regard futurology as the quintessential genre and gesture of neoliberal ideology. The characterization of the waste, stratification, destabilization, precarization, and distress exacerbated and exploited by neoliberal financialization as "accelerating change" "acceleration of acceleration" or even "progress toward transcension" by the current crop of futurologists (especially in the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology) is the reductio ad absurdum of futurism as neoliberal (corporate-militarist) apologia.

Not to put too fine a point on it, financialization is the temporal (futurological) elaboration of the alienation already enabled, first, through the abstraction from the unjust social conditions and unsustainable ecological impacts of production through the fetishized commodity-form and also, second, through the spatialization of uneven development/(post)colonial organizations of exploitation.

From a political perspective the present has always been riven by the diverse vantages and aspirations of the plural stakeholders who share and contest the world, peer to peer, and hence the present is always as Hannah Arendt put it, "between past and future," a collaboration and antagonism interminably reconciling the diversity of human hopes and histories, always restlessly edging us waywardly elsewhere and otherwise. In our own anthropocene epoch of thoroughly technoscientific agencies the intensity, inter-dependency, scope, and stakes of this open futurity in our present (in our plural presenting, peer-to-peer) is exacerbated to a point of crisis for which the word "revolution" or the phrase "quarrel of the ancients and moderns" are hopelessly inadequate.

Science fiction, it seems to me, provides the generic conventions through which our technoscientific present can be rendered unfamiliar enough for us to gain some critical and imaginative purchase here and now. Science fiction at its best redirects us to the open futurity inhering in our plural present, and is far from reassuring. If anything, science fiction mobilizes stakeholders in the present to educate, agitate, and organize where we are on our way elsewhere.

For me the futurological (as well as the futuristic, which I think was well characterized by Daniel Harris as a style vocabulary involving the perverse denial of the present at the level of details -- which is not at all the same thing as a critical interrogation of the terms of the present -- treated thereupon without cause as markers of "progress") is a profoundly de-politicizing discourse. This feels paradoxical, I know, since we associate technoscience with disruption and denaturalization. But to politicize or de-naturalize the status quo is to insist that the terms on which the present is given are open to collective contestation, are contingent formations caught up in interminable historical struggle. When historical change is figured as reductively techno-determined (deduced, extrapolated, amplified, or even hyperbolized from a parochial vantage in the present) then it is radically de-politicized however disruptive or "transcendental" its apparent preoccupations. It is not surprising, then, however paradoxical it may be, that we find every futurism functionally to be a retro-futurism, a reactionary endorsement of incumbency stealthed behind the mask of a false festival of change.

I won't deny that there is plenty of science fiction that takes on the coloration of the futurological, that sells itself as a spinning of predictive what-ifs in a way that disavows it is always much more about who we are and where we find ourselves now than it is indulging in some at once neutralized and hyperbolized blue-skying about what the world will be like in the next decade or the next century. But it seems to me that such pieces are almost inevitably camp (or just crap), and that they are still most interesting when they are treated as symptomatic engagements with their historical situations anyway.

I have sometimes derided futurologists as folks who cannot distinguish science from science fiction, or futurologists as would-be sf writers so inept that they not only endlessly regurgitate sf tropes and conceits with whiskers on them but also they don't even try to do the work of elementary character and narrative and setting building that even crappy fiction writers grasp as part of their task. But I do think it is crucial that we avoid making too close an identification of sf genres with the promotional pseudo-scientific genres of futurology, and certainly that we resist subsuming science fiction and speculative fiction underneath the futurist or futurological heading altogether.

While I will grant that some sf functions as a retro-futurological celebration of incumbency as the eternal protagonist of history the rest of us can best hope to consume or screen, I think it is crucial to insist as well that much sf is a critical intervention in the present that is politicizing and hence democratizing, at once testifying to and invigorating the open futurity inhering in presence, peer to peer, and as such the insistent opposite of futurism and the futurological.

"The Future" of futurism and futurology is constituted through the denial of open futurity. Futurisms and ologies characteristically substitute for the promise of political freedom arising out of open futurity the sterile promise of incapacious capacitating amplifications of instrumental force. They pretends their essentially promotional discourse is a science when it isn't, that their sales-pitch is foresight when it isn't, and that their celebration of triumphalist incumbency is a doctrine of change when it isn't. Quite in tune with the neoliberal spirit of its time, futurology originates in facile error and consummates in fraud, and to the likely ruin of the world.

Futurological Brickbats

Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.

Many more here.

Re-Visiting Drug Re-Importation Before Dorgan Re-Tires (Updated)

At the tail end of my last post, I tacked on this rather throw-away comment:

I know there is a lot of speculation that Dorgan's retirement expresses disgruntlement over his drug re-importation amendment going down in flames due to Obama's pre-emptive Pharma deal. I have a feeling drug re-importation will re-appear as a separate measure after Obama signs healthcare reform. That would be both a real crowd pleaser and a gift to the Base (not to mention being good policy) coming in to mid-terms -- that, plus a sense of a jobs turnaround are crucial by November if you ask me -- and Dorgan was making noises earlier today that he considers re-importation to be achievable before his retirement. Dorgan may indeed feel disgruntled about the debased state of the Senate, but I just don't think the setback on drug re-importation is anything like the whole story.

In the Moot for that post, reader "Thanatz" responds to my declaration "I have a feeling drug re-importation will re-appear as a separate measure after Obama signs healthcare reform":

Whence comes this "feeling"? I tend to agree with you that modifications of the current Senate bill sold as minor fixes after adoption (assuming the ineffectual House gets that version rammed down their throats basically as-is) would probably be more conducive to progressive interests and Dem seat retention than simply rejecting the bill as is, but I simply fail to see where anyone could find any evidence for the hope that any such fixes would actually happen in the world we inhabit. Given the howling that would inevitably result from the very same "centrist" "Dems" and obstructionist repugs that have gifted us this shit sandwich, I can in no way fathom why ORahma would not get the fuck outta HCR-Dodge as soon as the 60th vote was tallied. The Senate bill is gift to the base, or at least that's what they'll sell it as.

Well, I'm just going to set to the side what you may be insinuating with the silly rewriting of Obama as ORahma, since I have no truck with the weird world of left Rahmsputinism, nor do I agree with the self-defeating suggestion that corporations are Obama's "true base" even if I grant -- as every sensible person of the left surely does by now -- that corporate-militarism has debased our democracy beyond recognition and, one fears, beyond redemption.

But, to your substantial point about where my "feeling" is coming from that there is a real and not only wishful hope for a re-visitation of the drug re-importation legislation any time soon when Dorgan failed to get it tacked onto the Healthcare Reform so recently:

On the Randi Rhodes Show today Dorgan said that not only was he not retiring because of the scuppering of Drug Re-Importation but that he was going to be in office for a whole year during which he fully intended to revisit this issue and with the expectation of success. (Regrettably I cannot find a transcript but I'm sure there's an .mp3 somewhere.)

Over on TPM there is an article that contains a transcript of an exchange with Dorgan on the Ed Shultz show that takes up similar themes, not to mention some interesting possibilities otherwise (cabinet post, anyone?):

Dorgan fought for an amendment the Obama administration helped to kill during the health care debate, and Schultz asked if that left him with a "bad taste." "I'm not going to tell you I've got a bad taste in my mouth," Dorgan said. "I'm going to get that amendment passed ... and save the American consumers $100 billion." Schultz asked if Dorgan would consider a spot on the Obama Cabinet. "It hasn't been offered yet, Ed," Dorgan said. [emphases added --d]

It is easy enough to dismiss this as happy-talk or Dorgan making nicey-nice, but it simply didn't play that way to me, and I see little evidence that Dorgan has been circumspect about his disappointments hitherto.

Also, though again I daresay this is easily dismissed as Mouseketeer Roll-Call Charlie Brown running to kick Lucy's football stuff on my part -- I do love it how half the time I'm derided as Captain Bringdown and the other half I'm derided as the Happy Hippy -- the fact is that Axelrod among other Obama Administration figures have actually explicitly indicated that they do mean to revisit the issue themselves as for example here.

The fact is that I think Obama made his campaign promise to allow us to bargain with Pharma for lower prices because he believed it (like every other non-insane non-asshole believes it), and I think Obama then pre-emptively took it off the table because he figured he had to do so in order to have a chance to succeed in any kind of healthcare reform unlike the seven Presidents who have preceded him in this ambition and especially given the current structural contraints of the Senate.

I don't agree that revisiting this notion would be going back on the deal with Pharma, nor that this deal followed by a revisitation sequel would properly be regarded as breaking his campaign promise. I also disagree that it is quite so hard to circumvent obstructionism by Republican-empowered Conservadems on a straight-sell of drug importation (it's more competition! it'll lower costs for seniors!) than when it's bundled together with a bazillion other provisions as in healthcare reform more generally.

That is to say, it is easier to sell a good squirt of mustard you can put on your shit sandwich than it is to sell a shit sandwich with mustard on it.

I am far from saying this is a sure thing -- but Obama needs to give his Base some happy pills for mid-term turnout and he shows every sign of knowing it. This looks like a good path for many reasons. By all means let the cries of nth dimensional chess and Obamaboticism commence, I'm just pointing out that my "feeling" does have a basis other than fancy, in case you were wondering.

UPDATE:

I See in Democratic Retirements A Different Story Than the One GOPers Are Spinning

Republicans like to spin a good yarn (emphasis on the spin), no doubt about it. And I can't say I'm surprised that they are hyperventilating about the recent "wave" of Democratic retirements. But I have to think that at least some of the more reality-based operatives in the GOP -- assuming they haven't all been purged by now -- are feeling far from rosy about these developments.

In the House there are an average of sixteen retirements every couple of years, and at twelve so far we'll remain below that average even if we get a couple more. Certainly we are far from the twenty-eight retirements in 1994 that set up the wave Republicans keep evoking to frame our present situation. I must say the differences so far are so stark it makes these efforts at hard-selling the storyline look rather more desperate than worrisome. It would take far more retirements and far worse poll numbers to get me worried about losing the House. Which isn't to deny that could happen, but it simply doesn't look like reality as far as I can see.

Of course the Senate is another story. I do expect that Democrats will lose their so-called "filibuster proof" supermajority this November. Possibly not, by the way, but I expect they will. But since the current literally unprecedented irresponsible monolithic Republican and selective Conservadem obstructionism ensures that this majority is completely phony in terms of actual governance even though it remains a stick to beat Democrats with (oh, how incompetent Dems must be not to get anything done because in the face of our relentless anti-governmental misbehavior!) I can't say that this is a loss that is entirely without a silver lining, especially if one thinks about how to frame a more substantial Democratic presence in the Senate via the 2012 Presidential campaign in which conditions are far more favorable to Dems than they are for 2010.

I was truly surprised and distressed to hear of Dorgan's retirement. But I frankly felt relief rather than gloom to hear of Dodd's retirement later that same day (and not because I think Dodd is anything like the worst Senator around, in fact I think he has been a pretty good Senator all things considered -- the odious Lieberman is the other Senator of Dodd's State, after all), since it means that the seat Dorgan's retirement likely loses us is compensated by the seat we are likely to keep because of Dodd's retirement. If only the awful Blanche Lincoln would retire from her imperiled perch to give us a chance at keeping her seat with a more electable candidate as Dodd has done!

On a separate note, I know there is a lot of speculation that Dorgan's retirement expresses disgruntlement over his drug re-importation amendment going down in flames due to Obama's pre-emptive Pharma deal. I have a feeling drug re-importation will re-appear as a separate measure after Obama signs healthcare reform. That would be both a real crowd pleaser and a gift to the Base (not to mention being good policy) coming in to mid-terms -- that, plus a sense of a jobs turnaround are crucial by November if you ask me -- and Dorgan was making noises earlier today that he considers re-importation to be achievable before his retirement. Dorgan may indeed feel disgruntled about the debased state of the Senate, but I just don't think the setback on drug re-importation is anything like the whole story.

Not Blogging Much

I haven't posted for a couple of days, especially since I've started re-reading a slew of economics and political economy texts in anticipation of the two courses I'm teaching next term at UC Berkeley (descriptions here) . Also, I'll admit I gave a whole day over to re-watching all the episodes of Glee so far when my "Road to Sectionals" DVD arrived (yeah, I'm a gleek), so no blogging that day, either.

Welcome to Thunderdome!

Robert Cruickshank provides an enormously useful if a bit terrifying survey of all the ballot initiatives that have qualified or look likely (ish) to qualify for the upcoming June and November elections in 2010.

If you are a California citizen you absolutely must become educated about the politics of these initiatives. Cruickshank is clearly right to say that these initiatives might well shape the State pretty decisively for a generation.

Too many fighting liberal Californians know much more about National politics than they do about State politics.

And yet State politics directly impact millions of lives in ways we have a real say and stake in as Californians. Also, the sheer scale of California's cultural influence, economic impact, and regulatory ripple-effects actually impacts National politics across the board in ways we are uniquely in a position to shape as Californians.

California Democrats frankly might have more influence democratizing the whole country if they focused exclusively on defeating the anti-tax anti-government Republican minority and its monolithic obstructionism via the arcane 2/3rds provision in the California Constitution (as in so many things, when it comes to Republican zealots deploying irresponsible minority obstructionism to yield shock doctrine politics, as went California so goes the Nation -- let's make their defeat here a comparable precedent), and then through the imposition of environmental, safety, labor, civil rights, universal healthcare standards create a secure base in California from which the rest of the nation can learn positive lessons and a progressive momentum with which the Democratic Party might drag the whole country kicking and screaming into a more sustainable, more equitable and pluralistic, healthier, better educated, more energy and resource secure tomorrow.

Democratic Netroots, Discouraged and Encouraging

Given the last post, and a whole parade of posts railing at Republican outrages and Democratic-Netroots mis-steps and histrionics over the last couple of weeks, you may be surprised to hear that I am feeling quite encouraged overall right about now.

In the first place, I think polling numbers keep showing that the crazytown right-wingnut Teabagger base and its embrace by the "mainstream" Republican Party indicates a radical ongoing self-marginalization of Movement Republicanism as any kind of sustainable force in American politics in its present incarnation.

I think one should be careful not to forget that broad disappointment with the healthcare reform process is actually split between those who are disappointed that reform does not go far enough and those who think it goes too far and that this split will not benefit Republicans in the generalized way often suggested by pundits -- and this will be even more true when passage of reform yields none of the apocalyptic outcomes saturating Republican rhetoric, nor even consistent Republican opposition to reform once it is in place.

This is rather like the confusions of those who regard the rightward skew apparent among Independents as a danger sign to Democrats, when it is clearly a function of dis-identification across the right with the Republicans and hence is far more a danger sign to Republicans than to Democrats.

In terms both of polling on both the whole gamut of policy questions and on party-identification, America is the center-left nation it has always been since the New Deal and ever more inclined to identify with Democrats over Republicans. Obama is enormously popular, Hillary Clinton is enormously popular, Nancy Pelosi is more popular than you might think and considerably more so than any elected Republicans. America has repudiated Movement Republicans and that repudiation is not ebbing in the least.

Republican ideologues might be able to succeed here and there as celebrities theses days but they are less and less likely all the time to succeed in becoming or remaining elected.

This is encouraging.

Also, I think that saner voices are beginning to prevail across the Democratic Netroots, suggesting a very wholesome tendency to self-criticism and self-correction among us. The Netroots is making more quickly and thoroughly than might have been expected the enormously difficult transition from the blanket opposition to the Killer Clown administration in which the Netroots were baptised (their birth was in the corporate-mediated outrage of the Clinton impeachment, which set the scene for the Gore-bashing facilitation of the 2000 Bush putsch and the subsequent cheerleading of an immoral illegal war based on lies) into a force for the facilitation of democratization through actual governance in which we are ourselves implicated and responsible rather than a strident outside opposition.

I think the relatively swiftness of this transition (which took place through the fraught Obama/Hillary nomination contest and now through the heartbreaking sausage-making of the healthcare reform process) testifies in turn to a surprisingly quick if still-ongoing self-education up a steep learning curve about the baroque architecture of Senatorial, Department of Justice, and Congressional Subcommittee processes and the realities of democratizing governance with a majority so precarious as to be effectively Phony.

This, too, is encouraging.

I'm discouraged by the apparent fate of the Public Option, by the slow-moving to no-moving of torture and war-profiteering prosecutions, by bailouts for financial fraudsters, by the ruinous escalation in Afghanistan, by pointless betrayals of queer citizens on DADT and DOMA -- but I'm more encouraged than not by the Democratic Netroots and hence about the prospects for the Democratic Party as a force for ongoing democratization in the United States in the short term, the middle term, and the long-term.

More, and Better, Democrats, and we can turn those discouragements around, and there's more where that came from. 06 and 08 were the starting gun not the finish line.

More, and Better, Democrats

Here in the United States the actually-existing alternative to enormously disappointing Democrats are enormously insane Republicans.

To be blunt, this means that those who are committed to the difficult work of ongoing democratization here must respond to our disappointment with Democrats by struggling to elect More, and Better, Democrats.

When you are feeling frustrated with Democrats this often feels like a deeply counter-intuitive policy, and it is always an emotionally draining one. For one thing, we feel personally let down or even insulted by failures of "our own" representatives, and when we take things personally we react more vociferously than we would otherwise. When Republicans behave even worse, the fact that they are behaving precisely as we expect them to do can actually blunt the intensity of our repudiations of them.

I've long noticed how commonplace it is for Democrats to respond to the delineation of some outrageous outlandish thing Republicans have done with a chorus of resigned or wry variations of "What did you expect?" "And your point is?" "What, are you surprised?" It is interesting to note how often the same people who roll their eyes at too predictable Republican outrages will then respond to the delineation of some terribly wrongheaded or disappointing thing Democrats have done with a chorus of incensed "A plague on both your houses!" "Obama is Bush's third term!" "Screw you guys, I'm going home!"

There are a couple of things to say about this odd state of affairs: First, both responses function substantially to empower Republican outrages (since predictable outrages are still outrageous and should provoke outrage and not a facilitative indifference, while to fail to support Democrats for whatever reason is also to enable Republicans). Second, taken together, these responses are weirdly inconsistent, the first assuming there is a definitive difference in our relation to the parties and hence in the parties themselves, while the second is premised on an evacuation of this difference (in ways that precipitate Republican victories over Democrats with consequences that immediately provide evidence to the contrary).

Now, I just said we should be outraged by the outrageousness of even predictable outrages, and this is surely as true of Democratic outrages as Republican, else I would be offering up my own corrupting double standards. Because any elected politician or party professional, of whatever party, is a human mammal you can be sure they are vulnerable to the errors and corruptions of their necessary collegiality with a group of people who by education, net-worth, and life-experiences are typically wildly unrepresentative of the people they presumably represent. They are embedded in an urgent race to raise funds for their next election bid. They are immersed in streams of spin and even misinformation from incumbent interests. They are in the weeds of policy sausage-making fraught with minute internecine squabbling with stakes that are not easily communicated to those who aren't actively participating in these struggles themselves. They tend to get insular and wary and defensive. Not to mention, of course, some are terribly corrupt or deluded or immoral or ideologically out of tune with contemporary secular-democratic majorities.

This means it really is important to educate, agitate, and organize democratizing campaigns, loudly to criticize errors and lapses in both Democratic and Republican figures, to pressure and shame all public officials who do the wrong thing, and so on.

I am a strong believer in the idea that Democrats should organize primary challenges against any Democrat whose voting record is to the right of the district she or he represents.

I also believe that Democrats should field candidates in every district, however conservative, in an effort to educate the citizens of that district about Democratic principles through the campaign process itself, and also in the interest of investing in long-term Democratic Party infrastructure building.

But it is simply wrong, in my view, to deny differences that make a difference between the two parties, however disappointing elected Democrats may be. It is simply wrong to think that it is better for Republicans to be in the Congressional majority or in the White than for Democrats to be in the Congressional majority or in the White House. It is simply wrong for concerned democratically-minded citizens in their disappointment with Democrats to facilitate Republican Congressional majorities or occupations of the White House. And it is also simply wrong to attribute to stealth Republican-equivalency disappointing outcomes that are in fact the consequence of monolithic Republican obstructionism and its empowerment of the selective obstructionism of the least progressive members on the margins of the Democratic caucus.

The principle we must have always in mind is: More, and Better, Democrats. If our response to a Republican outrage or Democratic disappointment leads us to divert our educational, agitational, organizational energies away from the principle of More, and Better Democrats, then we have always, always lost our way.

This is exactly equally true of those whose disappointment yields disengagement from the compromised work of ongoing democratization who agent, for better or for worse, happens to be the Democratic Party in the world we live or, or those whose disappointment yields engagement in quixotic Third Party efforts, whether Socialist or Green, when in the world we live in Third Parties are so utterly structurally marginalized. If supporting unelectable Greens or Socialists means diverting votes away from electable Democrats, it is, in my view, always a matter of effectively supporting Republicans and their authoritarian politics, especially inasmuch as any sensible Green or Socialist would have to caucus with the Democrats in any case to get anything done.

Under these circumstances, it seems to me a person (among whom I am one) whose convictions are to the left of the Democratic Party would do better to work to push the Democratic Party to the left -- always only in ways that do not endanger its retention of Congressional majorities and occupation of the White House -- than to try to create viability for a Third Party to the left. This is especially the case at an historical moment like this (given how truly laborious and long-ineffectual any actually realistic Third Party politics would have to be under prevailing structural condition) when the organized partisan Right is so institutionally entrenched while at once so dangerously extreme, defined by authoritarian fundamentalists of both the Christianist and Market-Ideologue varieties, and hence the demand for a United Front across the American left -- center-left, civil libertarian, fighting liberal, social democrat, democratic socialist, anarchist -- is so terribly urgent.

Again, the rule to remember is: More, and Better, Democrats.

The "More" is there to keep us pragmatic, to remind us that however disappointed we might be in Democrats, Republicans are the greater and more dangerous threat to Democracy.

The "Better" is there to keep us idealistic, to remind us to push always for more democratization, for more equity, for more diversity, for more peace, and never to become complacent or apologists for the status quo even when we are the ones most responsible for and to it.

Would You Hit It?

Today's Random Wilde

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Blogging Is Not A Hangover Cure

Now I Know.

Name Three Things That Made This Awful Decade Worth Living Through

Mine: Met Eric, earned my PhD, the night Obama won the Presidency.

Why Can't President Obama Make Us Suck Less?

Recent Republican complaints about Obama's failure to change the tone and end partisan rancor in Washington are funny.

Make them pay in the upcoming mid-term elections.

More, and better, Democrats.

Why Can't President Obama Overreact to Petty Criminals to Show How Strong We Are?

Recent Republican complaints about Obama's "security failures" are funny -- especially given Republican indifference to warnings about 9/11, Republican amnesia about the Anthrax attacks, Republican politicization of rising terror around the globe, Republican incomprehension that immoral illegal wars of choice based on lies recruit terrorists rather than diminishing them, Republican preferences for useless tyrannical "Security Theater" over sensible security measures, and the odd Republican lust to transform a rag-tag band of dumb criminals (with occasional dumb luck) into Warriors in a world-historical Conflict to Make Republican Penises Seem Bigger.

Make them pay in the upcoming mid-term elections.

More, and better, Democrats.

Today's Random Wilde

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

For Republicans Sanity Is A Pre 9-11 Mindset

There are actually successful, actually violent criminal acts taking place in every State in the Union every day, but for some reason Republicans are truly losing their minds over the fact that the President isn't losing his mind over the failed attempt of a would-be underpants incendiary to undertake a violent criminal act of his own. This is apparently because he is not just a pathetic criminal but a "terrorist," and even failed pathetic "terrorists" have magical powers that other kinds of pathetic criminals associated in rag-tag bands with other pathetic criminals don't have.

Either Republicans are lying in the most stupid imaginable way in all this, or they are the most flabbergasting cowards on earth (of course, both may be true). Come what may, in any remotely sane world Republicans should pay a crippling price for this ridiculous display in the upcoming mid-terms. I propose that more lefty blogs should focus their attention on seeing to it that this happens, rather than devoting quite so much energy to declaring Obama Bush's evil twin, strangling insurance reform in its cradle, and comparable exercises in shooting themselves in the foot. More, and better, Democrats is the only actually legible pathway to more progressive outcomes. Listen to what Republicans are saying they want America to be, and redirect the fight to the Right enemy.

Didn't We Already Go Through All This In One of the More Idiotic Chapters of the Presidential Campaign?

Pundits who imply idiotically that there is anything the least bit "foreign" about the State of Hawaii really should be permanently exiled to Mississippi or something.

The Moral Majority

Still a minority.

The Silent Majority

Still a minority.

Red State America

Still the poorest, least healthy, least literate, least employed, most divorced, most unplannedly pregnant, most violent America. And, yes, still a minority.

Sarah Palin's "Real America"

Still unreal.

Values Voters

Still vote for greedy, warmongering, white-racist, multiply-divorced, prostitute toe-sucking, closet-case Republicans on Election Day. You know, for kids!

The Culture of Life

Still hot for pre-emptive wars, back-alley abortions, poisonous environments, machine guns in the streets, and billions dying of starvation, unclean water, and treatable diseases across the planet so that the richest one percent of the planet can keep rolling in the dough… for life.

What BooMan Said

He writes much more clearly than I can, happily afflicted as I am with the theoryhead gene.

A Brief Comment on Walking and Chewing Gum As A Radical Democrat

If I say that we should empty our jails of nonviolent drug offenders and then fill them up with neoliberal financial fraudsters (well, we should), you should be very clear that the force of this utterance is not to provide you with reasons to declare Democrats the equivalent of Republicans when, under the actually existing conditions prevailing in the actually existing world through which actually-possible legislation is made, we pass what will surely be anemic compromised regulations heartbreakingly far from the substance of that initial utterance in response to which you said, "Right on!"

I have come to realize that people really do need to be reminded that there is a difference between the analyses and aspirations which define radical democracy, and provide the horizon toward which we push, and provide the standards on the basis of which we grasp prospectively opportunities for tactical advantages and grasp retrospectively the significance of tactical victories taking us step by step toward that horizon -- and the terms of the actual struggle within the structural limits of the system within which legislation stakes place institutionally as well as the limits imposed by the existential condition of a plurality of contending stakeholders that articulates all politics, properly so-called.

If the force of one's ideals is always only to cast every actually achievable outcome as a defeat when measured against the ideal, rather than providing the measure through which to understand the contribution of actually-achievable outcomes to the larger project of struggling to implement one's ideals, then one's ideals, in a word, suck. They are of no use to anybody, unless you want to think of politics as some kind of performance art -- which I can easily respect and even delight in so long as we are reasonably clear about what we are doing and what we think what we are doing is good for.

If actually achievable outcomes always only amount to a litany of defeats in the light of your idealism it seems to me you need to seriously consider becoming a violent revolutionary. While I am not a violent revolutionary myself, and indeed am committed to nonviolence precisely as a revolutionary strategy, I do have more respect for the integrity of radicals who take up violent revolution to overthrow a system they cannot countenance far more than those who in disdaining revolution affirm that system to a non-negligible extent and yet still endlessly whine and moan about relatively democratizing outcomes that are actually achievable within the terms of that system.

It doesn't make me a hypocrite to declare my radically democratizing aspirations nor to analyze failures of contemporary society in terms that take radical democratic ideals as their point of departure, whereupon I celebrate piecemeal reforms and compromised outcomes in the give and take of ongoing political struggle... it just makes me, if you will forgive me, somebody who can walk and chew gum at the same time.

If you can't hold such pragmatism and idealism together in your head when it comes to the urgent and fraught politics of radical democratization, consensualization, and planetization, here and now, peer to peer, I fear that I am inclined to think you too stupid, probably out of laziness or unexamined privilege, to be of more than accidental and occasional benefit to these politics (everyday fighting liberals simply conventionally loyal to the Democratic Party are actually more dependable by far when it comes to it); or, worse, I am inclined to think you a hypocrite who fails to see that one either accepts the terms under which progress is legislatively made or, rejecting those terms, becomes the kind of wrongheaded but respectable revolutionary few whining narcissistic so-called radicals ever even remotely try to be in their actual lives.

MundiMuster! Move Your Money!

First take your money out of the hands of the fraudsters, then just keep raising hell until they force the financial sector into sanity and decency through regulation, and start putting the worst of the fraudsters in jail where they belong.

They Might Be Giants Helps Keep Amor Mundi More Positive

Of course, only TMBG could produce a piece in this genre equal to the Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

Would You Hit It?

It's Centaur Wednesday, Y'all!

This week's delightful creature is the brainchild of Molly Lawless.

Today's Random Wilde

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

It Is Effortlessly Easy to Find Hundreds of Billions of Dollars to Spend Murdering People in Wars Hated By Huge Majorities

While It Is Impossibly Daunting to Find Any Money at All to Provide Healthcare for People Even Though Huge Majorities Want This.

America. Smell it.

Spending Billions on Highways Is Uncontroversial Even Though Environmentally and Culturally Catastrophic

While Anything Spent on Light Rail Is Highly Controversial Even Though Indispensable to Our Survival As A Civilization.

America. Smell it.

Warmongers Who Are Always Wrong About Everything And Bulldoze Us Into Mass Murdering Sprees to No Purpose Are Treated As Serious Statesmen

While People Who Advocate From the Start the Peace Everyone Eventually Desperately Wants Are Derided As Unserious Dirty Fucking Hippies

America. Smell it.

Bedwetting Bullies Blah Blah Blah

McCain, Lieberman, Graham, you weird mean old white guys really do suck.

Can Healthcare Reform Still Build A Bridge to Get Democrats Past The Phony Majority?

Josh Marshall is right.

The mid-terms are shaping up to be a referendum on health care reform, and that is a good thing for Democrats.

This seems counter-intuitive to informed policy-progressives right now because we know how crappy this reform looks to be, especially considering how far it is from what we wanted. But the fact is that Americans really do want a more just and more sensible healthcare system, they overwhelmingly approve of healthcare reform.

Part of the reason things have seemed rather bleak for Democrats in the midst of the reform morass is because the negativity of those who are angry and disappointed with reform because it isn't going nearly far enough is lumped together with the negativity of those who are enraged and freaked out with reform because they think it is going too far, combining into a kind of monolithic negativity all of which has been bearing down on Democrats as they struggle their way through a broken process to get something done despite absolute Republican obstructionism and cynical veto-empowered Conservadems.

But this now-monolithic negativity gets split the moment a bill passes and when mid-term campaigns are cast as referenda on health care reform. And it is Republicans who have by far the shorter end of the split stick here. They have whomped up their crazytown base with tales of socialism and fascism and death panels, and they are about to reap the whirlwind.

They must campaign on repealing the bill in its eeeevil totality. Democrats need only reply by pointing to all the incredibly popular provisions of the bill that the Republicans are forced to oppose by the extremity of their opposition to healthcare reform as such. As Marshall paints the picture of the scene of a debate between a Democrat and their Republican opponent:

"You really want to bring back denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions?" Do you really want to get rid of X, Y and Z? Or perhaps you flip it and just make it an assertion since anyone who wants to repeal reform by definition wants to get rid of those things too.

Healthcare reform is popular, and through their monolithic obstructionism and hyperbolic rhetoric Republicans have forced themselves into the corner of having to run on the terribly unpopular idea that the status quo is preferable to imperfect reform that addresses widely-perceived problems.

Democrats don't have to descend into policy details, they can run on the poetry of reform and spotlight popular outcomes, but Republicans will have to make such a descent to find some way through this anti-governmental maze they're in.

This is the best of all possible worlds for Democrats because Republicans can't win wonk wars since they are wrong on all the details and in any case every nuance will seem to their base a compromise with principle that will risk their disaffection. Democrats can respond to flaws in the reform by saying they hope to go back and tinker and improve what they passed if America elects enough of them to overcome "Party of NO" obstructionism.

I do think historical trends will likely hold true, anti-incumbency and a skew to base voters in mid-terms will both yield Democratic losses in both Houses, but I think we can hold controlling majorities in both and if we can this means it will be possible to revisit the filibuster at the open of the next session and possible to hold back Republicans doing their worst. This sets the stage for Democratic gains in the Presidential campaign and, one hopes, sufficient majorities to do more of what elected Democrats really want to do and the American people who elected them to do than has been possible under The Phony Majority.

Today's Random Wilde

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

"Same Sex"

It is surely inherently patriarchal to pretend that the ways in which penises differ from one another and the ways in which vaginas differ from one another are so much less salient than the ways in which penises "in general" are different from vaginas "in general" that we will treat those differences of all things as the foundation of all civilization.

This is one of the reasons why I find it so patently absurd and annoying that queersex is so regularly described as or, worse, thought of as "same-sex."

Of course, homo means "same," just as hetero means "different" -- hence "homogeneous" as against "heterogeneous" -- so the same-sex terminology is just a straightforward translation of homo-sex. But my point is that it is actually deranging of the sense of what queerness often practically and imaginatively consists to imagine that its formations are based less on the eroticization of salient differences than are the formations of heterosexuality, so-called.

Honestly, you'd think that those who assume a more primordial narcissism or mimeticism prevails among queer folks than among straights, whoever they are supposed to be, had never heard of tops and bottoms, butches and femmes, ferocious "type"-tourisms articulated around race, class, morphology, and so on. I personally have had sex with more women (one) than I have had sex with blond haired people of either sex (zero, unless it was really dark or I was really drunk), for example. Is that homo-sex or hetero-sex, after all? Is there even a name for that (help me, Krafft-Ebing)? Have I signed onto the wrong gay agenda all these years?

As I say, I think the identification of queer-sex with same-sex functions to obliterate the substance of much if not most of that sex, but also to blunt our openness to ways in which the register of sexuality promisingly connects human beings to one another -- and I don't primarily mean sexually so much as in their shared differentiating aesthetic projects, via sex and otherwise, of assertive-narrative self-creation -- by positing some of them and so policing all of them as instead ineradicably "opposite."

It is even clearer that this insistent opposition at the heart of the heteronormative understanding of queerness as same-sex is even more obliterative of the substance of those queernesses -- bisexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality, to name the most obvious -- which seem to provoke sex-panics equally among both the heterosexuals and the homosexuals who cling to this patriarchal opposition in order to stabilize their respective sexualities more or less into scripts in which conventional couples couple conventionally the better to get on with the more serious business of business.

Desire is provoked by difference, whatever its objects. To want is precisely not to have, but also, crucially, there is a having of that wanting that leaves us more than wanting.

And indeed desire is often experienced first as a shattering difference within oneself that demands of the self that it become otherwise ("that's when I realized I was gay…" "oh my god, I don't hate her, I love her!").

This is one of the reasons why it is right to say of sex that it objects: sex is an objection through which we find our way to subjection (if we are lucky).

That "sex ob-jects" is the crucial discursive operation disavowed in the foregrounding of the dismissively reductive phrase "sex objects," in which we name the fear that we risk a dehumanizing objectification through our sexual relations. I believe that the risk disavowed through anti-sex discourses of a threatening universalizing sexual objectification is, more often than not, a phobic recoiling from the risk of sexual subjectification, the threat/promise of the sex in which we risk objecting to the selves we have been and thereupon embark upon a different selfhood.

The risk in the face of which generalized anti-sex retreats looks to be the risk of freedom itself, the freedom without which it makes no sense to bemoan a loss of subjecthood in the first place. None of this, I hasten to add, should be taken as a trivialization of the violence of rape or harassment or exploitation, which seem to me rarely to be about sex, proper, so much as about control and its pathologies, and hardly seem to me to be the lens through which to think the sexual in general, however urgently they demand an accounting and accountability as well.

Far from a threatening site from which universalizing objectification in the mode of violations articulated by hierarchy spread, the sexual seems to me instead a promising site from which universalizing subjectification in the mode of affiliations articulated by differentiation spread.

Crucial to this formulation is the sense -- to take up too clumsily and quick Judith Butler's terms from Undoing Gender here -- that desire is a site in which we embrace our own undoing ("I have come undone in my desire for him") as the way in which we do ourselves, engage in the doings in which we are rendered as legible, capable, among other things gendered beings. To be undone by gendered desire is to do the gender we would have (in a performative account of gender, again to abbreviate brutally, it is in the reiterated doing of the conventions of gender that we substantiate for ourselves and for others the salience in the gender we then experience ourselves as having; the having is indispensably a function of an ongoing doing) and in having which we are legible as capacious, free beings.

That is to say, in doing our gender and in being undone by its desire we engage in the performative substantiation of ourselves as socially legible beings in the crucial register of sex-gender, and are read in the world as capable of bearing agency.

It is this ethical universality inhering in the sexual, this interminable affiliation in differentiation (directly correlated, I would say, to the constitutive tension of equity in diversity that articulates the scene of consent on which the whole democratic imaginary also uneasily rests, so the stakes here are really rather fraught) which would be circumscribed and domesticated by the gesture in which queersex is identified with the Same (in a way that is Other, and Other in a way that is always also less than) and straight sex with the Other (in a way that is always also less than).

Happy Tree Friends (and TMBG) Help Make Vacation Time More Positive

Every Time You Treat Terrorists As Warriors Rather Than Criminals, They Win

There's a serial killer on the loose in a major American city, so of course we bomb the cozy bourgeois neighborhood in which he was last reported seen. What, that doesn't make sense?

A troubled teen tries but fails to set off a bomb in a suburban American mall, so of course we set up roadblocks at the entrances to every mall in America to search the cars and fingerprint and DNA-swab all would-be shoppers so they don't bring in bombs, too. What, that doesn't make sense?

Can't you hear them bloviating on Fox about how domestic crime isn't a police matter, it's WAR! Can't you see them shaking their pudgy white fists and decrying that defenders of conventional police departments pointing to dropping rates of violent crime are living in a pre-9/11 mindset? Do you even know how many rapes, murders, carjackings, home robberies took place on that fateful day? You bleedin hearts and artists let em get away with murder, let me hammer em to-dee!

What, doesn't it make sense to insist that advocates of public police departments following established police procedures attentive to the concerns of the communities they would serve and protect and the civil rights of all with whom they come into contact are Soft on Crime because they don't send tanks into the streets? That they are Un-Serious about Crime because they don't declare martial law across the nation? That they fail to grasp the Criminofascist Menace because they refuse to overthrow the Constitutional Republic and institute a totalitarian security state in its place, you know, for kids?

Of course, I realized even in the midst of writing it that this effort at a reductio fails, inasmuch as the War on Drugs, the hysteria about terror trials and terrorist criminals behind bars in American prisons, ongoing right-wing cheerleading for dismantling civil liberties in exchange for costly ineffective intrusive security theatricals, and the ongoing swelling of our racist prison-industrial complex all more or less literalize the analogy already anyway (not to mention the fact that I am far more worried about the ways in which police departments already fail to live up to the standards against which I am trying to set the insane analogy of a declaration of war on ourselves because of the incidence of domestic crime).

Look, terrorism is a tactic of asymmetrical conflict in which always only a minuscule minority are willing to participate or to condone (as is also true of any violent conduct), and as such it will never vanish nor will it ever be otherwise than a criminal act for which police are the proper respondents.

Provide populations with stakes in their societies (ideally universal healthcare, basic income, free education and access to knowledge, but, hell, howzabout simply no taxation without representation for a start?) and malcontents who would turn to violent resistance will be easily exposed and their threat diffused. Continue to exploit, abuse, disregard, and humiliate societies and you incubate both violent resistance in a minority but more crucially acquiescence to that violence by the still non-violent majority.

If terrorists are warriors, and America is committed to a Global War on Terror, then America has committed to a war on the whole world for all time that has no chance of success in a single one of its declared aims. Also, since America is now and ever more an ignorant bankrupted backwater, we can't even pull off the masquerade of engaging in such a planetary War on Everything anyway.

I would say it is hard to imagine anything more stupid than the War on Terror, but given our War on the Biosphere on which we literally depend for our survival, not to mention the War on (some) Drugs, the War on Having a Healthcare System, the War on Gay Marriage, the War on Christmas, the War on Profanity on the Tee Vee, and so on the truth is that everything everywhere seems pretty much equally stupid according to the shit for brains public discourse that suffuses the corporate media and preoccupies so many of our Congressional Millionaires.

Mama Cass Elliot and Julie Andrews Help Make Amor Mundi More Positive

"Obama Is A Mediocre Politician"

Since he won't simply strangle Republican obstructionists and the Conservadems at the margin of the Democratic caucus empowered by Republican obstructionism. Or something.

Pointing Out the Existence of Gravity Is Just Making Excuses for Obama's Decision Not to Fly Like Superman -- Or Even Try!

Or something.

Democrats and Defeatism

Given the stimulus package, and probably-pending insurance reform and upcoming financial regulations Obama and the Democratic Congress have accomplished more in the first year of an Administration than we've seen in generations, certainly since LBJ.

I think it is safe to say that these accomplishments fail to address the deeper structural and ethical problems of our nation in ways that are literally catastrophic to our national future and are also unequal to the demands of our historical moment in ways that imperil the survival of democratizing civilization and even the biosphere of which we are all a part. But I also think it is frankly stupid to presume that the reason these accomplishments fail to be equal to our problems is because Democrats in general either stealthily prefer this result or lack the "willpower" to do the right thing.

Movement Republicanism is at this point a literally insane force, appealing to and whomping up the insanity of its Base, and Republicans are presently monolithically obstructing the sensible efforts of Democrats elected to change this country's direction (and in ways that would better reflect the center-left to outright social-democratic policy preferences consistently attested to by majorities of Americans since the Nixon Administration in fact, but never once reflected in our governance), a monolithicism and discipline that reflects more than anything else their absolutely realistic awareness of their defensive minority status in an ever more secular diverse precarious nation.

Given this obstructionism it is simply the case that any legislation that makes it to the President's desk for his signature has to find its way first through the meat grinder to sixty votes in the Senate, despite the fact that a non-negligible number of the sixty Senators who caucus with the Democrats are partially or mildly devoted to the social or cultural or corporate-military agenda of the Movement Republican obstructionists.

These facts cannot be wished away. Too many who chirp about a circumvention of these facts through budget reconciliation or through an abolition of the filibuster seem unaware of the actual demands and limitations of such efforts of circumvention, and too many who bemoan the President's "hands-off" approach seem unaware of the extent to which Administration figures have indeed been intimately involved in these legislative processes or seem to desire their President to behave in ways that undermine the Separation of Powers (something Obama has been too prone to rather than resistant of, if you ask me, and which we should hardly be encouraging).

I do indeed think Democrats should return to healthcare next year and seriously consider using budget reconciliation to force through more robust mechanisms for the policing of the new regulations against worst practices of for-profit insurers and more robust cost containment through a public option in some form. I think this should be offered up as a matter of nibbling around the edges of the new status quo created by passage of insurance reform rather than a re-visitation of reform as such, some kind of "second bite of the apple." One bite of that apple was enough to show that it was already biting off more than we can chew.

Also, I do indeed think that Democrats should contemplate another revision of the filibuster to ameliorate the mischief of modern partisan obstructionism, although my understanding is that this cannot happen until the 112th Congress convenes in 2011, assuming Democrats retain their majority, else it would take fully 67 votes to push through (at a time when 60 votes are scarcely possible). Again, it seems to me that this should be proposed as technocratic tinkering rather than as some sort of revolutionary action. Senator Harkin has a nice proposal along these lines he's been floating. I am in no denial as to the fact that any such move will be repudiated in the most histrionic imaginable terms by Republicans in any case, but the point is that when the Teabaggers blow their crazytown wad over and over again this produces the effect of self-marginalization unless the left enables it to do more by treating it more seriously than it deserves -- the point is not to ignore it, but to ridicule it.

But, come what may, neither of these worthy efforts should be regarded as anything even remotely like a magic bullet rendering the enraged and demoralized left more adequate to the actual power of corporatist militarist and patriarchal forces obstructing and debasing our political process in this moment. They simply aren't, and there is nothing the least bit radical about pouting and stamping one's feet at such realities.

I think the sausage-making around jobs, climate-change, financial regulation, collective bargaining rights, military escalation, lgbt rights among many other things are going to deal a series of flabbergasting disappointments to the widely shared and eminently sensible hopes of the liberals on whose enthusiasm Democrats depend for their elections.

It is a real worry -- especially given the traditional skew toward base-voters in mid-term elections -- that this state of affairs is indeed likely to result in a state of affairs in which Democrats who want to do what they are elected to do, and indeed are struggling to do so but cannot because the most conservative Democrats in the caucus have been empowered by monolithic Republican obstructionism, will likely be punished by the relinquishment of support they need by those they have disappointed, in ways that always only further disempower the already disappointed by facilitating the election of more of the very Republicans who are the key authors of the present debacle.

Those who recognize in such a statement familiar excoriations of supporters of Third Party candidates are right to do so. Those who support Greens or socialists and hence facilitate the election of Republican feudalists and theocrats are wrong to imagine that those of us who denigrate their choices do so because we disagree with or disapprove of the point that Third Party advocates make, namely that both the Democratic and Republican parties are so beholden to corporate-military interests and values that neither of them as they are presently constituted can function as forces toward genuinely sustainable consensual planetary multiculture. For me, this demands that we struggle to get more and better Democrats in office, primarying Democrats (whatever the prerogatives of incumbency) whose aspirations and voting records are to the right of their districts, and putting up candidates in hopelessly right-leaning districts to facilitate the progressive education of those districts through the campaign process.

Let me just point out as a quick aside, by the way, that both in my writing and my teaching (hundreds of students at Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute can attest to this) I advocate the implementation of a universal non-means-tested basic guaranteed income and universal single-payer healthcare, universal access to public education, and considerable curtailments of current intellectual property rights regimes, which makes me close to a socialist (whatever my disagreements with many of the views of many who so identify), and that I also advocate, just as vociferously, for the subsidization of permaculture farming practices and decentralized renewable energy provision via solar rooftops and windmill co-ops, which makes me close to a radical Green, and that I was trained in nonviolence by the King Center when I was a member of Queer Nation Atlanta and I advocate the democratization of current actually-existing unaccountable neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist world governance through a strengthening of the WC, ICC, UNESCO, WHO, ILO, a redirection of the missions of the WB and IMF to reflect concerns about social injustice, sustainability and destabilizing and precarizing neoliberal financialization and enclosures of cultural and genomic commons, as well as the introduction of a popularly elected assembly to supplement or replace the United Nations General Assembly, all of which makes me possibly the biggest dirty fucking hippy (or DFH as digby and atrios pithily abbreviate the phrase) you would ever care to meet. So do please think twice before you simply assume I am a stealth corporatist or have drunk the Friedman kool-aid or am an uncritical Obamabot (although I may of course still be simply mistaken -- and if so I welcome arguments, especially arguments to the point, which are rare -- or possibly simply a hypocrite, although a hypocrite, I hope you will grant me, as Woody Allen once quipped, "for the left").

Given the actually-existing structural marginalization of third parties in the institutional landscape of American partisan politics it seems to me that those who advocate a more democratizing viewpoint than either party is currently advocating (which seems to me as palpably true as it is palpably false to peddle facile equivalency theses about the parties as do too many) must either struggle to reshape the best of those parties in the image of their own values or, if they truly believe in the necessity of a greener or more socialist third party, fight first to alter the institutional landscape in which third parties function politically (through campaigns for instant runoff voting, real campaign finance reform, or what have you). Those who advocate more radical third party interventions without concern to the actual structural realities in which interventions make their play seem to me to mistake as radicalism what amount to narcissistic temper tantrums indifferent to actual outcomes, just as those who decry fine elected Democrats (not to mention American's Senator, the fabulous Bernie Sanders) as traitors to Democratic principle, who deserve to be punished as such, without concern to the actual structural realities with which which such Democrats are contending seem to me to be rash, ill-informed, and too apt to cut off their noses to spite their faces, however righteous and well-meaning they may be in general.

Hence, I tend strongly to agree with BooMan (as I often have done through the various healthcare reform debates this year) when he criticizes the tactical mis-steps and energy-dividing histrionics of what he is calling the Anti-Corporatist Movement, despite the fact that I identify pretty closely with much of what self-identified "Ant-Corporatists" say is wrong with the currently prevailing catastrophically environmentally unsustainable, brutally precarizing, fraudulently financialized, disgustingly militarized world-system. When BooMan takes pains to say he doesn't mean to use the phrase Anti-Corporatist Movement "pejoratively" I think this is belied a bit by his actual analysis, especially when he declares the difference between anti-corporatists and, say, pragmatists as primarily "temperamental" in nature.

And I do think this tends rather to undermine the effectiveness of his larger crucial point, which is, if I am understanding him aright: that not only can one be a pragmatist while sympathizing or even, I suppose, identifying with the aspirations and analyses of the Anti-Corporatist Movement, but that frankly one must be a pragmatist in order actually to manage to re-write our world in something like the image of the aspirations and analyses of the Anti-Corporatist Movement.

To return to the first paragraph of this post, I said that "the stimulus package, and probably-pending insurance reform and upcoming financial regulations Obama and the Democratic Congress have accomplished more in the first year of an Administration than we've seen in generations, certainly since LBJ." I think the people with whose radical democratizing and permaculture politics I most closely identify myself likely really saw red reading that, reading such statements often makes the people with whose politics I most personally sympathize want to tear their hair out. I fully understand that and I understand the reasons why this is so.

I realize that there are some who want to say that what Obama and the Democrats have accomplished is something wonderful, something adequate to "the fierce urgency of now" as the man said. And of course given the actual problems of climate catastrophe, corporate catastrophe, military catastrophe we face those who think this painfully-accomplished something we will have wrought is also enough are simply straightforwardly wrong to think so or to say so.

But it also really is true that something is not nothing, even when that something is nothing like enough. It is wrong to pretend that something is nothing when what you want is something more, because in declaring something to be nothing you disempower the very forces on whom you must most rely to work your way to something more.

I realize that there are good reasons to fear that the heartbreaking process of incremental reform may be unequal to the demands of unfolding catastrophe, but unless you are advocating the violent overthrow of the system the limitations of which frustrate the educational, agitational, organizational work through which humans must strive to be equal to our shared problems then you are conceding that we do such politics as we can with the system we have rather than the system we might wish for, and this demands in turn that we assume the responsibility actually to work through that system rather than indulging in delusive, distracting, deranging wish-fulfillment fantasies involving third parties which cannot be going concerns in our actual reality or involving the punishment of Conservadems whose votes are nonetheless still needed to accomplish anything given the monolithic obstructionism of crass crazytown Republicans.

In an earlier post I wrote:

Like many a good pragmatist, I think it is enormously important to remember that the perfect can be the mortal enemy of the good. Like many a fine idealist, I think it is no less important to recognize that pragmatists who assert the previous can in their fixation on what seems possible, lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible. I think both insights are indispensable and I don't think there are any criteria on hand to assure us which is the more relevant perspective in any generally useful sort of way, and so that one must remain rather self-critical and attentive and persistent in the face of inevitable frustrations, come what may. All of this seems to me simply a straightforward matter of intelligence.

I do think the "perfect as enemy of the good" chestnut has been trotted out so many times at this point to defend crap that it may be time to roast it on an open fire, but it really does name an indispensable insight for a genuinely political point of view (and I mean real politics, not moralizing or performance art mistaken for politics). The problem is, of course, that too many who grasp the indispensability of the point fail to grasp the equal indispensability of the second point that "in their fixation on what seems possible, [pragmatists can] lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible." Rather than denigrate the Anti-Corporatist Movement it seems to me we should embrace it as a regulative ideal that truly and actively informs our pragmatism, keeps us vigilant for opportunities to shift the terms that presently seem to delimit the practically possible, but without becoming a standard against which all pragmatic outcomes are found wanting so that successes are experienced as defeats and hence inculcate a defeatism which renders the possibilities for success ever more remote, quite contrary to purpose.

A simple way to put this point is that the Latest Left -- the left that has been and continues to be shaped by emerging peer-to-peer forms of real-time criticism, distributed organizing, aggregated fund-raising, and so on -- as it matures from its inaugural formation in opposition to the Bush Administration and Movement Republicanism to reformation in assuming responsibility for actual governance in a diverse stakeholder society suffused with corporate-militarist institutions and discourses -- must learn better to distinguish short-term and long-term goals, or to distinguish tactics and strategy.

One of the ways that one ensures that learning to make such distinctions does not facilitate the assimilation of the revolutionary democratizing promise of these peer to peer formations to the counter-revolutionary forces of incumbency (the usual domestication of the revolutionary by the professional which Arendt writes so well about) is to demand that tactical accomplishments be celebrated always only as stepping stones toward strategic outcomes rather than as ends in themselves. Among other things this demands that we respect the aspirations and analyses of Anti-Corporatist Anti-Militarist and Green Movements rather than denigrating them, but that our respect for these aspirations and analyses not exact as it cost the denial of tactical realities or the denigration of tactical accomplishments.

I get it that it is devilish hard to hold all these things together in one's head and one's heart at the same time, and that people are wonderfully emotional and error-prone in ways that render all of us all too apt to make mistakes in judgment connecting our histories with our hopes, where we are with where we want to go. But nobody really expects democratization to be easy, so I see no point in pretending otherwise.

Today's Random Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Would You Hit It?

Well, queergeeks?

Would You Hit It?

Well, queergeeks?

Today's Random Wilde

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It Isn't True That There Have Always Been So Many Commercials, Such Loud Commercials, or Permanent Commercials in the Corner of Ongoing Programming

Just as billboards should be attacked as pollution, television commercials should be attacked as harassment. Ubiquitous repetitious interminable ever-higher volume commercials are not just insulting, are not just stupefying, are not just undermining critical faculties on which democratic citizenship depends for its flourishing, but they amount to criminal harassment and should be litigated and regulated as such. The logic of short-term profit-taking is literally incapable of putting the breaks on this development, and hence this deranging demoralizing degenerating trend simply will not stop, stall, or slow, let alone reverse, until there are laws to see to it that it does.

Air Force Commercials Involving CGI Space Battles That Declare "It's Not Science Fiction" ...Are Science Fiction

Just Saying.

Asthma Medications That May Cause "Asthma-Related Death" Are Probably Not Your Best Bet, Which Is Why They Are Being Advertised on the Tee Vee

Just saying.

"Free, Just Pay..." Is A Contradictory Statement

Just saying.

There Is No Such Thing As A "Fitness Celebrity"

Just saying.

Dumb Damaged Person Does Mischief…

…Obviously An Agent of Fu Manchu and His Global Network of Vile Gangsters!

Until we start talking about "terrorism" as a police problem rather than a matter of war no useful or sane sustained conversation will ever take place let alone sane policy emerge on the subject.


Or even more monumentally idiotically -- if such a thing as something more idiotic than pretending bands of bourgie malcontents playing at being Che in smelly caves amounts to WWIII is even fathomable -- discerning in it a "Clash of Civilizations," say, muscular white-racist baby jesusland against brown islamofascist homicide-bomberland is indeed surreally nuttier still...

It is of course for precisely this reason that the reactionary right-wing has sought to make this very move unthinkable, so that actually thinking about terrorism as a worldly problem rather than as some abyssal cthulhulic activation vector is itself unthinkable...

So that in a surprise move thinking is unthinkable and the fundamentalist (market, judeochrislamic, whatever) slaughterhouse parade brainlessly joylessly lurches ever on and on.

Would You Hit It?

Well, queergeeks?

Today's Random Wilde

The Selfish Giant

EVERY afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden. It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the springtime broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them.

"How happy we are here," they cried to each other.

One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.

"What are you doing there?" he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.

"My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself."

So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

He was a very selfish Giant.

The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside.

"How happy we were there," they said to each other.

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost.

"Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round."

The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down.

"This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit."

So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

"I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming," said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; "I hope there will be a change in the weather."

But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant"s garden she gave none.

"He is too selfish," she said.

So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King's musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open easement.

"I believe the Spring has come at last," said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

What did he see?

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children"s heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it.

"Climb up! little boy," said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the boy was too tiny. And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out.

"How selfish I have been," he said, "now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever."

He was really very sorry for what he had done.

So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him. And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring.

"It is your garden now, little children," said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o'clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye.

"But where is your little companion?" he said: "the boy I put into the tree."

The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him.

"We don"t know," answered the children, "He has gone away."

"You must tell him to be sure and come here tomorrow," said the Giant.

But the children said that they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.

Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. "How I would like to see him!" he used to say.

Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden.

"I have many beautiful flowers," he said, "but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all."

One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.

Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvelous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?" For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant, "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."

"Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

The delightful sketch is by Dion Whiteside.

The Pretenders Help Make Amor Mundi More Positive for the Holidays

Holiday Fun

We spent much of the afternoon watching a marathon of Ark II eps on a DVD set I got Eric for Christmas (he has no memory of the show, but I lo-o-o-o-oved it as a kid). Anybody else do anything fun for the holiday?

John and Yoko Help Make Amor Mundi More Positive

Another Christmas Eve, and here is John Lennon again as in years before, to end a year of war and begin another year of war, another mass murder in our names, another squandering of treasure in a Nation hopelessly ill, ill-informed, ill-advised, ill-prepared, ill-equipped, ill-willed, ill-at-ease, and in the shadow of still another war President.

Readin the news, and it sure looks bad. They won't give peace a chance, guess that was just a dream that some of us had. (That's not John, it's Joni, but still.)



War is over. If you want it.

Would You Hit It?

Well, queergeeks?

Today's Random Wilde

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

FDL WTF

Firedoglake is threatening to primary Bernie Sanders "from the left." From what further left, one might wonder, does anybody imagine they are going to find a candidate with whom to primary America's Senator, Bernie Sanders? You know, the Senator who introduced Single Payer onto the Senate floor? You know, the socialist? This is coming right on the heels of firedoglake teaming with Grover Norquist to oust Jane's nemesis the apparently Rasputin-like Clintonian-triangulator and corporatist Rahm Emmanuel. You know, I want to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub, Grover Norquist? The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and this quintessentially cynical and opportunistic dictum is especially inapt for those who want to be making arguments of principle castigating other folks for failing to live up to principle. I've said it before, I'll say it again, I don't have patience for histrionic Jane Hamsher hate. I find that I like what I hear Jane saying and doing about equally often as I loath it, and pretty much equally intensely whichever. I'm glad she's around. Also, it pays to remember (and I hope Jane does, but this goes for the chorus of her haters, too) that the tangle of contingent strategic coalitions and public assertions of compromise or lines drawn in the sand often have a more complicated relation to one's ideals about policy or one's expectations about process than are immediately evident.

Would You Hit It, Queergeek?

Centaur Wednesday, we're back, y'all.

Good For Them

More like this, asap.

Good for Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), and my Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) making serious noises about scuttling the corporatist crapola outcome now hurtling forward through the last votes of the Senate healthcare reform process.

I'm not saying "good for them" because I personally think we should "kill the bill."

I'm not saying "good for them" because I think Dems could magically get a better bill starting over with the same Congress we have still intact.

I'm not saying "good for them" because I think everybody else has sold us out for not saying the same thing.

I'm not saying "good for them" because I think other fighting liberals are folding in public instead of fighting because I think the fighters are assessing the terrain or the desirability of likely outcomes much differently than the apparent folders are.

I'm not saying "good for them" because I think Obama fooled us and has gotten the bill he seeeecretly wanted all along (or even that he got 95% of what he wanted, as he himself is reported as saying as he goes headfirst into the framing war for ambient-informed voters who aren't following this like we are but who do care enough to vote anyway and make a difference when they're in the mood and who Dems very much need to be in the mood).

I'm not saying "good for them" because I mistakenly think they won't actually settle for less than they are saying they will when confronted with the prospect of passage or no passage when they care about passage and the people helped by passage and they are up against assholes who actually don't care if it doesn't pass.

No, I'm saying "good for them" because the negotiations are not over and saying what they are saying is what you have to say to get anything improved for the better and certainly what you have to say if you don't want this thing to get much worse before the end.

So, again, good for them, and good for us.