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Sunday, May 31, 2015

The Sanders Scandal Pundits Have Failed To Note

After trolling for months about how disastrous it was for Hillary Clinton to lack a primary challenger, the pundits are now drooling at the prospect of trolling for months about how disastrous it will be for Hillary Clinton to have a decisive victory in Iowa over her primary challenger Bernie Sanders (say, 55% Clinton, 15% Sanders, which is my expectation, give or take). Of course, Hillary Clinton will get the Democratic nomination, Sanders (whose political views are far closer to my own than Clinton's are, since we are both democratic socialists after all) will not provide even a remote electoral challenge for Clinton, while I suspect she welcomes the "pressure" he provides to enable her to frame her campaign to the left of her husband's politics with which she is historically identified -- as has the party and indeed the whole country also shifted leftward -- while still signaling moderateness by performing contrasts at the level of tone.

The truly notable thing about the Sanders' candidacy at this point -- apart from the wholesome effect yielded by the wider platform for his ideas which will eventually prevail if we are to have a chance to survive and flourish in freedom in the world -- is that in the latest Quinnipiac Poll, at 15% support (against Clinton's 57% support) Sander's is more popular than any of the top five Republican contenders who presently have 10% support each. Talk about scandalous! Given the development that Democratic party identification is now slightly higher in recent polling than Republican party identification, the support for Sanders over the Republican frontrunners is if anything even more pronounced than initially appears. Sanders exposes no weakness in Clinton's support (which for now is highest among those Democrats who are most activist and informed, contrary to pundit gossips who assure us her support in the Base is universally lukewarm), and almost nobody who is supporting Sanders now will not vote for Clinton when the time comes to do so, as of course it will, nor does anybody to speak of even think otherwise already.

No doubt the Beltway press corps remain annoyed because Clinton is continuing a listening tour in which she is ignoring their efforts to cough up the usual hairball of false-equivalence and horse-race narrative with the racist sexist homophobic bully-the-poor bomb-first gun-nut forced-pregnancy science-and-macroeconomics illiterate killer clowns of the Republican party, the better instead to understand how her actually likely voters are experiencing politics and framing issues in their lives outside the beltway. Clinton is right to ignore them, and I hope she will continue to do so for as long as possible -- heaven knows she will receive no more reward for satisfying their demands for attention, as inevitably she will, than for ignoring them.

For now, they are content to spin yarns about dramatic threats to Clinton represented by a Sanders challenge that isn't, and a deep viable Republican bench that isn't either. That a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing American people is leaving the Republicans behind, while they eschew adaptation to the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the failure of market fundamentalist pieties, and the collapse of the white-racist Southern Strategy to retreat into suicidal, genocidal madness seems to me a fairly dramatic story that could be told instead -- and it has the virtue of being much closer to the truth at hand. Ask Bernie Sanders -- he has much more to say about all that than he has to say against Hillary Clinton.

Not About Going Anywhere

All literature is blowing air through a hole.

Shooting Blanks

Not one "father of artificial intelligence" has a child.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Marsh O'Malley

Democratic field becomes s'more.

Why I Can Never Be A "Thought Leader"

It is better to repeat important things than it is to say new less important things.

Neoliberal Futurology Twitterrant

Friday, May 29, 2015

Lincoln Chafee

The Republican Clown Car is so full they're just going ahead and starting to run for the Democratic nomination at this point.

Teaching, On Kant

This morning in "What Is Compelling?" at Berkeley, I'll be talking audiences and intentions, Crusius and Channell's Aims of Argument, the three Aristotelian appeals, then discussing Kant's "Idea of a Universal History for a Cosmopolitan Purpose." This class will end the first week of summer intensives; five still to go and it feels like I'm operating on fumes already. Worrisome. My students, though, seem appealingly bright and eager, and that is always a spur to best efforts.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Teaching On, Thucydides

Thucydides today, the prose Iliad, the politics of facticity, Sparta and Athens anxiously clash over masculinity, leaving little but a testament to trauma in the fog of war -- all this, with a digression into Plato's early Menexenus (with its cynical and sexist parody of Pericles). Yesterday's long slog was a bear, and today's prospect looms ominously. Two intensives at once is clearly going to be frightful thing to take on this summer. I worry I will be too tired and frenetic to teach as well as I can, especially given my deep love/hate of the materials. Scarcely begun, already feeling a bit done.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Long Teaching Day

This morning is the first meeting of "What Is Compelling?" and later in the day "Patriarchal Conventions and Convictions in Greek and Roman Antiquity" continues on, grappling with the Iliad and Gorgias' "Encomium to Helen." Summer intensives already feeling quite intense -- ah me poor old bones.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Summer Intensives Begin

Today I begin teaching my "Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Greek and Roman Antiquity" course at Berkeley. Tomorrow "What Is Compelling: Argumentation, Reconciliation, Obligation" begins. These are summer intensives, packing a semester's worth of material in a six week span. Teaching one is a bit bonkers, but two simultaneously is terrorizing. I've been doing these for two decades now, and I have taught many versions of each of these specific courses as well (this is my fourth summer in a row teaching the Greek/Roman course, the eighth time I've taught the argument and violence course). Today's lecture is short and introductory, but still packs a wallop, and by tomorrow we will already be diving deep into the Iliad and Gorgias' "Encomium," so summer intensive is apt as can be. As usual new class jitters gave me a fitful night's sleep last night, and so I begin feeling a bit tired -- an exhaustion that will almost certainly dog me till I hand in final grades over the July fourth holiday. Don't quite know yet how this will affect blogging this year. Sometimes I shut down, sometimes teaching is a spur. We'll see.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Syllabus for My "What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation" Summer Intensive at Berkeley

Rhetoric 10: The Rhetoric of Argument 
"What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation"

Summer 2015, Session A, 10-12.30pm., Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 88 Dwinelle

Instructor, Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edy; ndaleca@gmail.com

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 20%; Reading Notebook, 20%; Precis, 2-3pp., 10%; Mid-Term Exam, 25%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 25%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

A Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One
May 27 Course Introduction
SKILL SET: Rhetoric as occasional, interested, figurative; The literal as conventional, the figurative as deviant. Definitions: Rhetoric is the facilitation of efficacious discourse and the inquiry into the terms on the basis of which discourse comes to seem efficacious or not.
An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
May 29 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Audience/Intentions; Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Writing A Precis

Week Two
June 1 Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
SKILL SET: Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Audience/Intentions; Performativity
June 3 Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
SKILL SET: Audiences: Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Intentions: Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliatio; Rogerian Rhetoric; Writing A Precis
June 5 Randal Amster, Anarchism and Nonviolence: Time for a "Complementarity of Tactics"
Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace
George Ciccariello-Maher, Planet of Slums, Age of Riots
Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
Chris Hedges, Evidence of Things Not Seen
Precis should be posted to the blog by six pm, Thursday, June 4 

Week Three
June 8 William May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death"
SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
June 10 Workshopping
SKILL SET: Propositional Analysis; Enthymemes, Syllogisms, Formal Fallacies, Informal Fallacies
June 12 Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense; Workshopping
SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes

Week Four
June 15 Mid-Term Examination
June 17 Screening and Discussion of the Film, "A History of Violence," dir. Cronenberg
June 19 Tom Beasley, The American Atheist, Atheism and Violence;
Edward Oakes, First Things, Atheism and Violence;
Rabia Terri Harris, Fellowship of Reconciliation, On Islamic Nonviolence
Jeremiah Bowden, Jihad and the Qur'an: The Case for a Non-Violent Interpretation

Week Five
June 22 Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence from The Wretched of the Earth
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations
Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute, From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government Sponsored Segregation
June 24 Hannah Arendt, Reflections On Violence and "Must Eichmann Hang?"
June 26 Workshopping Final Paper: Producing a Strong Thesis; Anticipating Objections; Providing Textual Support

Week Six
June 29 Octavia Butler, Kindred
July 1 Concluding Remarks: Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender and Precarious Life
Final Paper Due

Taker or Maker?

The fool calls "Makers" the ones on the make.
The cruel call "Takers" the ones who get took.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Syllabus for My "Patriarchal Philosophistry" Summer Intensive at Berkeley

Rhet 103A: Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetorical Theory:
Patriarchal Philosophistry

Course Description

Rhetoric was conceived in antiquity as the art of speaking well. But the act of speaking in public was always also a doing of deeds, and even well done it could do you in -- whether one was declaiming in the assemblies and courts of the radical (and radically exclusive) democracies and anti-democracies of the Greek city-states, or drawing up ideal Republics in dreamy discourses among scholars, or engaging in the rough and tumble of state-craft and electioneering in the all too real and corrupt Republic of Rome, or circulating satires among sardonic snickers in the shadow of Emperors. In Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian engagements with and through rhetoric delineated critical, deliberative, civic, pedagogical visions of human agencies fraught with inhumanity.

The societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously patriarchal, they were societies in which Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency; they were horrific rape cultures in which women were conceived as beasts, slaves and dutiful wives, a patriarchy finding perhaps its quintessential expression in the Roman paterfamilias, the authoritarian male head of the household who held the power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman comedies we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world of gendered relations, erotic imaginations, and human possibilities, we encounter profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and prejudices.

Although we will be reading texts in which philosophy declares its opposition to rhetoric's opportunism and deceit, we will read them as rhetorical skirmishes in the politics of truth-telling. Although we will read discourses on civic deliberation, we will read them as anxious testaments to ubiquitous corruption and violence. Although we will be reading orations aspiring to a world of Heroes and of Men, we will read them as brutal reflections on a world in which many were not heroes and many were not men. We will be reading works by Aristophanes, Aristotle, Augustine, Marcus and Quintus Cicero, Euripides, Gorgias, Homer, Juvenal, Libanus, Petronius, Plato, Quintilian, Sappho, Seneca, Suetonius, Terence, and Thucydides. All of the readings will be available either online or in a course reader.

Rhet 103A: Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Classical Antiquity
Summer 2015

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://patriarchalphilosophistry.blogspot.com
Session A, May 26-July 2, 2015, TWR 4-6.30pm, 160 Dwinelle

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 10%; Reading Notebook, 30%; Precis 1, 2-3pp., 15%; Precis 2, 2-3pp., 15%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 30%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One

May 26 –- Introduction, and a selection of poems by Sappho
May 27 –- Homer, Books I, II, IX, and XXIV from the Iliad, Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen"
May 28 –- Thucydides, Books I and II and The Melian Dialogue from the History of the Peloponnesian War, Plato Menexenus

Week Two

June 2 –- Euripides, Hecuba, Plato, Protagorus
June 3 –- Plato, Apology, and also Book V and Book VII from Republic
June 4 –- Aristophanes, Wasps; Plato, Symposium

Week Three

June 9 -- Plato, Gorgias, Phaedrus
June 10 –- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I and Book II and from Topics
June 11 –- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book III and from Poetics

Week Four

June 16 –- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Against Verres, Against Cataline, Against Antony -- First Essay Due (5-6pp.)
June 17 –- Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator
June 18 –- Terence, Eunuchus; Quintus Tullius Cicero, Commentariolum Petitionis

Week Five

June 23 –- Juvenal, Satires
June 24 -- Quintillian, from Institutio Oratoria: Book I -- Preface, Chapters 1-3; Book III -- Chapters 1-5; Book VI -- Chapter 1; Book VII -- Chapters 8-10; Book VIII -- Chapter 1-3, and also Chapter 6; Book IX -- Chapter 1; Book XII -- Chapter 1
June 25 –- Workshopping Final Paper

Week Six

June 30 –- Suetonius, Caligula; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii
July 1 –- Gaius Petronius, Satyricon
July 2 -- Augustine, from City of God, Read as much as you will, but Books I and XI are crucial, Libanius, "The Silence of Socrates" -- Final Essay Due (5-6pp.)

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Robocalypse Now

To say a robot has "learned" something is to denigrate every living learning being in what I consider an inexcusable and also dangerous way. Being existentially impressed by a computer cranking through sprawling arithmetic calculations faster than a genius is exactly as mistaken as being existentially impressed by a hydraulic press crushing objects that a strongman can't: calculation is more muscular than thoughtful. As Hannah Arendt wrote in the 1950s, "the newly invented electronic machines... are, like all machines, mere substitutes... of human labor power, following the time-honored device of all division of labor to break down every operation into its simplest constituent motions, substituting, for instance, repeated addition for multiplication... All that the giant computers prove is that the modern age was wrong to believe with Hobbes that rationality, in the sense of 'reckoning with consequences,' is the highest and most human of man's capacities." That is, calculation is an already instrumentalized dimension of thought as against the reflective, critical, imaginative dimensions of thought of the rational/political animal. The robocalypse is not and will not be a matter of killer robots conquering the earth, but of reductive robotic premises deranging our sense of the political substance of historical struggles for freedom and justice, and rationalizing the denigration, exploitation and abuse of people and fellow earthlings.

Sensawundabread

The uncritical enthusiasm of gizmo-fandoms for useless landfill-destined consumer crap peddled as paradigm-shattering.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Intolerable

It is intolerant, not tolerant, to tolerate intolerance.

ToMAYduh ToMAHduh

You can always tell a corporatist by the way he describes lying, cheating and stealing not as wrong-doing but as risk-taking.

Note To Jeb

A Republican having a tough time answering a question actually is not enough to indicate that the question was tough.

But... Can... A... Killer... Robot... Love...?

Time for A Tech-Talk Thought Leader "Deep Think"!

Sunday, May 17, 2015

To Whomever It May Concern

To those who declare participation in elections you are qualified to vote in and that have real consequences for better and for worse even when you fully approve of none of the candidates and, indeed, actively disapprove of all the candidates in some measure makes you a complicit celebrant in the worst evils in which these candidates take some part, even if you condemn these evils, even if you resist them, even when you struggle to rectify them, I must say three things. First: by such standards a person who accepts a summons to jury duty, pays taxes (including sales taxes, so it's shoplifting or bust I'm afraid), or even retains their citizenship in a nation-state complicit in such crimes is exactly equally complicit in such crimes as the everyday voting citizen presumably is and people in glass houses have no business throwing stones. Second, of course, I disagree that such standards make any kind of practical or even philosophical sense, indeed such a proposal confuses ethical (or possibly even aesthetic) values with political ones in my view and then proceeds from that error into the even larger and worse error of pretending that this mistake is some kind of sign of superiority rather than confusion and provides an occasion for stupid assholes making a self-righteous spectacle of themselves to no practical purpose, not least because treating everybody as guilty of great crimes is tantamount to treating nobody as guilty of them which is not in fact a way of demonstrating how much more seriously you take crimes than other people do but how you aren't really interested in crimes at all except to the extent that they provide excuses for ugly preening, which is not very nice when it comes to it. Third, apart from insisting that those who try in the heartbreaking compromised historical struggle toward social justice to do anything at all are essentially the worst of the worst for trying (since it would seem that not only voting in elections, but devoting one's adult life to teaching critical thinking and democratic politics as a precarious adjunct, advocating policies for sustainability and equity-in-diversity in writing and in public under one's name, engaging in actual civil rights and labor organizing and activism, and so on are all worthy of contempt and reveal one to be the worst of the worst), it is hard to see what positive contribution to the solution of problems of injustice and exploitation and violence those who rail against doing anything are actually managing in their doing nothing, indeed it is hard to see how these heroic revolutionaries are distinguishable in their actual conduct from the most uncritical complacent consumer reactionaries when all is said and done. If after a few joyless turns on the rhetorical merry-go-round with persons holding such views you find that you are still being denigrated as evasive and non-communicative, while war-crimes and genocide are being falsely and utterly irresponsibly attributed to you not even by convoluted inference (which would be bad enough) but directly and by name, and while cowardly pseudonymous commenters are applauded as they declare themselves (without proof or even plausibility) former students and give false testimony about your teaching practice and character and so on you should not really be surprised to discover that even the most patient and generous interlocutor may finally come to judge you to be little more than a troll and so call it a day.

So Many Manifestos

So Few Manifestations.

By Their Inactions Shall They Be Known

Why, oh, why is it so hard to distinguish the actual conduct of so many anarcho-insurrectionists from that of uncritical complacent consumers? Why, if it weren't for their mania for online manifesto writing one could hardly distinguish them at all!

Clown Car Traffic Jam

At this point there are over twenty candidates running, whether declared or not, for the Republican nomination for President, all of whom are being treated by their party and by pundits as "viable," because they have been elected to other prominent positions, have attracted large sums of donation money (possibly through the patronage of a pet billionaire), or have accumulated a large fandom through right-wing hate media or the Megachurch archipelago. Questions whether they were elected (if ever they were) by nationally representative constituencies, whether their tenure in office (or in any other position of authority) was objectively accomplished, or whether their stated policy views survive even minimal scrutiny by experts in the relevant fields are all, of course, completely disregarded in such attributions of "viability."

The resulting circus atmosphere is hardly surprising -- even without actually thinking through its causes the accumulating experience of each successful wave of Republican presidential dopefuls has been crazier and crazier each time around and so one has to expect it by now. Needless to say, Republicans themselves are worried about the spectacle they are making of themselves by now (that their outdated ugly values and outrageous failed policy prescriptions might actually have to change is never seriously taken up by these Very Serious handwringers, naturally), but even their expressions of concern do little but re-enact the nonsensical spectacle itself. Via The Washington Post:
For now, the candidates say they want to avoid chaos. “This whole process is to elect a Republican nominee,” Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, told reporters Friday in Scottsdale. “It’s not to provide a media circus. It’s not to provide entertainment to the masses and to create a show that would be delightfully pleasant for the opposition to watch.”
Of course, the whole reason this garish spectacle of stupidity and bigotry and madness provides an "entertainment... delightfully pleasant for the opposition to watch" is that it consists of killer clowns exactly like Huckabee, none of whom, very much including him, grasp that they are the circus they claim to disdain.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Jeb Bush Unveils Upcoming Infomercial Run

Bloomberg:
After calling for the repeal of the Affordable Healthcare Act during a Thursday stop at a brewery in Tempe, Ariz., Bush touted the potential of the health apps on his new Apple Watch. "On this device in five years will be applications that will allow me to manage my healthcare in ways that five years ago were not even possible," Bush told his audience.
Everybody has already had a good laugh at Jeb Bush's audition for a post-presidential run to be spent hawking consumer crap, just in case he fails to sell feudalism to enough white-racists to get to the White House. Yes, the idea that an awkward crappy media gewgaw could replace healthcare is stupid and cruel, but it is perfectly continuous with the stupid and cruel assertions one hears from Republicans who pretend that poverty doesn't exist because lots of people have color tee vees or microwave ovens. If they want to pretend a dumb-phone could replace welfare why not pretend it can replace healthcare? Given the anti-futurological axe I am always grinding hereabouts, I would add that Bush is expressing an essentially futurological prophesy here, that what appears to be a future-prediction is in fact a advertisement for a present-product, and that the politics of the utterance are essentially reactionary. It's a nice quotidian illustration of connections I make all the time.

The Bends Depends

The arc of history bends from just us.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Living for SFAI Adjunct Tortilla Activism


GOPuhDUMpum

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Prince's "Baltimore"

Santa Precaria, We Pray, Protect SFAI from Wrongdoing


Administrators, Donors, Friends of SFAI, Alumni,
Look deep into your hearts in the silence of this long night
And contemplate the insecurity of SFAI's adjuncts
Who have devoted their years and months and days
To SFAI's students and school.

Have a care, we implore you, be respectful,
And value our dignity, our long commitment to our community,
Always in the service of our students' potential.

We are brought here by the force of Contingency,
Unleashed by profiteers who gamble with the lives of educators.
Look upon us, who would foster culture, creation, and criticism
And are made the incarnation of Precarity.

Santa Precaria, tear away the veils of cynical spin and suave deception,
Move the administration into partnership with their teachers,
Bring them back into good faith negotiations,
Bring them into the light of common sense and justice for us all.

Soften the hearts of our administrators,
That they will treat us fairly.
Open the eyes of SFAI's donors and alumni,
That they will open their mouths to protest unfairness.

Santa Precaria, O merciful light in the darkness,
Watch over us in our struggles
Against the iron shackles of eternal temp work
From underemployment and unending insecurity.

Break the dead weight of our bonds and recognize our living connection
To our school and to our students.

Santa Precaria, awaken in the ones who would glory in control,
Their share in our mortal destiny, their own need of a shared world of care.

To teach is a sacred vocation,
To teach is to be generous, to be civil, to be fair,
To devote yourself to respect and to care.

Santa Precaria, guide those who are guided to administer education
To grant to the majority of SFAI's teachers the security and respect and fairness
Of real contracts and paths of advancement.

To this necessary and inevitable end we pray, Amen

SFAI Adjuncts Invoke San Precario

On bended knee
We pray to Thee
For the Majority
Of SFAI Faculty
Living in Uncertainty

How Do You Solve A Problem Like the Neoliberal Academy?


How do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you catch their spin and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means the neoliberal academy?
A PR release? A digital app? A killer clown?

Many a thing you know they'd like to sell us.
Many a fraud we ought to understand!
But how do you make them stop,
And listen as standards drop?
How can you steal supply and meet demand?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you eat the future with your hands?

Goods and money get confused,
All the teachers just get used,
While administrators multiply at will...
Unpredictable your fate,
Until Death demands his date:
You’re a cypher! You're a loser! Take a pill!

All that's solid melts in air,
Individualize your hair,
Education's just like tee vee, if you're hip!
MOOCify the classroom, stat!
All the think tanks tell you that.
School's a TED Talk!
Feudalism!
Sinking ship!

How do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you stop them while they tear it down?
How do you find the words that scream neoliberal academy?
A faculty of temps? Thought Leaders and pimps? A company town?

Many a con you know they'll try to sell us
Until the day we finally understand,
That nothing will make them stop,
But fighting back they drop!
Can't you see ruination 'cross the land?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
Now you must see the future's in our hands.

Monday, May 11, 2015

First Lady Michelle Obama's Tuskegee Commencement Address

You may have seen snippets of this barn burner, but here's the whole speech.

Brother's Sleeper

Jeb Bush is so stupid it takes him three letters to spell W.

Fight The Feudal Future!

Tech talkers will never stop selling their landfill hellscape as a toypile to heaven. But we can stop buying it.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

More Musk Rat Love

boing boing is reporting that celebrity tech CEO Elon Musk had some choice words for an employee who skipped work to witness the birth of a child:
That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.
I don't doubt that PR teams are busy massaging (with release) the message, and we will soon be treated to apologies and corrections, spiritually akin to that dude who ended up apologizing to Dick Cheney for Cheney shooting him in the face. (The denial has arrived and would appear to be fact-checkable.) Be that as it may, the rich are not like you and me. For one thing, they are Gods. Or at any rate they are ascending superlatively godward on piles of ill-gotten cash. You may recall that I have described Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as The Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurology, what with their techno-transcendental pretensions and anti-government harangues conjoined to hoovering up endless government cashola. Musk's con-job peddling low earth orbit amusement park rides for the superrich as the same thing as a real space program as well as his robo-evangelical summoning of the demon of superintelligent AI are especially egregious, though it looks like the battery business may bear fruit, I guess. President Obama certainly has been going on and on about investment in new battery technology since the Recovery Act, but I don't doubt it will turn out Musk is the real Randroidal fountainhead of all good things when it comes to it. Master Builder Musk is so right! That pathetic mehum (that's "merely human," noob!) worker drone who is blessed to be a part of Musk's revolutionary world-changing history-shattering techno-transcendental movement of making new landfill-destined crap gizmos for consumer dupes seriously needs to get his priorities straight!

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Julia Ward Howe, "Mothers' Day Proclamation," Boston, 1870

Mother's Day may seem to be nothing but another Hallmark Holiday, merely the occasion for a phone call and an online order for a flower delivery, but the holiday originated as an anti-war protest in the aftermath of the Civil War and the holiday becomes more the moment we make it so.

____________________

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Saturday, May 09, 2015

#ToriesOutNow

You have more voice than your vote. By all means educate, agitate, organize to protest an election outcome you disapprove.

Friday, May 08, 2015

Long Teaching Day

And last teaching day... until summer term begins at Berkeley. This morning we will briefly survey some pieces on digital humanities -- in which structural racism and a vulnerability to promotional hype reveal limitations in the latest Very Serious academic engagement with networks, and we will also talk a bit about connections between social/relational aesthetics and social software, between participatory art/curation and vacuous participation in net-utopian discourse, on "design" discourse as reactionary politics framed as aesthetics. In my graduate survey of critical theory we return to the distinction of literal from figurative language, recall that fetishes are structured like figures that field false facts -- and embrace the fetishism of all facticity. The larger narrative beginning in the tale of Marx Nietzsche and Freud as foundational figures moving from philosophy into post-philosophical discourses inaugurating critical theory as critiques of fetishism, then re-oriented in the biopolitics of post-war UN-internationalism in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault, finally culminates in planetarity in Spivak as dis-figuration, culture as translation, classrooms as laboratories for convivial praxis, a repudiation of digital globalism and founded in racist/sexist stratifications and an embrace of sustainability as responsibility to others in a futural we that is here but yet to be. I end with thoughts on the radicalism of King's beloved community (which does not apply non-violence but re-constitutes what counts as violence, which does not know how to love everyone in advance but solicits everyone -- including beings that are not yet understood as "people" -- into a companionate responsibility in which love is made possible). A mile high stack of grading then awaits. My class on the patriarchal construction of philosophy against rhetoric in classical Greece/Rome -- and possibly the last-minute addition of a class on argument as compulsion/interrogation of compulsion -- begins at Berkeley in just two weeks. No rest for the weary, bills have got to be paid. Union updates likely sporadically to follow -- that situation is getting hairy. Today, tho, blogging will probably be low to no.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

Information About the SFAI Adjunct Union Protest Party at Gala Vernissage:

Net Freedom

Nets are things you get stuck and tangled in or caught in by hunters. I wonder about those for whom nets are the go-to figure for freedom.

Vote!

Voting for lesser evils won't bring about greater goods -- that doesn't mean you shouldn't vote but that you must do more than vote.

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

"Get Out Of My Office!" President Charles Desmarais Responds to His Students and Faculty

Yesterday, SFAI student Drew Grasso invited visiting faculty members to join him at his scheduled meeting with President Charles Desmarais.

The purpose of the meeting: to give the president a student's perspective on the need for a more stable, secure, cohesive faculty to provide continuity and consistency, and to deliver a letter from visiting faculty (see full text below) asking the president to intervene in contract negotiations and instruct his administration to make an acceptable counter proposal on job security.

President Charles Desmarais's response to his student and faculty? "Get out of my office!" Visiting faculty and students posted a letter to Charles Desmarais (see below) all over campus after he refused to accept it in his office.


Since he refused to listen to us or read the letter in his office, we made sure he would see it by posting it all around campus. But his utter disregard for 85% of his faculty--and even students--is unacceptable. We need to make sure he gets our message. If he won't listen to us in his office or in contract negotiations, maybe he will listen to us at Gala Vernissage?

While Vernissage is a celebration of our MFA students' work and talent, and Gala Vernissage raises funds for the noble purpose of student scholarships, there is no better time or place to get his full, undivided attention.

Donors and students also deserve to know how SFAI's administration has treated and plans to continue treating the majority of their faculty. Students have volunteered to help make our protest party outside Gala Vernissage a memorable--and meaningful--event, and will also be wearing "Adjuncts Unite" buttons in support of us.

But the party would not be complete without the backbone of SFAI, the visiting faculty.

Join us to tell Charles that justice won't wait another semester!

See you there! Wednesday, May 13, 5 PM at Fort Mason Center, Pier 2 (Herbst Pavilion), 2 Marina Blvd., SF.

In Solidarity, The SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team

Full text of the letter to President Charles Desmarais from the SFAI VF Bargaining Team and Action Team:

President Charles Desmarais:

For many years now, more than three-quarters of the teaching taking place at the San Francisco Art Institute has been the work of adjuncts who have no job security, who can be dismissed at the discretion of the administration without notice, who are provided no benefits, professional recognition, or seniority even after contributing decades of exemplary service to the community. We have long been described as “Visiting Faculty” at SFAI, even those of us who have been an integral part of the work of the school for decades. Lately, we have been described instead as “Contract Faculty,” a no less ironic designation since our “contracts” confer on us no security, no status, no stability, no respect for our service and loyalty, no recognized stake in the community to which we devote so much of our lives.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that last year adjuncts at SFAI voted to be represented by SEIU in unprecedented numbers. And this year we have been negotiating the terms of a new adjunct faculty contract with the administration. Throughout this process of negotiations, our priorities have been the same as the ones that impelled us to organize in the first place: we have sought real job security, recognitions of excellence and seniority, and a greater voice in governance to reflect the unique insights emerging from our experience doing so much of the actual teaching of the actual students for whom SFAI actually exists.

Throughout the year we have made many proposals and regularly offered compromises in the face of administration counter-proposals, proceeding in good faith, but the bargaining progress has recently stalled. The administration’s representatives have become less timely in responding to our proposals in what has begun to seem an effort to run out the clock as the academic year draws to a close and public attention strays from the injurious impacts of administration policies. More and more unionized adjuncts with many years of service to SFAI are finding that they will no longer be offered courses for the coming year; meanwhile, advertisements for new replacement instructors grow apace. The most recent administration proposal has not remotely met any of our concerns or reflected the least awareness of our core values: it refuses to provide any job security, any recognition of excellent or long service, any relevant stake in governance. This is worse than unacceptable, it is an outrageous expression of indifference and disrespect to the history that brought us to this moment of distress.

In a communication to tenured faculty -- but apparently not to adjuncts -- Dean Schreiber expressed incredulity at our response to the administration’s blanket rejection of our key demands, then went on to explain that any “job security proposal… must take into account our obligation to the entire institution to create a system that provides the level of flexibility that we need.” It is very clear “the level of flexibility” that the administration thinks it “needs” amounts to arbitrary discretion over hiring and firing at will, precisely the intolerable state of affairs that inaugurated this dispute. So long as “flexibility” amounts to absolute unaccountable control over the terms of our employment it is antithetical to any security for the dedicated, talented, professionals who do most of the teaching at SFAI. It should go without saying that the administration’s “obligation to the entire institution” actually includes obligations to all the people who are working here, to the maintenance of a community that includes us, and also requires support of ongoing academic standards and traditions and a shared ethos that is ill-served by a precarious, short-term, isolated, ill-respected cohort of teachers.

In your welcome message at the official SFAI website, you speak of the Institute as a “tight-knit community of peers and accomplished faculty” and that word “faculty” links to a directory that includes us all. You say that “SFAI must apply its distinct culture and long-held values in a contemporary context.” We are sure you understand that we are indispensable to that distinct culture and that we are doing the work of applying those shared values. You immediately recognized the verdict of our vote to unionize and expressed a commitment to work with us on what you agreed were shared concerns. That is why we are exhorting you now to become involved in the bargaining at this crucial moment. Come to the table yourself and offer up an acceptable and respectful proposal to restore the good faith bargaining to which we must all remain committed.

Over the next two weeks there will be a number of events celebrating the accomplishments of our wonderful students at the close of another academic year. As you know these events will be thronged with students, donors, alumni, celebrated figures and press. You should expect that we will be a presence in these events, educating all the interested (and often, we fear, misinformed) stakeholders to this institution about our circumstances and the present status of our bargaining. Let us be clear, we are as dedicated to and proud of our students as only their teachers could be, and we are more thrilled than anybody to celebrate their work and achievements with our community. The information we provide the public will not disrupt their events or distract from their accomplishments. If you could provide a tentative proposal by May 12 on job security that satisfies the Bargaining Team that administration is finally showing real movement reflecting our demands for a system recognizing tiers of seniority, providing a path for advancement including multi-year contracts, offering a grandfathering system to recognize the long service of many adjuncts, and a greater voice in our coursework and school governance you can be sure that the information we provide the public would reflect that promising change and provide a congenial end-of-term for all.

SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team and Action Team

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

An Open Letter to SFAI President Charles Desmarais

President Charles Desmarais:

For many years now, more than three-quarters of the teaching taking place at the San Francisco Art Institute has been the work of adjuncts who have no job security, who can be dismissed at the discretion of the administration without notice, who are provided no benefits, professional recognition, or seniority even after contributing decades of exemplary service to the community. We have long been described as "Visiting Faculty" at SFAI, even those of us who have been an integral part of the work of the school for decades. Lately, we have been described instead as "Contract Faculty," a no less ironic designation since our "contracts" confer on us no security, no status, no stability, no respect for our service and loyalty, no recognized stake in the community to which we devote so much of our lives.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that last year adjuncts at SFAI voted to be represented by SEIU in unprecedented numbers. And this year we have been negotiating the terms of a new adjunct faculty contract with the administration. Throughout this process of negotiations, our priorities have been the same as the ones that impelled us to organize in the first place: we have sought real job security, recognitions of excellence and seniority, and a greater voice in governance to reflect the unique insights emerging from our experience doing so much of the actual teaching of the actual students for whom SFAI actually exists.

Throughout the year we have made many proposals and regularly offered compromises in the face of administration counter-proposals, proceeding in good faith, but the bargaining progress has recently stalled. The administration's representatives have become less timely in responding to our proposals in what has begun to seem an effort to run out the clock as the academic year draws to a close and public attention strays from the injurious impacts of administration policies. More and more unionized adjuncts with many years of service to SFAI are finding that they will no longer be offered courses for the coming year; meanwhile, advertisements for new replacement instructors grow apace. The most recent administration proposal has not remotely met any of our concerns or reflected the least awareness of our core values: it refuses to provide any job security, any recognition of excellent or long service, any relevant stake in governance. This is worse than unacceptable, it is an outrageous expression of indifference and disrespect to the history that brought us to this moment of distress.

In a communication to tenured faculty -- but apparently not to adjuncts -- Dean Schreiber expressed incredulity at our response to the administration's blanket rejection of our key demands, then went on to explain that any "job security proposal… must take into account our obligation to the entire institution to create a system that provides the level of flexibility that we need." It is very clear "the level of flexibility" that the administration thinks it "needs" amounts to arbitrary discretion over hiring and firing at will, precisely the intolerable state of affairs that inaugurated this dispute. So long as "flexibility" amounts to absolute unaccountable control over the terms of our employment it is antithetical to any security for the dedicated, talented, professionals who do most of the teaching at SFAI. It should go without saying that the administration's "obligation to the entire institution" actually includes obligations to all the people who are working here, to the maintenance of a community that includes us, and also requires support of ongoing academic standards and traditions and a shared ethos that is ill-served by a precarious, short-term, isolated, ill-respected cohort of teachers.

In your welcome message at the official SFAI website, you speak of the Institute as a "tight-knit community of peers and accomplished faculty" and that word "faculty" links to a directory that includes us all. You say that "SFAI must apply its distinct culture and long-held values in a contemporary context." We are sure you understand that we are indispensable to that distinct culture and that we are doing the work of applying those shared values. You immediately recognized the verdict of our vote to unionize and expressed a commitment to work with us on what you agreed were shared concerns. That is why we are exhorting you now to become involved in the bargaining at this crucial moment. Come to the table yourself and offer up an acceptable and respectful proposal to restore the good faith bargaining to which we must all remain committed.

Over the next two weeks there will be a number of events celebrating the accomplishments of our wonderful students at the close of another academic year. As you know these events will be thronged with students, donors, alumni, celebrated figures and press. You should expect that we will be a presence in these events, educating all the interested (and often, we fear, misinformed) stakeholders to this institution about our circumstances and the present status of our bargaining. Let us be clear, we are as dedicated to and proud of our students as only their teachers could be, and we are more thrilled than anybody to celebrate their work and achievements with our community. The information we provide the public will not disrupt their events or distract from their accomplishments. If you could provide a tentative proposal by on job security that satisfies the Bargaining Team that administration is finally showing real movement reflecting our demands for a system recognizing tiers of seniority, providing a path for advancement including multi-year contracts, offering a grandfathering system to recognize the long service of many adjuncts, and a greater voice in our coursework and school governance you can be sure that the information we provide the public would reflect that promising change and provide a congenial end-of-term for all.


SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team and Action Team

***
BACKGROUND:

San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting
It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points
It's Not Just SEIU They Oppose, That's Just the Line They've Settled On
The Willfulness of the "At Will" Academy
SFAI's Adjunct Union Voting Commences -- As Does the Latest and Last Union-Busting Gambit
SFAI Adjuncts Vote Overwhelmingly to Unionize With SEIU!

Cheers! Happy Birthday Karl Marx!


Coming up on his bicentennial soon. Any revolutions being planned for the occasion? (Tech "revolutions" don't count.)

Monday, May 04, 2015

By The Way

Those who think voting for a better bad over a worse bad candidate actually on offer in elections putting people in offices who will act in your name whether you participate or not implies a complete endorsement of everything that candidate proceeds to do and makes one culpable for all the crimes of politicians past present and future, and who think somehow not voting removes these complicities and bloodstains -- I am afraid that by your logic (though certainly not my own) you are already complicit in and celebratory of all the war-crimes and genocidal expansions yourself because you have not renounced your citizenship in a nation-state beholden in them. Eschewing the compromised scrum of the political for an ascent into pure logic, ethical universality, or aesthetic sublimity is actually not something you can really manage. You are caught up in history like a gnat in amber, like it or not. You can struggle with heartbreaking compromises to make things better here on the ground by your lights, or you can become an acquiescent consumer feasting on suffering, or you can delude yourself into the belief that pontificating at an abstract level keeps your hands clean. None of the options are good, but only the first is the least bit worthy. All this discussion began because some people think they are too good to vote and that makes them responsible while I think it makes them irresponsible. I've said all I can think to say on the subject for now. It's all very odd. Voting isn't really that hard to do unless you happen to have been a target of GOP disenfranchisement schemes, and here in America, in this debased moment of the white-racist misogynist gay-bashing war-mongering gun-loving forced-pregnancy anti-science christianist-talibanist economic cruelty-caucus of the Republican Party it isn't really that hard to figure out who to vote for, even when the Democrats put forth timorous corporate-cozy assholes up for election (which indeed they do, but it is wrong to pretend that this is all they do). Just fucking vote. Do more than vote, certainly, but vote. If you think it's hard, you're lazy, if you think it makes no difference, you're stupid. Stop your whining and your self-righteous pretenses that not helping out makes you some kind of superhero. Bored, now.

Normative Pluralism

Once again, upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Reasonableness demands more than that we apply legitimate standards of justification to warrant beliefs that drive our choices, but that we recognize there are different kinds of decision justified by different forms of belief warranted by different sorts of legitimate criteria. Moral beliefs (from the Latin mores, meaning something like "community-standards") consolidate membership in a "we" which inevitably excludes various "theys" -- while ethical beliefs (from ethos, projections of character in rhetorical occasions) solicit imagined, logical, eventual universal assent, a "we" from which no "they" would rightly be excluded -- and political beliefs (from polis, city, the space of urbanity, publicity, plurality) assume that the "we" who share a time and place are ineradicably diverse in their histories and hopes and that reconciling our wants and solving our shared problems demands interminable efforts at compromise with "theys."

I think it is as profoundly misguided to confuse the ethical universalism of our normative ideals with the provisional compromises of political reconciliation and problem solving (a confusion that yields aesthetic politics more concerned with making beautiful spectacles of pure idealism than progressive change) as it is to confuse the membership policing of moral parochialism with the political reconciliation of worldly diversity (a confusion that yields imperial politics more concerned with imposing conforming on diversity rather than compromises among the diverse to solve shared problems).

I am not denying that moral, ethical, political, aesthetic, legal beliefs and decisions inform one another -- of course, we all weave them together in our worldviews -- but I deny emphatically that they are or should be reducible to one another. I suspect that self-congratulatory refusals to make political compromises in the struggle toward progress, as well as self-righteous assignments of absolute complicity in evil arising from expedient compromises are rooted in a moralizing or logical disavowal of politics as such. While such disavowals seem to make heartbreaking struggles seem easier and complex realities seem simpler, this is a form of laziness and self-deception that is the furthest thing from admirable in my view.

Sunday, May 03, 2015

In Which I Answer Insane Questions Such As: How Many Murders And Rapes Would It Take To Get You To Stop Voting in Elections?

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

The questions you put to me (which look to me to be insults pretending to be questions), your "thought experiment," your declared effort at prompting a Socratic exposure of my supposedly contradictory or at any rate intolerable assumptions involved your presentation of a string of imaginary calculations as to how many millions of rapes or murders or war-crimes or other injustices I would be willing to "countenance" before they might balance out against good policy outcomes otherwise to alter my decision to vote in the upcoming Presidential election, likely to vote for Clinton over the eventual Republican nominee, and also to support Clinton for pragmatic reasons even while agreeing with Sanders' political formulations more than Clinton's. These are decisions that are debatable (the last one most, the first one least), but I do not agree that your questions are much to the point should you really want to debate them. Nevertheless, I will answer you.

The answer to your question is that I do not countenance a single murder, rape, war-crime, or injustice.

The answer is that I expose and decry and organize and agitate against murders, rapes, war-crimes, and injustices when I am aware of them and that I struggle to create an intellectual and legislative environment in which these are less likely to occur and more likely to be punished than they are now.

The answer is that I do not expect Sanders to be the eventual nominee and even if he were to win I think he is not positioned within the actually-existing institutional and stakeholder terrain to accomplish the ends on which he and I agree, while Clinton with whom I agree less might nonetheless be better positioned to facilitate an arrival closer to many of those ends even if her premises are more modest and compromised than my own to start with.

The answer is that voting for the best candidate on offer is not a matter of countenancing all the atrocities with which they may eventually be associated.

I say this because I question pornographic comic book evocations of piles of dead and violated bodies attributed reductively to villains and heroes in the White House, which is, after all, just one site of historical change (but indeed IS such a site). But I also say this because the alternatives to voting for the best candidates on offer are either voting for worse candidates instead or not voting and hence not voting against worse candidates thereby facilitating their elevation to office. If voting for a better but bad candidate is taken to countenance unjust outcomes associated with their terms in office (however oversimplified the view of the relation of individual agency and historical change implied in such an assertion) then why wouldn't voting for or not voting against an even worse bad candidate be taken as countenancing the same and worse still? 

Which of the millions of dead, violated bodies you make a self-righteous spectacle of would be rendered not dead or not violated by the choice to support the worse bad and not the better bad actually-existing candidate for actually-existing offices? Which of the millions of dead, violated bodies you conjure would be saved because you were too pure to vote for anyone at all even though somebody was going to be elected to hold that office making decisions in your name whether you participated or not in the election?

As I have said over and over again, voting is usually insufficient to the struggle to bring about more just political outcomes, but it is one dimension of that political struggle with an impact it is truly foolish to ignore when you do not have to do so, especially when it is mostly easy and safe enough here in the US (although reactionaries who understand its potential better than some progressives seem to do, are quite eager to make it harder and riskier all the time) not to interfere with other forms of political struggle, education, agitation, organization, criticism, assembly, legislative campaigns, and so on (many of these directed at the very people we vote for, to make the better bad better still and more accountable for the bad they do).

I do not agree that we cannot adjudicate better from worse candidates even when both seem bad by our lights, or both advocate policies with which we agree and disagree at once. If judgment is impossible under such complex circumstance then judgment is always impossible because life is never not complex in this way. Surely an abdication of judgment is not evidence of superior judgment but inferior judgment.

Even A Good Haircut Is A Bad Argument

Same goes for catsuits, at least most of the time.

Saturday, May 02, 2015

Baltimore's Dayvon Love on MHP

The brilliant, righteous Dayvon Love, co-founder of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, was amazing today on Melissa Harris-Perry's show this morning. What an exhilaration to witness and learn from him! Watch!

Not Voting Doesn't Make Worse Candidates Magically Disappear

Expanded and upgraded from my continuing exchange with the very pure "High Arka," who, it would seem, has by now had quite enough of my Secret Plan to facilitate Evil by voting for people on Election Day:
That's a nice, thoughtful paragraph, and you've done an excellent job of reframing the discussion into your preferred avenues... For the purposes of commenting here, would you be willing to directly answer the initial list of questions? I hope the irony won't be lost on you that your responses have been taken from the playbook of Karl Rove, in that you've avoiding answering the questions put to you and instead fired back a long paragraph that changed the subject to something more to your liking.
I'm not, as you put it in your earlier charges, "fine" with ANY of the many atrocities you have pornographically elaborated to spark my inferior conscience with shame at its criminal complicities for encouraging my voting for a President every four years. I know I have put off my confession for far too long, but you will be shocked, shocked! to hear that I disapprove of war crimes and child rape, even though I expect to be voting next year for Hillary Clinton.

Once again, voting is not an endorsement of all the crimes and catastrophes abetted or combated over the course of the political life of a candidate one votes for because they were the better candidate actually on offer.

Once again, there are many ways beyond but including voting to educate, agitate, organize politically to resist injustice, to bring crimes to justice, and to prevent injustice from happening.

Once again, voting for more, and better, Democratic candidates is one small part of the way one engages in such a struggle, not because no Democrats abet injustice but because they are better than Republicans in this particular debased and deranged moment in the life of the GOP.

Once again, not voting for anybody because you don't want to sully your beautiful mind with real world compromises doesn't actually accomplish anything at all in the service of the outcomes you claim to care about, although it could ensure that people who are worse than the available alternatives do greater damage in your name.

As I have said before, I will say once again, that I do hope you do other kinds of real organizational work to support actual struggles toward better political outcomes as a penance for your failure to help by voting.

But, once again, voting is usually insufficient to achieve justice, but it remains an indispensable part of that struggle nonetheless.

I actually have answered all your questions. Your insinuation that I must celebrate the US military-industrial complex and our Empire of Bases and our undeclared wars and extrajudicial killings and so on is frankly stupid. I actually have already explicitly condemned some of the atrocities on your laundry list over the course of our longer exchange but my repeated emphasis that I am anti-militarist should have given you a clue where I stand -- and, again, delving into my archive would provide you a rich record of years and years of my criticisms of our wars and war-crimes.

You seem to think that the President will cease to exist simply if you pretend they don't by not voting for anybody. Your refusal to assume your responsibility as a citizen in one of the richest, most capacious, most influential, most violent, most wasteful, most irresponsible nations in world history to vote for the best candidate on offer to occupy existing positions that will proceed to act in your name contributes nothing at all to the address or redress of the evil things that some of them will do from that position.

You will please spare me the continuing idiotic and insulting suggestions that voting for Hillary Clinton over whatever killer clown will oppose her for the White House indicates my endorsement of child rape or reveals that I would have lacked the character to notice the Nazis were bad. I'm sorry if walking and chewing gum at the same time hurts your head, and that you cannot distinguish the pragmatic politics of a green anti-racist anti-militarist democratic socialist feminist queer from the lies and frauds of Karl Rove. That is certainly your deficiency, not mine.

Although you have not learned anything by our conversation, I am glad you are at any rate edified by the beauty of my apologiae for tyranny.

So, Just How Large Can A "Lesser" Evil Grow Before It Becomes Too Evil For Me?

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a question is asked of a certain democratic socialist of your acquaintance who has the temerity to support the less progressive and occasionally quite awful by my lights Hillary Clinton:
How large can a "lesser" evil grow before it becomes too much evil for you?
Ethically? Morally? I condemn evil by my lights as evil in no uncertain terms. Always. Just read through my archive to discern whether this green anti-racist anti-militarist vegetarian socialist feminist atheist queer teacher and writer and activist passes muster by the reckoning of your moral compass, my friend.

But how evil can the lesser evil get before it no longer recommends itself over the greater politically? Let me be as clear as I can be: ANY difference that makes a difference is enough of a difference to adjudicate a political decision to vote one way or another.

I make a lot of fun of what I see as falsely equivalent "a plague on both house" complaints about (obviously often awful) Democrats, ridiculing these as amounting to treating voting as looking for a dream date or perfect parent or Revolutionary Daddy or what have you. But, putting the point more modestly, you really do seem to think voting for a candidate is an endorsement of their every policy in some sense. What nonsense! Politicians scarcely know what their policies will even play out as in the scrum of events themselves, for heaven's sake. I'm nearing fifty years old and there hasn't been a President whose every policy I was remotely close to endorsing my whole life. What part of green anti-racist anti-militarist vegetarian socialist feminist atheist queer in the United States of America are you not getting? But do I vote in every election every time? Oh, yes, I do! Trust that.

I am a broken record on this score. Let me repeat the chestnut once more: The lesser of two evils is still evil, but the difference between them can still make a difference. Ethics Is Not Politics.

Look, I'm all for uncompromising ethical and factual and aesthetic stands, but to demand them of political compromises in a diverse shared world is no sign of high principles but of a straightforward mis-recognition of the nature of politics -- especially what passes for representative politics in capitalist countries!

Why the repeated recourse to atrocity porn? Parading all the war crimes and rapes you want is quite beside the point actually at hand. Can you possibly be self-congratulatory enough to imagine you know more or care more about such atrocities than I do? Because I am a pragmatic voter, among the other ways in which I engage in political struggle? You don't know me very well, to say the least.

Partisan politics, especially the partisan politics focused on voting and contributions of time and money and that sort of thing are not the place for making ethical stands. Perhaps running for office, or organizing campaigns to inspire legislative outcomes come closer. Certainly broader educational and agitational spaces of action are fine places for such unqualified judgments. At any rate, it isn't unless politics in the other domains I mentioned has done the real work of preparing the way for viable partisan politics on such questions. That simply isn't what voting is for, or usually even should be for.

Perhaps you lack the stomach for the debased choices that happen at the level of voting for the best actually-existing candidate actually on offer, or the heartbreaking reconciliations at the heart of legislative reform. But don't expect me to admire you for it, or to pretend that you are a more ferocious activist for justice and sanity in history than I am because I can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you can't vote for the lesser of two evils to restrain the greater of them -- all the while condemning the evil for the evil it is and organizing to defeat it or expressing yourself creatively to change general perceptions to better accord with your sense of that evil -- then I just think you are being lazy, irresponsible, and narcissistic.

Voting is certainly usually insufficient to achieve justice, but it remains necessary all the same. I can't say I admire those who confine their politics to voting and yet declare themselves principled, but I have less patience still for those who refrain from the costly demands of voting in the compromised service of principle and who would pretend this is the sign of their principle. At best, it indicates profound ignorance, at worst it is privileged self-indulgence.

Friday, May 01, 2015

Long Teaching Day

This morning in my undergraduate Digital Democracy, Digital Anti-Democracy course we will be continuing our discussion of hashtag activism, taking up #YesAllWomen and #NotYour Asian Sidekick, not to mention #Gamergate (no doubt an excursus into all the sad Sad Puppies may find its way into the discussion), plus Lisa Nakamura on structural racism/sexism and gaming, Zeynep Tufecki on cultural capital and techbros, and an early prescient piece by Paulina Borsook -- whose critiques of the cyberlibertarians we read early in the term -- on tokenism among the early WIRED mag digirati (blech). Later on in my graduate survey of critical theory we have arrived at technocriticism as well -- and so I will be reading the poetic Donna Haraway on cyborg agencies and the prosaic David Harvey on technological fetishism before the break, and then turning to Hannah Arendt and CS Lewis and Slavoj Zizek on posthuman eugenics and the anti-democracy of instrumental rationality. Later in the day there is a meeting of unionized adjuncts coping with a pretty low and depressing stage of bad-faith negotiation on the part of Administration over questions of job security for the folks (like me) who do more than 80% of the teaching at the school and who can be fired "at will" at any time for any reason and who, even after teaching there over for a decade (again, like me) are not informed whether we have a job teaching the next term much in advance each term, year after year, catastrophic though the news of a lack of teaching would turn out to be to any plans one might want to make, or bills one might want to keep paying. Another fitful night with little sleep and a demanding day of six hours lecturing ahead. The usual back and forth between thankfulness and thanklessness. Blogging will be low to no, I'm afraid, till the weekend.

Happy May Day!