Who Is IOZ?

Carney

2012-01-27T12:23:00.003-05:00

An anarchist's take on the "social safety net", which is, like Penelope's shroud, forever woven and unwoven while everyone sits around getting drunk on the host's booze: when contemplating the necessity of a safety net, it is perhaps worth asking if the highwire act is worth it to begin with.

La Morte de Mallory

2012-01-27T11:21:00.001-05:00

So if I'm right -- if my liberal friends want to believe that the State is not just an emanation of the fundamental conflict of Many and Few, and this is why they have to keep believing, in turn, in the essential goodness of the Democratic Party -- then we push the question back a step: Why do they want to believe this fairytale about the State?

-Mister Smith

Always a pleasure to see a writer I admire moving in the direction of dread anarchy, and I'll offer an answer to that ultimate question, which is that the question begs its own answer as surely as the inevitable answer begs the question. Why is the state? Because it is. Through all the dross, the thousands of years of philosophy and speculation, all the justifications and genealogies and taxonomies and myths of origin, no one has ever come up with a tale about the state that in its most fundamental essence goes one step beyond the old mountaineer's motto: because it is there. It is, when you think about it, an awfully curious ontology, and there is a certain poetic justice in the fact that the man who formulated it was murdered in cold blood by the very inanimate inevitability that he sought to surmount. How's that for a metaphor for the state?

As for the Democratic party, MJS wonders how anyone can believe in it--that is to say, not simply recognize its existence but imbue it with some quality of transcendence, or, well, what would we say in this spiritually denuded age?--some values, perhaps. Actually, I fall rather in line with some of the most-cracked crackpots of the so-called Right on the question: in an age in which the transcendent is at best a purchasable commodity, what else is there but the hierarchy of a kind of secular mother church? Fairness, moderation, equality, merit--the Donk treats its various political commitments like objects in a catechism. These outward expressions of an inner state are really all about a sick sort of grace. The often-remarked condescension of liberals is intimately familiar to anyone who's ever spent a few weekends in the pews.

Straits of the Union

2012-01-25T10:26:00.003-05:00

My boyfriend, who is in every way a better judge, arbiter, and possessor of taste than I am, and who therefore pays exactly no attention to politics except when forced into uncomfortable proximity by my own retrograde little fetish, asked best: "Why does he talk like that?"

While I was always bothered by Obama's fatuous grandiloquence back in the aspirational days of his campaign, it seems to me in retrospect an almost charming affectation, like Bush's phony drawl--a put-on so regularly worn that it becomes habit, and what, after all, is authenticity but the habituation of the self to its own autobiographical invention? If he never achieved anything even remotely resembling actually compelling oratory, he managed, nevertheless, to do a pretty good impression of an actual orator. If not a great performer, then at least a competent mimic.

But having taken office, he forsook pantomime for pedagogy, and every word he uttered, even when he attempted to crank up the emotional amplitude, came out clipped, sour, and disapproving; the giddy televangelism of his campaign was replaced by a pale parson right out of Samuel Butler; the change is especially glaring when he attempts to work in the word "folks," which has evidently wholly supplanted the tired "people" as the collective noun of choice in the political lexicon, though Barack Obama saying "folks want to get back to work" is like Bill Moyers saying "truck nutz on my F-150" or Tim Tebow saying "I am a heterosexual"--not so much inauthentic (see above) as implausible given the observable characteristics.

Did he say anything interesting? Jobs, mortgages, jobs, business, taxes. I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, "the indispensable nation." I have always enjoyed that phrase. It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.

To Be, or Maccabee

2012-01-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

I imagine a gang of uncomfortable rookie cops in some half-dark cafeteria multipurpose room like boys in sex ed while an orientation officer exhorts them to pay close attention before firing up the reel-to-reel and running a grainy version of The Third Jihad. No, really.

The thing was produced by the Clarion Fund, a crackpot propaganda arm of the crazed Jews who run Aish HaTorah (Fire of the Torah, no really), an institution dedicated to a particularly aggressive brand of Zionism. The Clarion Fund is pretty hysterical; it seems mostly to produce pornography for American Christian Zionists; its 990 filings are a gas:

I love that phrase: "adequately conveying the reality" . . . I think that might become my drag name one day.

Having been raised in the Jewish faith, I retain a sentimental soft spot for the religion . . . if you can get over The Prayer for the State of Israel that's wormed its way into the service, the high holy day liturgies are really quite lovely . . . my long-lapsed Catholic father even enjoys them, in keeping with his dictum that he enjoys all religions carried out in languages he can't understand. Saturday mornings still recall for me pretty fond memories of preparing for my own Bar Mitzvah, and I do still celebrate a raucous Passover; you can't beat the Seder as a festival meal.

But good god, I hate Jews. I hate this Israel shit. It drives me absolutely batty. This preening, violent desire for a damned national identity, this ragged, atavistic, vicious rejection of exile, and the unforgivable, unspeakable treatment of the Holocaust not so much as a sorrow but as a collective embarrassment . . . oh, watch us pay lip service to the magnitude of our catastrophe while uttering a pugilistic "never again" like a skinny kid who got knocked down by a bully at recess. Well the bully got killed when he was run over by a drunk Russian, so let's pick on some even smaller kid, some little faggot, in a demonstration of compensatory toughness. Oh, and it helps that our big brother is the biggest kid in school.

Anyway, there is a majestically kooky symmetry to the whole thing: a bunch of Israeli nuts producing cryptoeugenic hit job videos which are in turn aired as continuing ed for a gang of New York cops who aspire to get out of the frisking random nigger business and in on the next bad action movie plot.

Come Down the Chimney Tonight

2012-01-23T11:31:00.001-05:00

Santa exists only if we make him real through belief. The American project in democracy is similar.

La Nation's Melissa Harris-Perry. I must admit, it's a novel argument. Along similar lines, socialism with Chinese characteristics is a fish that grants wishes and Saudi monarchical absolutism is a giant blue Robin Williams.

In any event, I am happy to see that the advocates of democracy see it in the same light I do: as the final, bloody, catastrophic end of an aspirational selfhelpism gone completely mad with power.

IOZ dot COM

2012-01-20T06:51:00.000-05:00

Uh-oh it looks like the government can shut down the internets whenever it wants without the Pippa Middleton act or whatever . . . Hm I wonder what this says about the actual power of the state vs the import of any specific and formal piece of legislation.

CONscience

2012-01-19T10:38:00.002-05:00

Great Architects

2012-01-18T09:55:00.000-05:00

So apparently the Congresscritters are trying to pass some kind of MPAA-Murdoch-COC-backed acronym, which has annoyed the internet. I admit I am sort of enjoying it as the old media and the well-capitalized but fundamentally fuddyduddy Chamber discover that oh shit Google is a thing now, but I've got to cop to having no real rooting interest in this payperview cagematch between a bunch of corporate behemoths . . . I guess if you are some kind of liberalprogressive or something you think that Rupert Murdoch is the most evil man in history; meanwhile the Googbook goes right on downloading your brain into its world-devouring personality emulator; copyright does suck, but Total Information is pretty fucking terrifying, and I say this as a person who willfully passes a fair amount of time on the internet.

But look. I am all for the idea that information wants to be free, but youknowmaybe that doesn't just mean free of charge. To consign oneself to a world in which movie downloads are available from eurotorrents while one's entire brain is turned into a proprietary algorithm is a little, um, disheartening. Lemme axe you, which do you think is a bigger infringement on your human liberty, Universal's copyrights, or Google's patents?

Gustav Leonhardt RIP

2012-01-17T17:31:00.001-05:00

Leonhardt was never my favorite, but he was a titan and did as much as any single person to revive the Baroque and begin to retrieve classical music from its bloat and gigantism.

Good Old-Fashioned Psychological Realism Or Bust

2012-01-17T12:58:00.000-05:00

The first requisite of any work of art — theater, opera, a novel — is that it create a universe that is complete and consistent unto and within itself. -Ben Brantley

What does this mean?

I propose to you that it does not, in fact, mean anything at all.

Wrong Mistakes

2012-01-16T11:07:00.000-05:00

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism find the Times doing product placement for the finance "industry" and lobs most of the appropriate hand grenades, although she misses the irony of author Adam Davidson claiming that "Wall Street" created credit cards when, in fact, they were imagined in the 1880s by socialist utopian goofball Edward Bellamy for his novel Looking Backwards--to be fair, he imagined something a lot closer to a pre-paid debit card, but still. As Yves ruefully points out, all of the "innovations" Davidson discovers are antique, if not ancient. Wall Street invented mortgages? Well it must've also invented time machines, because mortgages existed in England all the way back in the Plantagenet days.

What is interesting is that Davidson, like most reporters on the money beat--hell, like most reporters on most beats--has but the barest grasp of what the thing he reports on actually is; his Wall Street is just a sort of vague metonym for all things having to do with money; imagine a sports reporter conflating the Nordic combined with the NFL with the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament with Formula One and you get some sense of how these pieces read to a person even marginally interested in the subject; backcheckers are confused with shortstops, and Vince Lombardi bombs down the track with the Jamaican bobsled team, quoting Yogi Berra the whole way.

Preach the Gospel always and, if necessary, use words

2012-01-14T10:04:00.000-05:00

Now Washington D.C. has long been held to be quite literally Satanic by the conspiracy set, its streets a neat tracery of devilish runes, and while I give some credence to the belief, I hold Washington to be something even worse, which is in terrible taste; I can think of no uglier city; it makes St. Louis look like Paris; it makes Houston look like Angkor Wat. And the MLK memorial is another perfect addition to the perfectly awful landscape, an immense, hammy, vaguely angry demigod emerging from a styrofoam Star Trek set piece, scowling in cartoonish dismay, looking, to my eyes, as if he is slightly hungry. I am apparently late to the story, but it appears that the creators got the quotations wrong! But no one can figure out how to transform the inaccurate paraphrase into a statement of actual principles without blowing the whole thing up. Which describes how all right-thinking folk feel about Washington and thus, in an ironical sorta way, make me hope they leave the thing exactly as it is, a goofy reminder that the misattribution of bogus notions is the crowning intellectual endeavor in these United States.

Logan's Done

2012-01-13T09:50:00.000-05:00

I'm buoyed by the case for Scottish independence and hope that it gives the Basques and the Catalans and the Slow Foods movement and the Walloons and the Texans and the Inuit and the obscure tribes of the Amazon ideas. Liberal futurism is always so blandly totalitarian--whether utopian or dystopian, the whole Earth is forever resolving itself into world governments or other vast transnational, deracinated, cultureless, monolingual blocs, as if history is but a pale reflection of entropy and in the inevitable flight from primitive tribalism our animal passions cool to match the background radiation and we all end up in white corridors wearing space jumpsuits and eating our food in pill form. But why should the future be thus? Liberalism likes to blow kisses in the direction of diversity, but seems to fundamentally despise actual difference, and when they blow their stacks because some obviously racist conservative type denounces them as the real racists, I sorta hafta laugh, because it thrusts awfully near an uncomfortable truth, which is not, lord knows, that Asians are the smartest and blacks have an extra calf muscle due to natural selection on the slave ships or whatever, but rather that culture actually exists and has meaning; that it cannot simply be dissolved by New Deal social democracy or a more unified European fiscal policy or even hundreds of years of subjugation by some larger national entity. Riddle me this, maze uh-meez: why shouldn't the Basques be free?

Like Lenin Said

2012-01-12T10:45:00.000-05:00

Well I am glad to find that Rob Payne, whose post has links to the original news story, had the same reaction I did to the scandal of a Marine sniper team "desecrating" the bodies of the dudes they'd just killed. But you know, c'est normal. Like, it is scandalous for Pvt. England to pile a bunch of naked Iraqis the one atop the other, but it is not scandalous for America to fucking occupy Iraq in the first place. Actually, the most hilarious thing is in the NBC report that Rob links to . . . Brian Williams assures the audience that the "offensive parts" of the photo of the Marines pissing on the bodies of the dudes they've just killed have been blurred out. He means PENIS! There are not enough lulz on the whole internet; every kittycat who ever lived could not LOL enough. You've got Marines pissing on corpses, but AMERICA, no penises!

Gaze in the Military, part 97

2012-01-11T09:50:00.001-05:00

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I wonder who's been killing Iranian scientists. Well thank God that homophobe Ron Paul has peaked at 23% in New Hampshire.

We're Down on Our Knees

2012-01-10T10:27:00.003-05:00

Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour? -The Guardian

I see it as an advance for equality. After all, the state has been criminalizing normal adult behavior for millennia.

Or Does It Explode?

2012-01-09T11:41:00.000-05:00

I really dig the idea that a presidential campaign is all about authenticity. Do we really know who Willard Romney is? His être-au-monde and être-en-soi? Is he a self-created avatar of his own beingness, the observer, the fire, the shadow, and the cave? Now obviously what is meant by authenticity here is something more like truth-in-advertising. Does it taste great? Is it less filling? Do the curtains match the drapes? And in this regard, let me suggest to you that Romney, despite all this shit about his inconsistency and incoherence, his too-slick demeanor and penchant for reversing himself, is far and away the grande dame of Executive Realness; he is exactly what he seems--all id and superego and a Cheshire grin where his I used to be. The other candidates suffer from remnants of actual personalities, and will likely lose because of it. Interestingly, Obama has always struck me with an almost identical impression, a human personality reduced entirely to its formal, gestural elements, Commedia dell'arte where the soul's 'sposed to be. I can't wait for the general election season.

Steel Errs

2012-01-08T21:30:00.001-05:00

Credit where due - Tebow, perhaps for the first time, but convincingly nevertheless, looked like a bona fide quarterback, and my Steelers made a lot of errors. Maybe the kid's got a future after all. Here is my pledge to yinz: if he beats Brady, which I sincerely doubt he will, but if he does, he'll make a fan out of me.

Some Monks, I Owe Ya

2012-01-04T12:53:00.001-05:00

I will indulge this much American exceptionalism: truly, we have built a system to make all the kings and tyrants, party bosses and generalissississimi and primates inter pares and dukes and princess and chiefs and big men over all the ages of mankind weep with jealousy; no hereditary pageantry nor coronation nor victory parade nor one-party election can compete with the multi-billion dollar spectacle of an American presidential election season, its endless lefthand turn toward an identical indycar conclusion, one selfsame auto beating another, a few weird diehards talking pit strategy, the restuvus enjoying the occasional fiery pileup along the way. A vast spectacle of competition ripping ever-faster toward a foregone conclusion, a breadbowl circus lathered in Applebees Smokey Barbeque Honey Bacon Strudel Pepper Spice Chipotle Doritos Rub by Bobby Flay. So what if only forty percent of viewers actually tune into the show? Not even Navy Seal Advocate Investigation Factor: Special Idol Brigade gets those sorts of ratings. Even those who don't participate get vaguely caught up in the proceedings; a self-consuming nuclear fireball of utter inanity through which one of several psycho clowns becomes warden for a few swiftly-expiring years before the whole thing is recharged, refueled, and rerun. Ours is not so much a political economy as a syndicated series.

Fandi Fictor Optimus Prime

2012-01-03T14:58:00.000-05:00

Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: How Research Assistants Can Help to Transform a Slight, 5,000-word College Essay on a Topic of Modestly Malcolm-Gladwellian Counterintuitive Interest into a Tome, is long, wrong, and yet strangely endearing. It begins by explaining that Homeric epics and the Old Testament, despite being fiction, demonstrate the empirically undeniable violence of the days of yore, which is rather like some distant, almond-eyed historian-descendant of the present human race telepathically informing a galaxy full of Stapledonian Last Men that twentieth-century humanity was indisputably overrun by immense extraterrestrial robots capable of transforming themselves into tractor-trailers and boomboxes due to the fictional, but nonetheless, you know, representative historical poetry of one Michael Bay. The rest of the book is devoted to confusing incidence with prevalence and both with averages and everything, everything with percentages; Cain killing Abel being statistically worse than the Ukranian famine, that sort of thing. It's completely preposterous and really sort of fun, an Indiana Jones adventure for the bored intellectual--a bunch of Rube Goldberg setups for impossible derring-do that delights through the sheer force of its own naivete. A lark, really. I run the risk of plagiarizing David Bentley Hart here; a kind reader forwarded me Hart's review, and that was the spark that actually got me to read the whole doorstop. "But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist." Great stuff, the whole of it.

I found myself asking the same question I find myself asking whenever I come across the old IQ-surveys-prove-niggaz-iz-stupid brigade, which is: to what end, this knowledge? I mean, even presuming against all evidence, for the sake of argument alone, that the bullshit is true. Black people are dumb as a demographic which validates that their subordinate position within the body of our society is no one's fault but their own eugenic heritage ergo oh well let them play basketball what are you gonna do it could be worse? Sure World War II sucked but would you rather get raped by a Mongol? It attempts, I suppose, to run a subtle epistemological alchemy whereby Hobbes is transmuted from philosophy into scientific theory, the sort of project that has the flinty odor of a crackpot undergrad fresh from the latest Timothy Ferris joint trying to explain to his comp lit cohort that string theory proves Derrida correct. Why go to all this trouble tying the modern state up in a sac with a duck, a rat, a witch, and a viper and tossing it in the drink just to see if it floats? Perhaps in a more ancient time that sort of thing would be admissible in court; to us, it's just a bit of kooky antiquity.

The answer, I think, is in rearranging our own critical faculties, you'll pardon the expression, to see Pinker's writing within the proper context, which is to say: industry writing. It isn't exactly apologia, and it's not quite panegyric; it belongs to the same genre that arrives in your office, printed on that weirdly too-thick glossy stock, bearing articles with titles like "How Joe Zlotknik of Bumnass Industries Is Revolutionizing the Way You Think about Industrial Lubricant" or "Kineticrux ASGD CEO Viktor Baffleman on the Seventh Sigma"--it all has a certain PowerPoint coherence, a set of texts and images dutifully assembled and carefully put together in a slideshow, the language a slightly deranged adaptation of Journalese, studious objectivity overlaid with the manic desperation of a fading line of cocaine. This shit is churned out by the long ton each year by our universitarians and their pop-sci counterparts, but usually you just ignore it or toss it in the office recycling bin. Oh, is that Jared Diamond telling me not to cut down all the trees on my island? Yeah, I'm gonna go pretend that I'm waiting for a fax for an hour or two. But Pinker, man, he's pulled off the real trick. That smiling face on the cover of Electronic Catheter Quarterly is your own asshole CFO; that glowing company profile, that's your bullshit company, where you work . . . and you feel, though you hate this fucking job, hate these assholes, goddamnit, fucking Janet in Finance and that bitch Louise in HR and Chuck, that fat jag who never cleans out the microwave in the kitchenette, you feel, inexplicably, a kind of vicarious, joyful pride to belong.

Easy Marx

2011-12-28T09:26:00.000-05:00

Well, the dude may be a lazy man, but I've always found the immensely (if inexplicably) popular Eschaton/Duncan Black the least awful of the liberal set, but still, you'd think that at some point you'd stop being surprised that a system that proudly calls itself capitalism operates in the service of capital.

Chaucer at the Bit

2011-12-21T11:14:00.001-05:00

This is an idea I sound in my new book, “The Change I Believe In.” The book is about the journey I and millions of Americans took, from the exhilaration engendered by Obama’s election and the first months of his presidency, through the disappointments and frustrations that have followed. It is, above all, about recognizing how transformational change comes about in a system rigged against it.

-Serena van der Woodsen

These people really need to get religion or something, because this is the worst journey imaginable. Well, look, the change I believe in comes from cultivating mindfulness, equanimity, and compassion. The whole lib shebang, the whole Obama schtick, the wholesale misappropriation of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you want to see in the world--oy, outside of a philosophy of rigorous Hindu asceticism it is exactly the platitude it's become. And that is really the problem with these well-meaning progressives, I mean, the problem other than the problem of their eagerness to return a child-murdering capitalist stooge to the Throne of St. Lincoln for four more years . . . the problem is an entirely outward-looking vision of transformation; a management-guru spiritualism: five principles, six steps, and seven processes for a better tomorrow, today! It takes the pilgrimage, which is a ritual physical metaphor for a movement of the spirit and flips it and reverses it; it imagines that a lot of banal shuffling about in the phenomenal world is gonna get everyone's Kundalini nice 'n uncoiled. And so you end up at mere tautology: transformational change. Yeah, okay, we are going to transform the change in the system that is rigged against transformation in order to immanentize the system to transform itself to change us? Uh, how about we cultivons nos jardins and all that. Do you consider "navel-gazing" an insult? Maybe you oughtn't.

Hie Unto

2011-12-19T10:13:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer; in an older, simpler time, we might've still blamed it on all the vile and poisonous nonsense he hacked up between great gulps of vile, poisonous sustenance. He was never an especially good writer, which is why he crossed the Oxbridge to America, where accents are mistaken for intellect. I read Why Orwell Matters, but I can't remember a single word of it; from the title, I suppose it makes the argument that Orwell matters. I have it filed in my library alongside Harold Bloom's Shakespeare Was Important, Malcolm Gladwell's Noun: A Verb, and my dad's old Tom Clancy collection. Apparently he was supposed to be some kind of iconoclast because he took some potshots at Mother Teresa, but the tipping of holy cows, like the tipping of actual cows, is better confined to a muddy adolescence. He was supposed to be searing but was merely snide; his great intellectual trahison stank mostly of a mid-career MBA, a brief strategic necessity in order to pad the paycheck. A person who uses a natty portmanteau like Islamofascism without a halfhipster of irony is not a writer. As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt's impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company. If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles.

I, of Newt.

2011-12-19T09:41:00.001-05:00

I love Gingrich. I love his new idea that the President or Congress oughta send the Texas Rangers after judges who issue rulings contrary to their decrees and make em splain themselves. It just doesn't go far enough. I think every institution of government should have its own paramilitary, and every minister should have the power to summon any other minister to splain his ministrations; every decision should be infinitely reviewable by every individual; Joe from Public Works should be able to subpoena John Roberts who will be tied up, metaphorically speaking, with John Boehner, who has to rush to testify before Ethyl in the WalMart greeting line. His totalitarian vision, taken to its own logical end, is the very anarchy we so desire.

@ Risk

2011-12-19T09:29:00.001-05:00

Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the lead author of the study, said he hoped the research would alert physicians to signs that their young patients were at risk.

“We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Dr. Brame said. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.”

If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”

-The Times

This is the tag on an article revealing that a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23, or, if you want to be optimistic about it, not quite a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23. The herrenperfessers and the perfesserdokters naturally see a growth industry of sorts here; why should the justice system get all the fun and profits while the psychopharmacologists are stuck merely shoveling speed down the gullets of disputatious pre-teens? What profiteth it the Bayer Corporation or whatever if a kid arrested for selling dime bags (can you still buy dime bags? ach, inflation) gets merely a fine and probation, rather than a lifetime of psychiatric medication? Why make the graffiti boys merely scrub off the evidence of their delinquency when you can also sell them Paroxetine?

Chilling and delightful, like a good snappy horror flick: the total, unquestioning acceptance of this as the natural state of modern life, as regular as pimples with puberty.