Yes, it’s August. Yes, it’s muggy. Yes, I got my hair cut.
Yes, I hate everything.
HOWEVER: my heart is not in the hate. I’m working this summer (unlike last. . .) and am thus ensconced in an environment in which someone else is paying to (over)cool the air, and, given that I am working, I can afford to put on the a/c if the weather is still filthy when I get home.
It’s no-drama time. Good for me, certainly, but it does take the oomph out of the hate.
Cousin!
And, to steal the line from Cute Overload (from where I also stole this picture): Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo that’s cold!
(Image via Uzoo Facebook page.)
And remember: Ape, not monkey. A-P-E.
I don’t care if Harry Reid lied.
And yes, I do believe he’s lying, if not about the conversation with a Bain adviser per se, then in propagating information which he likely knows isn’t true. Either way, I don’t care.
I should, though, shouldn’t I? Why let the political scientist in me rule over the citizen? After all, I don’t like lying in politics, and would prefer a clean and vigorous fight about policy and purpose over a cage match in which (metaphorically) gouging out one’s opponents eyes is considered the surest path to victory.
Also, I would like a pony.
Anyway, I let my analyst lead on a discussion at TNC’s place, repeating there what I have stated multiple times here: In electoral campaigns, all that matters is winning, and anything you do which helps you win is good, and anything you do which makes it more difficult to win is bad.
That’s it, that’s the full morality of electoral politics: Winning and everything associated with winning is good, losing and everything associated with losing is bad.
I and those who argued along similar lines got some pushback, with TNC saying he “didn’t really believe this” and others arguing that Democrats need to hold the line against demagoguery. One side held to the view that this is how electoral politics is (You run for President with the politics you have, not the politics you wish you had, as commenter WCBound put it) and the other that this is not how politics should be.
Along with the other amoralists, I took the hard line on this matter, defending lies and racism and swift-boating; in doing so we took the view of the analyst, or even of a campaign insider. Those who took the other side were standing on the ground of citizenship and, in terms of going after the lies, good journalism. Each side was right; neither side budged.
I as a citizen like to feel good about who I’m voting for, and thus am grateful that I have been able to pull the lever for two as-good-as-they-come politicians, Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold. These men held to their principles—ran on their principles—and won election and re-election. Their integrity was the core of their campaigns, and had Feingold* tried to slide away from it, it’s not at all clear such sliding would have helped him in his losing bid for a third senatorial term.
(*Wellstone, of course, was killed in a plane crash while campaigning, and the man who stepped in to fill his candidacy, former Vice President Walter Mondale, another decent chap, lost to Norm Coleman.)
All that said, I’ll vote for the SOB who advocates for what I see as good policies over the decent candidate with horrible policies every time. Every damned time.
It would be great if more campaigns were built around integrity. It would be great if more journalists would press candidates on their views and their tactics. It would be great if the electorate rewarded clean campaigns and punished those who, by any standards other than those of electoral campaigning, “fought dirty”.
It would also be great if I got a pony.
Libertarianism and anarchism are necessary adjuncts to any theory, but as theories themselves, they are shit.
Now, if I were as clever as Nietzsche, I could leave it at that: the man knew that aphorisms are so much more delightful—for the writer of them, at least—than their elaborations.
But I am duller than the mad German, more (if only fitfully) dutiful in extending my pronunciamentos into argument.
Still, I am in an aphoristic mood, so allow me to miss the dot-and-cross of explanation in favor of elision and leap and speculation: after all, even political theorists have to play.
And so, declaration upon declaration, a piling up standing in for the more consequential lock of link by link:
I had stated previously that no theory of politics which cannot take account of how we humans are deserve the name of theory; I may even have used the term political science fiction.
And, alas, as much affection as I hold for anarchism, it is as fantastical as libertarianism in its approach to human being. If libertarianism can’t think of value beyond liberty, anarchism cannot imagine the irreconcilability of interests. Libertarianism conceives of humans as adults emerging fully formed from the mud, anarchism sees us instinctively in communion. They see the state, the corporation, as the obstacles to our true selves, the heavy gate locking us away from utopia.
In short, libertarianism is too small in its understanding of humans, while anarchism would have us floating above the ground. One thinks too little of humans, the other, too much; neither knows what to do with coercion.
And there’s the rub: there is no human polity without coercion, no human congress at all, so any political theory which is to direct us has to take coercion’s measure, calculate how to deploy and constrain coercion in a manner most congenial to that theory’s purpose.
Neither libertarianism nor anarchism is fitted to such calculations. Libertarianism falls into hysterics at the merest whisper of coercion, imagining itself Mel Gibson’s William Wallace rasping out “Freedom!” as it is gutted by the king’s men, while anarchism, too, imagines that if it gets rid of kings and bosses it gets rid of coercion. They share the delusion that if only individuals or the people were left alone, that if the state and the corporation were to disappear, power and interest would disappear with them.
Forced to toil in service to real theory, however, these adjuncts serve a real purpose. Libertarianism reminds one of the massive accumulation of coercive power in the state, and how easily that state may justify to itself any use of that power; if one cares at all the liberty and integrity of the individual, it is good to have a counter-valence to the state. Anarchism remembers that these same individuals and the communities in which they live are capable, often more capable, than is the central state in providing, or at least arranging the provisions, for themselves.
To put this more simply, when serving as a minor chord in a major theory, they are forced to reckon with elements they would otherwise dismiss, and by this reckoning they provide a leavening necessary to the continued functioning of that theory. Their resistance creates breathing room that theory in its denseness would not otherwise provide.
Libertarianism and anarchism, then, are honorable resistance fighters, but it is best if they rarely, if ever, defeat what they resist.
The point is that evidence can be unreliable, and therefore you should use as little of it as possible. . . . I mean, people don’t realize that not only can data be wrong in science, it can be misleading. There isn’t such a thing as a hard fact when you’re trying to discover something. It’s only afterwards that the facts become hard.*
~Francis Crick
It’s no surprise that Crick is a theorist, is it?
I quite like this quote, and (I think) used it in my dissertation, but it also makes me nervous.
First, why I like it: It puts theory first, forces you to think of the evidence in terms of a theory in which it makes sense. If you let the evidence go first, you may end up hiking into a dead end, both because you’re misinterpreting the evidence as evidence (i.e., taking as fact something which is not, yet) and because you miss other bits because you don’t have a way of seeing those bits as something which matters.
But this is where the unease kicks in: Theory can mislead, as well. Thomas Kuhn noted this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his arguments on paradigm shift, although Max Planck had the pithiest observation on this phenomenon: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
So, theory leads, and theory misleads.
Richard Rhodes, in his magisterial The Making of the Atomic Bomb, ticks off any number of discoveries which were missed by those with the most data because they weren’t able to see the data correctly.
The most well-known story is that of Frederick Smith, who didn’t discover X rays:
. . . not so unlucky in legend as the Oxford physicist Frederick Smith, who found that photographic plates kept near a cathode-ray tube were liable to be fogged and merely told his assistant to move them to another place. . . . Röntgen isolated the effect by covering his cathode-ray tube with black paper. When a nearby screen of fluorescent material still glowed he realized that whatever was causing the screen to glow was passing through the paper and the intervening air. If he held his hand between the covered tube and the screen, his hand slightly reduced the glow on the screen but in the dark shadow he could see its bones.
So is this a case of theory leading, or misleading? Or is this a third case, where a willingness to follow the evidence led to a hitherto overlooked phenomenon?
My guess: all three. Physics at the turn of the century was in the start of a creative tumult, a half-century active quake zone of discovery: old theories cracked under the pressure of irreconcilable data, new theories upended the known world and brought forth phenomenon which had previously hidden among the unknown unknowns, and all of this piled up and into the felt urgency to explain not just this new world, but a whole new universe.
There was too much of everything, a glorious and disorienting plenty on which one of the finest collection of minds in human history feasted; is it any surprise that pursuit of this course meant that dish was neglected?
All of this is a long way of saying I’m having a bitch of a time trying to make sense of my foray into medieval history. I don’t have a theory, don’t have a direction, and while I’m unbothered by—hell, actively defend—a certain amount of dilettantism, I’ve wandered enough to have become frustrated by my wanderings.
I’m not too worried, though. As frustrating as frustration is, it works for me, (eventually) crowbarring me out of my “it’ll come” complacency and into a “go get it” activity—which is to say, I’ll come up with a theory which will guide me to look at this, not at that.
I’m not doing the [kind of] science Crick did, so his observations on the process of discovery don’t necessarily translate across the fields, but he is right that if you’re going to find anything, it helps to know what you’re looking for.
(*As quoted in Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation)
Crazy dreams, man.
We all have crazy dreams sometimes, but I have this thing about not waking up before I think I should wake up; thus, if something wakes me up at, say, 8:30 on a Saturday morning, there is no way I’ll think, Oh, I’m awake now, a little early, but that’s okay.
No. What I will think is, That is too goddamned early for a weekend morning, and will roll over and go back to sleep for another hour or so.
When that happens, when my second sleep lasts an hour or so or less, I have crazy dreams. Sure, I probably have crazy dreams in my regular sleep that I don’t remember because, duh, asleep, but these second-sleep dreams tend toward surrealism in a way my other dreams do not. They seem as if they might actually be happening, but there’s something. . . off about them; it’s as if the dream doesn’t have the time to accelerate into full-on unreal, and so gets stuck in this half-world of the weirdly real.
Disclaimer: I don’t pay much attention to my dreams beyond their entertainment value. I see dreams as a kind of vent for everything I’ve accumulated over the day, nothing more.
Anyway, this morning I woke around 6:30, a half hour before my alarm would go off; as per usual, I saw no reason not to eke out a few more moments of unconsciousness.
Which is how I found myself in the street on an office chair whooping around desks and chairs and flinging papers about and singing Echo & the Bunnymen as office workers around me danced and sang.
No, I don’t understand it either.
Read this, Sean Flynn’s piece on the massacre at Utøya: “Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is.”
Two of Freddy Lie’s three daughters are on Utøya. Cathrine, who is 17, is there for the second time, and Elisabeth, who is a year younger, is at her first island camp. Sometimes Freddy thinks his girls joined the AUF just so they could go to Utøya, but that’s not completely true: Elisabeth believes she can change the world. She wants to help people, and especially she wants to help animals. Oh, yes, the animals. Very important. She would say, “The fur, it stays on the animals.” She is also a number-one picker, a top recruiter, for the AUF in the østfold southern district.
Freddy’s girls are worried about him. He drives a dump truck in Oslo Monday through Thursday, but he’s added a few Friday shifts lately. Cathrine and Elisabeth don’t know if he’s in the capital when the bomb explodes. They call his mobile. Freddy always answers. If they call me one hundred times, ninety-nine I take it. Freddy is at home, in Halden, a border town south of Oslo, but he’s left his phone in the car. He misses the call. On the island, his daughters start to panic. They are certain he has been blown up. By the time Freddy retrieves the mobile, just before five o’clock, there’s a message from his ex-wife. “Call Elisabeth.”
He dials her number. She is giddy with relief. Through a window in the cafeteria building, Elisabeth sees Cathrine walk by outside. Cathrine points a thumb up so her little sister can see it, but tentatively, more of a silent question than a statement. Elisabeth smiles, gives her sister a thumbs-up in return. Their father is safe in Halden.
Freddy and Elisabeth talk for sixteen minutes and forty seconds. Elisabeth complains about the rain, teases that she might want to come home if the sky keeps emptying on the island. If it’s still raining Saturday, Freddy teases back, he’ll bring her a survival suit, and maybe a pair of goggles, too.
He tells her not to worry. He’s safe.
You know what happens.
The police emergency lines in the North Buskerud district start ringing just before 5:30 p.m. on 22 July. There are only four officers on duty in the entire district, which is headquartered ten miles north of Utøya in the little city of Hønefoss, and the calls come faster than the operator can answer. The senior officer, a sergeant named Håkon Hval, has been watching news of the Oslo bombing and waiting for his shift to end. He picks up a line. “There’s a guy in a police uniform,” a hysterical voice tells him, “walking around Utøya shooting people.”
Håkon does not believe this. He has worked in North Buskerud for eight years, and he has never been to Utøya, because there’s never been any need. Also, police in Norway do not shoot people. This is a sick joke, he thinks. But the phones keep ringing. Phones are ringing in South Buskerud and Oslo, too. He realizes, very quickly, that this is not a joke.
The cinematic moment, in awful reality.
Boats are launched. Toril climbs into one with a man who steers out into the lake to fish kids from the water. Hege stays at the jetty, waiting for people to come ashore. Within minutes, she helps two girls, wet and shivering, onto the jetty. “A policeman is shooting,” they tell her. She begins to walk them up the path to the café at the top of the camp, then detours to her trailer to retrieve her cell phone. One of the girls spoke to her mother less than an hour before and told her she was safe on Utøya. She needs to call her back.
Boats bring more campers, dozens, then hundreds. The people at Utvika gather blankets for wet survivors. Hege loses track of how many kids borrow her phone. One is a girl, maybe 18 years old, with long black hair. She is nearly hysterical, and she wraps herself around Hege. She refuses to go to the café, refuses to leave the jetty, because she left her brother on the island and she won’t leave until she finds him. She uses Hege’s phone to call her brother, over and over, but he does not answer, and Hege does not leave her.
Toril and Hege were engaged; it’s not clear if they are any longer.
There are ten kids on South Point. Five are dead; the other five are wounded. One of them, a girl, is in the water, upright but limping. Adrian helps her out of the lake and sees a wound in her right leg. There is no blood, just a hole deep and round as a golf ball. They sit together. The blue lights are still flashing across the water, but the helicopter is gone. Adrian tweets: “Shot on Utøya. Many dead.”
He turns to the girl. “It would be really nice,” he says, “to have a cigarette now.”
“Yeah,” she says without looking at him.
“Do you think the shop is open?”
The girl laughs and Adrian laughs, and then they laugh about their water-wrinkled fingers and the cabaret scheduled for tomorrow night that probably won’t happen, and they keep laughing, because there is nothing else to do until someone finally gets them off Utøya.
He gets his cigarette, at the hospital.
He’s missing some muscle, and there are seventy or so fragments still embedded in his flesh that work their way up to his skin every now and again. “So there’s always a reminder,” he says, “that there are pieces of evil in me.”
He smoked a lot over the winter. He got hate mail from right-wingers, and once, down by the water behind the mall, a little thug told him, “You weren’t killed then, but someday I’ll make sure you are.” When he went out, he left notes in his apartment saying where he’d gone and who he was meeting in case that person turned out to be a lunatic assassin and the police had to search his apartment for clues. He also wrote a book, with a Norwegian journalist, about his hours on Utøya. It’s called Heart Against Stone, which is a reference to his desperate effort to quiet his pounding heart in the moments before Breivik tried to kill him. He often wonders why he is still alive, why the man with the gun didn’t put a bullet in his chest when he had a clear shot, and how he managed to miss the head of a still body at point-blank range. Adrian decided it was luck, and that perhaps all of life is endless luck.
Maybe that’s true. On the sixth day of his trial, Breivik explained exactly why he didn’t shoot Adrian when he had his first chance. “I thought,” he told the court, “that he looked right-wing.”
Of course, Breivik came back to shoot him, mangle him. Luck, good and bad.
Read it all, all of the way to the banal and beautiful and awful end.
h/t Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic Monthly
I used to be straight—that’s important to acknowledge.
I wasn’t repressing or in denial or running away from myself; before the age of 40, I was straight. After 40, not so much.
When I lived in Albuquerque I used to take my dirty clothes to a laundry a couple of blocks away. I got to know one of the women who ran the joint (damn, what’s her name? I can picture her, long dark hair, broad face, broad shoulders), and we’d talk while my clothes tumbled and I think we may have even gone out for beers a few time. She was a lesbian, was surprised I was not a lesbian, and stated with some confidence that I must therefore be bi.
You’re bi; you are. You know it. She wasn’t bullying or unkind, and said it with a fair amount of humor, but she meant it, too. I allowed for the possibility—I had plenty o’ friends who were lesbian, had lived with lesbians, had even had crushes on women—but it was an intellectual allowance, nothing more. Even my crushes were more emotional than anything else; I didn’t swoon at the thought of these women, and I certainly didn’t want to get naked with them.
I swooned around men. Not all men, not even most men, but if there was any swooning to be done, it was in the presence of a man.
So how to explain the switch? And it did feel as if a switch had been flipped: one moment, straight, the next moment, Holy cow!
I’ve mentioned before my friend M. thought this switch might have been related to a recent burst of creativity: I was still a bit dazed at having completed a draft of my first novel (that would be The Unexpected Neighbor, link on the sidebar) when prior to writing it I didn’t know that I could write it, had been in New York for less than a year, and my life was kinda shitty but not in a shitty way (if you know what I mean, which I’m not sure I do).
Anyway.
She thought I was opening myself up in ways I hadn’t before, and that this new interest in women was all a part of that. I still don’t know that I accept that, but since I don’t have any better story, I figured I might as well use M’s.
That I don’t have a better story, however, does get in the way of coming out to the folks who knew me when I was straight. Stating that I’m bisexual to new friends isn’t a big deal—there’s nothing to explain—but how to explain to old friends that before I was this and now I’m that?
Perhaps the problem is that I feel the need to explain, but wouldn’t you? And if your friend told you that she was this and now she’s that, wouldn’t you want to know?
Actually, when I put it like that, it’s not a dilemma, not really: One of things friends do is hash over what’s going on with ourselves, so this would just be another ingredient in the hash.
No, the dilemma is in dealing with the skepticism that I was ever not bisexual, or that I’m saying I’m bisexual because I’m unwilling to come out all of the way as a lesbian.
I know, I know: tough shit, people will believe what they want to believe. But given that among my many agonies is that regarding what to tell those close to me about me, if I am to reveal something, then I want it understood that I am revealing something true about myself.
What is true may change, but it still matters, and the truth is, I used to be straight, and now I’m not. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but there it is.
There it is.
You ever bite into a brat and look at it?
(A bratwurst, you perv! Bratwurst!)
Well, it’s a bad idea—no, not the bratwurst, not if you’re a meat-eater (which I no longer am, but once was)—but the looking.
You got that?
Okay, what I mean to say is that while a bratwurst, especially a beer-soaked brat slathered with whatever mess you want to slather on it and nestled in the only-to-be-found-in-southeastern-Wisconsin hard roll, is a damned fine meal, it is also a meal which one might want to close her eyes to enjoy.
Even the best wurst, after all, is sausage, and even the best sausage looks like. . . sausage.
All of this is to say that the spam this blog attracts is best not inspected too closely.
WordPress does a pretty good job of catching most of this canned internet sausage in a filter, and it’s easy for me simply to shake out the spam en masse, but since every once in a great while a real comment is snared, I feel the need to inspect the filter before slamming it against the side of the computer to clear it.
And what do I find upon inspection? Ads for shoes/handbags/misc junk, generic compliments, generic suggestions, generic criticisms, comments in Cyrillic, comments in Greek, and these incredibly long and irritating comments on the global financial situation and, Zeus forbid, the gold standard.
Dull dull dull dull dull. I should be grateful I don’t attract trolls; while they can be amusing in their obvious trollishness, they are more often dull in their obnoxiousness. And these spam bits aren’t generally offensive—unlike some of the stuff I get in one of my email accounts, with subject lines containing come-ons for violent sex with teenagers.
(No, I don’t click through and yes, if I thought it were really child porn I would contact authorities. You would too, right?)
Still, if you’re going to splatter your junk all over the internet, why not show some pizzazz, a bit of flair? Why not slather that spam in some enticing mess to get me to bite?
Huh, I never thought I would miss the Nigerian dictators eager to share their millions with me.
AbsurdBeats 