Have at it. I’m going to watch Mountain Monsters – I want to know what happens with the Raven Mocker. (verdammt cliff hangers…)
Feel free to speculate on whether Cole knows anyone on the show in the comments.
by Adam L Silverman| 163 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Have at it. I’m going to watch Mountain Monsters – I want to know what happens with the Raven Mocker. (verdammt cliff hangers…)
Feel free to speculate on whether Cole knows anyone on the show in the comments.
Comments are closed.
redshirt
Cole knows no one.
Trentrunner
Josh @TPM just reminded everyone via Twitter that Donald Trump is, among many other execrable things, an antivaxxer.
Steve in the ATL
@srv: CIA fucks up = dog bites man
raven
Raven Mocker. Well, I’m going to stay up until this game is over and then you have to find someone else!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I’m still responding in the thread below. And I will not tolerate a raven mocker; he’s my hero, as I explained in the previous thread.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): See my comment back yonder.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: I put the link in so you would know we’re not making fun of you.
Elizabelle
And: DeNiro pulls the film. NY Times:
You people are mighty.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Boy, the old testament god was a real fucking asshole. Who would worship that guy? Oh, never mind.
schrodinger's cat
All of them Katie.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Elizabelle:
This is progress. Robert DeNiro exposed as just another clueless entitled nutjob – explains a lot.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: Here’s the investigative team:
http://cdn.topsecretwriters.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/AIMS-flag.jpg
Which one is Cole?
PaulWartenberg2016
In the good news category, Wonder Woman was great in the Batman v Superman movie.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Trentrunner:
I suppose it’s too much to hope for that he develop an incapacitating case of mumps for the rest of the campaign season?
JGabriel
Mountain Monsters?
IMDB:
Look, I’m as opposed to redneck conservatives as the next progressive, but I don’t know that I can actually countenance hunting them. That just seems a little extreme to …
Oh. They’re hunters who are hillbillies, not who hunt hill… Never mind.
Elizabelle
Frog lifeguarding and drinking white wine near the hotel pool in Jacksonville. Two little frogs passed through about 20 mins. ago. The smarter hopped on his way; the lesser hopped into the pool. “Don’t do that,” I told him. “Chlorine.” Fished him out. Despite his protests. He hung out on the poolside for a little while, stunned, then hopped off on his merry frog way.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: Hell I don’t care, it’s all fun!
Adam L Silverman
@raven: I watch the show because its a hoot to watch these guys try to run this stuff down. I love the shows on Bigfoot or other mysteries. They’re like bubblegum for the mind.
mclaren
@srv:
America’s idiotic self-destructive War on Terror has now reached the apex of stupidity and craziness. From now on, why does Shithole America even need to intervene in foreign wars? We can just get the CIA to arm one faction in another country and the Pentagon to arm another faction and get them to mutilate and shoot and stab and disembowel and napalm and machine-gun one another. Infinite revenues for America’s bloated senile pointless military-industrial complex, plus the added bonus that quacking flabby U.S. politicians will be able to yap “It’s better to have them fighting each other over there than fighting us over here!”
JGabriel
via srv:
I guess that era of post-9/11 interagency cooperation is over.
mclaren
Camille Paglia has a great article in Salon today:
Steve in the ATL
@mclaren: To be fair to the War on Terror, the CIA has been doing this shit as long as it has existed. It’s not a recent development.
JGabriel
@Elizabelle:
That’s a shot in the arm, err, I mean, that’s encouraging.
mclaren
@Elizabelle:
Better than frog baseball, anyway. Or (shudder) frog golf…
Adam L Silverman
@mclaren: All you need to know about Camille Paglia can be found in this Molly Ivins’ takedown of her from 1991:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080306071615/http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/02/MJ_1991_Sept_Ivins.pdf
Molly’s wit would be of much use right about now!
raven
@mclaren: well dork, if I needed a reason to go to bed. . .
JPL
@mclaren: If only if.. If Jeb, then no Trump, if Rubio, then no Trump..
if O’Malley, then no Bernie.. whoops.. that doesn’t fit with your scenario.
JGabriel
@mclaren:
Think we can get them to do that at the Republican Convention?
LAO
@Steve in the ATL: quick OT question, since I have to visit your fine city, if I take an extra day, any golf course suggestions?
mclaren
@Steve in the ATL:
Oh, sure, absolutely — the CIA’s very first operation after it was created in 1945 (from the former O.S.S.) was to intervene in the Italian elections and ratfvck the Italian Communist party out of winning. The CIA has been in the business of subverting our own allies from the start.
That’s not what’s new here.
What’s amazing and new and spectacularly moronic is that for the first time to my knowledge, we’ve got a CIA-backed faction fighting a Pentagon-backed faction in a foreign country. This augurs a whole new paradigm of foreign intervention. Now we’ve got two of our agencies battling each other by proxy in a foreign country. It’s a bizarre descent into a whole new realm of ignorance and folly, like a globalized Metternichian version of the bum fights unscrupulous producers film (by hiring a couple of winos to batter each other with bricks) and put up on the web for paying customers.
Anyone who thinks this will go well for America is insane. Not only arming the internal factions of third-world countries but inciting ’em to attack one another will end only in rage and hatred toward America, and even more terrorist attacks on us by the enraged resentful survivors.
Stupidity, thy name is U.S. foreign policy!
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Not to presume to correct your Southernisms — you’ve been here as long as I have, if not longer — but isn’t it “over yonder”?
LAO
@Adam L Silverman:
Can you imagine what she would say/write about this election season?
Major Major Major Major
@mclaren: you lost me at “Camille Paglia has a great article in Salon today.”
I can think of at least four things wrong with that sentence.
Anywho, post-haircut seafood dinner with the parents, yay!
JPL
@Adam L Silverman: lol That is perfect. I forgot to buy sour cream today since I use it so little, but it is necessary for baked potatoes in my household. I’m hoping to find it at the local QT
Kansas is gonna lose btw
Miss Bianca
@Elizabelle:
“frog lifeguarding?” You are scooping little frogs out of dangerous water situations?
@JGabriel:
Dude, you are swooping in and setting the place on fire. Giggling quite madly.
Linnaeus
This ‘Nova – Kansas game has been a good one.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: I can, unfortunately if I tried to express it it would largely be a stream of curse words and profanities. She would be a lot more eloquent. And amusing.
JGabriel
@LAO:
Probably not, but trying to is a very enjoyable way to spend a few hours.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Few things more shocking to encounter on a plate than hairy seafood.
redshirt
@LAO: My general golf recommendations are: Practice your putting. Then your chipping. Then your tipping, asshole.
Then your drives.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: Its the best take down of Paglia I’ve ever read.
I am constantly amazed at the people that manage to get themselves these sinecures, and they’re always multiple sinecures, and their output is uniformly bad. And its not just these folks with columns, but at think tanks and research institutes. I’ve got a lot of good connections from over the past decade, but I just don’t understand how I could even get into something like this even knowing I’d make a better contribution.
Elizabelle
@mclaren: I remember that frog rocket launch. From Wallop Island on Virginia Eastern Shore? Anyway, the frog was photographed flying into the air once the engines ignited, but did not fare well after that bit of immortality …
No frog sports. No animals may be harmed …
NotMax
@JPL
There’s a jar of the thick and creamy kind of bleu cheese dressing in the fridge solely to be used on baked taters.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Evening all. Thanks for all the
fishfun.JGabriel
@Miss Bianca: Danke, we at Chez Gabriel live to amuse.
Linnaeus
Of course the one year that I don’t pick Nova to go far, they get to the Final Four.
JGabriel
@NotMax:
{Pause}
I just can’t think of any way to respond to this that won’t get me in trouble.
Miss Bianca
@JGabriel:
I mean “dude” in the strictly non-gendered Generic Address fashion, of course…just in case Dude *Is* in fact a Lady…
p.a.
@JGabriel:
I hear rumor of a West Va entity: angry, hulking, twisted looking hands or fingers. Leaves Subarus dead in fields.
mclaren
@Adam L Silverman:
This is the kind of one-dimensional thinking that disgusts me with the self-styled educated elite.
No, Molly Ivins’ hit piece is not “all I need to know” about Camille Paglia. Read Sexual Personae. It’s a dynamite piece of writing, supremely insightful, plus it’s a work of serious scholarship.
Is Camille Paglia flaky as well as a serious scholar? You betcha. So was Emile Durkheim, so in Noam Chomsky, so was Freud, so was Einstein, so was Friedrich Hayek, so is Stiglitz and Krugman and Larry Summers and even J. Bradford DeLong today. But all these people offered some worthwhile insights, they thought deeply about issues and at least tried to apply real scholarship (as opposed to vacuous sound-bites and slogans) to the issues they dealt with — and most of all, these folks were serious enough that you can’t encapsulate ’em with a single throwaway insult.
Molly Ivins was a damn fine essayist (loved her collection The Worst Years of Our Lives) but she was out of her depth when she took on Camille Paglia. Did Paglia go off the rails into Reaganoid personality-cult worship in the 90s? Yep. Does Paglia still have solid and incisive things to say about feminism and American culture today? You bet your ass she does. Is Paglia my idea of a progressive idol? Not on this planet.
But unlike the lightweight thinkers like Tom Friedman and David Brooks who dominate so much of America’s supposed intellectual discourse today, Paglia doesn’t offer simplistic nostrums and refuses to limit herself to a superficial diagnosis of what afflicts American culture today. She’s a flawed oracle (very flawed) but, hell, so was Abraham Lincoln (read his private description of blacks if you want to find how racist Lincoln really was).
It’s an act of supreme superificiality to dismiss Paglia just because she’s got some unsavory qualities. People are multidimensional: they can have superb insights as well as glaring prejudices. LBJ was a classic case in point. Ditto JFK. I could go on.
The notion that if someone isn’t perfect we should disregard and revile them represents the fallacy of searching for the Perfect Purity Pony in our intellectuals or our leaders. There is no such thing as a Perfect Purity Pony. Serious adults look for valuable insights, and find it in themselves to overlook the folly and toxic prejudices in imperfect intellectuals.
JGabriel
Elizabelle:
For an entire season afterward, moths stopped drawing themselves to flames. It was part memorial, honoring that amphibian achievement, and part depression, knowing they could never top it.
dr. bloor
@JGabriel: It was a forty-seven seconds that we will all treasure.
lollipopguild
@p.a.: Known to travel with Hairy/furry animals.
JPL
@mclaren:
Serious adults look for valuable insights, and find it in themselves to overlook the folly and toxic prejudices in imperfect intellectuals.
haha.. Serious people like yourself look for bullshit that will fit their narrative. If only if………….
Adam L Silverman
@mclaren: Noam Chomsky fucked over my aunt when she was his doctoral student/advisee. It ruined her professional life and she never recovered from it. I don’t care if he’s got a direct conduit from the celestial intelligence, he’s an asshat. How you treat the people you’re responsible for is much more important than how erudite you sound in your soundbites. He fails the former and I have no use for him in regards the latter. Paglia is a pretentious dolt who can’t carry a coherent theme through a paragraph much less a column or article. She thinks if she uses enough big words everyone will be impressed because they’re also confused. She’s not confusing them because she’s smarter than everyone else, she’s confusing because she’s incoherent.
dr. bloor
@mclaren: Hopefully, you will thus abandon us all as lost causes and move on to a more palatable online forums worthy of your intellect.
mclaren
@Major Major Major Major:
Perfect example of the kneejerk junkthink that substitutes for thought in so much of our public discourse.
Instead of actually reading the fucking article, you substitute some slogans and insults as a placeholder for the name of a person you happen to dislike, and never bother to actually engage with their ideas.
Let’s try to again on a different public intellectual to see the problem with your so-called ‘thinking’:
Yeah, Coates is blackity black-black-black so let’s disregard whatever he has to say. Coates writes in The Atlantic magazine, a liberal rag, so let’s avoid reading anything he writes.
Don’t bother to actually engage with any argument someone makes, don’t bother to even read the article, just vomit out a few kneejerk labels and point and snicker.
The sheer mindlessness of your response is stunning.
If you want to know why Shithole America is hurtling into a pit of anti-intellectual mudslinging, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A: Major Major Major Major.
JGabriel
@Miss Bianca: No, I’m still largely boy-gendered. I think … [Looks down] Yep. Dude still dude.
Steve in the ATL
@LAO: What part of town? There are great courses all over.
Also (and Bella Q if you are still around):
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/atlanta-doctor-who-was-self-proclaimed-private-sovereign-citizen-sentenced-prison-tax
JGabriel
@dr. bloor:
That’s what she sa … HEY!
Elizabelle
@JGabriel: Truly. When you get caught by NASA camera. And become a meme, after you have left this fine earth …. faster than the rocket did.
Steve in the ATL
@SiubhanDuinne: I was about to weigh in, but decided that three people originally from Chicago should not be offering opinions in this debate.
Is there a native Southerner in the house?!
Miss Bianca
@mclaren:
Sorry, I *have* read Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae”, and – even tho’ she has some stands I approve of and am glad she puts out into the public sphere – such as an unapologetic defense of abortion rights – I still find her facile, glib, and a little too fond of how controversial and contrarian she appears.
There’s two kinds of idiots in the world: the idiot who knows nothing, and the idiot who knows everything. She strikes me as a fine example of the idiot who knows everything.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Steve in the ATL: Ooh, thanks. Just leaving (really) now.
Steve in the ATL
@JPL:
Why do you hate Obama?
mclaren
@Adam L Silverman:
So we should disregard the basic insights of Chomsky’s structural linguistics because “he’s an asshat’?
What is wrong with this reasoning, folks?
Do you have any idea, Silverman, of how degraded and debased psychology was back when B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism dominated the field? Do have any concept of what a breakthrough it was when Chomsky blew away Skinner’s behaviorism and forced psychologists to start dealing with human beings as individuals with an internal life, instead of as collections of operant-conditoned impulses?
No, you don’t give a damn, your aunt got fucked over by Chomsky so you hate his guts.
Is Chomsky an asshole? Yes, he’s a raging asshole. Chomsky fucked over huge numbers of people. That doesn’t change the fact that he made a huge contribution t our knowledge about how the mind works and how language works. Was Rousseau a complete dick? You bet your ass he was. Should we abandon the principles of a liberal society Rousseau eneunciated because of that?
Come on, Silverman, you’re smarter than this.
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: Probably downtown since lao has a hearing in front of the US Circuit Court of Appeals
LAO
@Steve in the ATL: how big is Atlanta? Have argument before the 11th circuit. So no clue.
And thanks for the link.
Eta: with my luck argument will be scheduled in the middle of week, and do I really want to drag my clubs? Probably not. Forget it. ?
Miss Bianca
@JGabriel:
Hey now, hey now, we know that sex and gender are two ENTIRELY different things, am I right? You’re boy-sexed, then, I take it? ; )
OK I stop yanking your chain now…
JPL
@LAO: It’s spread out.
Steve in the ATL
@redshirt:
I am good at one of those four things.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steve in the ATL:
You are a very wise man, and I shall not pursue the issue further.
But that is kind of cool that you and raven and I are all originally from Chicagoland and now in GA. We really should create a meetup, to include JPL, SIA, KareninGA (Mingobat), and I’m sure many others that I’m (shamefully) forgetting right now.
Major Major Major Major
@mclaren: I read the article when it came out, which also was not today (one of the things wrong with that sentence.)
LAO
@JPL: I’m so used to tight eastern cities. It would probably kill me to drive in Atlanta (especially since I only drive maybe 20 times a year, in the suburbs. )
Adam L Silverman
@mclaren: My father’s PhD was in Psychology. My mother’s master’s of science is in Speech Language Pathology. And my aunt’s would have been in Linguistics. I grew up reading this stuff, listening to it being discussed, and know the historical developments of the field/fields in question, who made what contributions, why they were important, etc. I’m not discussing Chomsky’s work in his actual field of Linguistics. Being a professional linguist, even at the doctoral level, does not, and I repeat the not qualify one to comment on geopolitics, the US political or governmental systems, civic society, or anything else any more than any other layman. I know a lot about linguistics – I even studied it a bit in grad school when I was doing my advanced foreign language studies, it does not, and I repeat not qualify me to speak about linguistics in anything but the most casual sense. I don’t give medical or psychological advice, and even though I’ve had formal, advanced education on, and have taught at the university level course on, American Federal government, American politics, American political development, and state and local politics, I don’t generally write on these subjects in a professional way/as a professional because they are outside the scope of my expertise.
You are confusing and conflating Chomsky’s work within his field with Chomsky the public intellectual. His work in the former was very important. His work in the latter is no more or less valuable than that of anyone else. He’s not qualified to comment on most of what he does, so why would I chose to listen/read what he’s saying when I can actually go and find the words of those actually qualified to do so?
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: I lived in Springfield for a few years, so there is an IL connection.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
good god, the drivel tribble is now clogging up threads in favor of Camille Fucking Paglia
dogwood
@mclaren:
If the excerpt from Pagilia’s piece is representative of the larger piece, then there’s nothing new, insightful, or unique about it as a Sander’s endorsement. Most any Sander’s voter here could have written it, and they aren’t getting paid. That’s not really a knock on the excerpt. At this stage of an election season there isn’t much to say about any candidate that hasn’t already been said.
PurpleGirl
I finally turned on The Ten Commandants. Coming up soon is the green death. They borrowed animators from Disney to make that scene.
Do any of you know hoe the filmed the parting of the Red Sea?
JGabriel
@Elizabelle:
That frog (sniff) .. that frog achieved more in death … than I will ever achieve in life.
Wow, that got a bit real. Depressed now.
LAO
@redshirt: Just for the record, since I believe tipping is the only way I’m getting into heaven, I’m a good tipper. ?
Cacti
@mclaren:
Neither Camille Paglia nor Salon produce great articles.
Miss Bianca
@PurpleGirl:
*I* heard it was done with Jello…the parting of the Red Sea, that is…
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Its Yuuuge! I did my undergrad there. Basically metro Atlanta takes up a lot of space and the traffic is horrid. At the last Bobby Jones Scholars reunion in 2007 they took us to the Atlanta Country Club as several of the trustees have memberships there.
https://www.atlantacountryclub.org/web/pages/golf
Here’s most of them:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=atlanta%20golf%20courses&rflfq=1&rlha=0&tbm=lcl&tbs=lf_msr:-1,lf:1,lf_ui:1&rlfi=hd:;si:
I knew Yates, or his son, as he was a Jones Trust trustee. I’ve been to the Druid Hills Golf Course as I lived in North Druid Hills when I was at Emory.
bago
I thought this would be an interesting link given the last thread. https://youtu.be/Meh5BXBdx_A
Emma
@mclaren: Camille Paglia is a logorrheic egoist whose only real field of expertise is the jumbled insides of her own mind.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
One of my minors in college was in Linguistics. Enjoyed especially delving into facets of psycholinguistics in Lila Gleitman‘s classes.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
I never knew that! My only connection with Springfield is an eighth-grade trip. Oh, and I was once offered a job at the Sangamon State University public radio station. Have sometimes wondered whether my life would have been appreciably different if I had accepted the offer, or if I would have made all the same mistakes no matter where I lived and who I worked for.
Cacti
@Adam L Silverman:
He’s never personally harmed anyone I know…
But I’ve always thought that his Cambodian genocide denial made him an asshat.
JGabriel
PurpleGirl:
I’m thinking comb, Grecian Formula, mini-cam, and Trump’s scalp^ – but I’m probably wrong.
^Edited to Add: And Jello™.
NotMax
@PurpleGirl
Oobleck!
Steve in the ATL
@LAO: Dude, always travel with your clubs. If you are going to be downtown and don’t want to travel too far, I’d say Bobby Jones, Charlie Yates at East Lake (not the same as East Lake Golf Club which is private), or Wolf Creek, which I have not played but have heard is good.
If you have any club memberships with reciprocity, then there are other options.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: My mom has at least one of her books in her study.
Funny story: In 2012 I was hosting a working group drafting what we thought would be the revision to the Army Culture and Foreign Language Strategy (that didn’t actually work out, don’t ask, I don’t need the agita…). Anyhow we were having trouble coming up with a good definition of language. Also, don’t ask: short story we had one guy in the room that still claims to have a PhD that he doesn’t have and lieutenant colonel who was way in over his head (the latter was the handler for the former) that kept tying things up. Finally, I picked up my cell and called my Mom. Everyone wanted to know what I was doing and I told them what my Mom’s training was in. Ten minutes later she’d transcribed one of the standard definitions, with citation, into an email and sent it to me. When I told my commanding general about it a couple of days later he thought that was the best thing he heard all week: that my Mom had just defined language for the US Army.
Major Major Major Major
Chomsky is as relevant to geopolitical commentary as Paglia is to computational linguistics.
Steve in the ATL
@SiubhanDuinne:
I concur. Will this meetup have a Canadian theme or should all wear our Cubs hats and Ditka mustaches?
Adam L Silverman
@Cacti: He professionally harmed her, which was her second professional derailment. She never recovered that time and spent her life underemployed as an administrative assistant, alone, and largely cut off from everyone around her. The impact of of her doctorate being derailed basically brought out all of her worst instincts and traits. She lived a long, sad, and bitter life estranged from almost everyone.
mclaren
@Miss Bianca:
At least your’re engaging with Paglia. Now, if you could give me some specific examples of how Paglia was “facile, glib, and a little too fond of how controversial and contrarian she appears,” I’d have some more respect for your response.
But instead of actual argumentation and specifics, you fall on name-calling: Paglia is an “idiot.” Maybe. But nothing you’ve said would persuade anyone of that.
Let me give you logic and evidence to support why I found Sexual Personae insightful and impressive:
[1] Paglia’s description of nature and sexuality as wild forces of chaos fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment civilizing impulse seemed insightful to me. Paglia is channeling the anti-Enlightenment philosophers here, people who have largely been forgotten today in our highly technocratic rationalistic post-WW II society. Joseph de Maistre and Giambattista Vico don’t get much love nowadays, but they offered important explanations for the persistent human irrationalities that our wonderful tech and marvel math and rationalist principles don’t seem to be able to fix. Vico and de Maistre could have explained clearly and simply why a society like America has gone mad and descended into a vortex of paranoia and self-destructive warmongering…but people like Voltaire and Newton wouldn’t be able to. The irreconcilable antagonism twixt human sexuality and other institutions like the family or govenrment helps explain a lot of America’s puritanical paranoia about sexulity: it explains, for example, why enraged fundamentalist Christians prefer to let their children die of cervical cancer rather than give ’em access to HPV vaccines. It explains why there’s a much higher incidence of marital infidelity and STDs in the highly religious deep south than in the northern half of America. It explains the rage and hatred against Hillary, doubtless partly grounded in her sexuality as a woman.
[2] Paglia’s point about the cult of the beautiful male that was so centric to paganism seems wonderfully insightful. That undercurrent of culture got driven underground by Christian puritanism, but has never gone away — and it’s crucial to understanding the schisms in America culture. It explains, for instance, why so many fundamentalist preachers get dragged out of hotel rooms with gay hookers. It also explains middle America’s hatred and suspicion of pop music, which still celebrates the androgynous culture of the beautiful young male…in violent opposition to the more conventional cult of the beautiful young girl (celebrated of course in virtually all our mainstream American advertisements).
[3] Paglia’s recognition that paganism and Christianity have never stopped their cultural war, and that the resurgence of paganism what with the rise of science and technology after WW II the concomitant decline of religiousness has driven huge rifts into American culture over the last 70 years, seems particularly insightful to me. A _lot_ of headlines in the newspapers get explained by this subterranean cultural battle. Why is prayer in the schools such a big issue for Republicans? Because they recognize that the entire American culture is getting more pagan and less religious. See, for example, “The fall of religion in America.” Surveys show that American were roughly 5 times more likely to go to church just in the early 1980s than today. The change is striking, it’s happening fast, and it’s having enormous cultural consequences. But I don’t hear a lot of other intellectuals talking about it…other than guys like P.Z. Meyers, whom I think really does fit the definition of glib and contrarian. To Meyers, religion = bad, atheism = good, that’s all there is to know, and that’s the end of the subject. The notion that the issue might be more complex than that is completely lost of intellectuals like Meyers. Not so people like Paglia.
I could go on. But this gives at least a few examples of why Paglia seems to me a worthwhile and serious intellect.
None of this seems particularly glib or especially contrarian — indeed, Paglia in some cases merely extends Nietszche’s commentaries. But she extends ’em in striking ways, and connects his insights with what’s going on in American culture today in unique ways.
Steve in the ATL
@JPL: Do/did you root for Chicago or St. Louis teams? Not that your invitation depends on how you answer this question (it totally does).
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: That’s Dudette.
I second either Bobby Jones or Charlie Yates. And I double checked, I don know the Yates from the Jones Trust.
LAO
@Steve in the ATL: that’s a good idea. at the risk of sounding like a Yuuuge tool, I’ll ask the head pro at my country club. Cause you know, I wouldn’t want to perpetuate the image that I’m a rich NYC lawyer, or something. ?
ETa: not a Trump course.
Cacti
@Adam L Silverman:
Wow, so he sucks as a private and public figure.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: Dude, I know that (I’m the token male in the SovCitPa Obssessives Club); was using “dude” in the general and ironic sense.
Adam L Silverman
@Cacti: I only know of him in regards to what happened to my aunt. I have no doubt that other students of his speak of him in glowing terms, as do those who find his commentary on everything and anything insightful. All I know is when the rent a rabbi for my aunt’s funeral asked me to give him details of her life for the eulogy, all I could tell him is that after having two professional failures largely outside her control (the first was an injury that derailed her dancing career) she took a largely menial pink collar job, lived in a one bedroom apartment, never traveled anywhere but to see her parents or us, and largely had no friends. And there was no one I knew of that could provide any more or better information. So much potential wasted and for naught.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: tracking, I withdraw my gendered objection.
LAO
@NotMax: a fellow Quaker?
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: Neither.. I’m a long time fan of the Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox and Patriots. Neighbors loved the Blues though.
dogwood
@Cacti:
Denying the Cambodian genocide is what happens when you simplistically believe that when America makes a foreign policy mistake it becomes not the “wrong”guy, but rather the “bad” guy. And if there’s a bad guy there must be a good guy. Lot’s of people end up in denial when they see the world that way.
Miss Bianca
@mclaren:
So you found her insightful and original. How nice for you. I didn’t. I found her premises flawed, particularly with regard to the reading of Enlightenment ideals. My impression at the time was that she dealt in simplistic binary oppositions that sounded cool. And frankly…nothing you’ve cited has really made me strike my forehead and cry, “my goodness, how could I have misinterpreted her!”
But…you know…whatever blows your dress up. She didn’t blow my dress up then, and she does so even less now.
Steve in the ATL
@JPL: Ah, you’re one of those. Saw a whole lot of Bruins jerseys last month at the Dropkick Murphys concert at the Tabernacle. Apparently they are the current favorite of the Southie and Southie wannabe crowd as they are the least successful team in Boston. The Pats and Red Sox are seen are way too corporate and too successful. Not sure about the Celtics, but saw only one of their jerseys (may have been McHale?).
SiubhanDuinne
@Steve in the ATL:
Cubbies, to be sure. And Blackhawks. (I think I’m the only one in the lot with Canadian connections. And Mingobat/Karen is a rabid Mets fan anyhow.)
Emma
@Miss Bianca: I had to read parts of Sexual Personae for a class — still hold a grudge against the teacher.
Anya
@Adam L Silverman: Camille Paglia should’ve lost any semblance of credibility she had when she hitched her wagon to the birther lunatics. She claimed they had legitimate issues and their lunacy was not motivated by racism. Well, she slightly qualified it but still…fuck her and her contrarian schtick.
Her whole shtickis is based on being bête noire of feminists and progressives. What I most dislike about her is she’s a poseur.
Adam L Silverman
@Anya: She is what she is.
mclaren
@Major Major Major Major:
A stunningly uninsightful comment. Let me explain to you exactly how Chomsky is totally relevant to geopolitical commentary.
The basic geopolitical fact of the world today is that America has gone berserk and now wages endless unwinnable wars in 134 different countries — that’s how many countries American special ops teams are working in, if you want to use the euphemism “work” for murder, torture, assassination, and political subversion.
American military power and American foreign policy are based on antique long-debunked Enlightenment-era Npoleonic rationalist principles. American military doctrine centers around what William S. Lind and military historian Martin van Creveld call “second generation” warfare, the principle that if you put enough fire on target, you win any military conflict. Because America finds itself trapped in this Enlightenment-era rationalist conception of human behavior and warfare, America cannot conceive of any enemy that does not respond in a predictable way to “putting fire on target.” America just has to put more fire on target and we’ll win any conflict.
(Third generation warfare is maneuver warfare as used in the German blitzkrieg in WW II, fourth generation warfare is insurgency or guerilla warfare that became common after WW II when Mao perfected it in his Long March.)
Likewise, since American foreign policy suffers from this Enlighenment-era delusion that all peoples on earth respond like Napoleonic armies in early 19th-century Europe, all we need to do is demonstrate our military and cultural superiority, and other nations will fall in line.
This all comes out of behaviorism, the notion that humans are little rational robots that respond to conditioning automatically. This is where the U.S. drone program comes from. It’s pure Skinnerian operant conditioning put into practice: take the rat, give the rat an electric shock, and you can teach the rat not to perform the behaviors you dislike. It gets translated into drone attacks directly and simply: take the drone, blow up suspected terrorists, eventually you’ll train the terrorists not to do the things America dislikes.
This makes perfect sense from the Enlightenment standpoint of behaviorism + 2nd generation warfare. The two concepts go together perfectly.
But American foreign policy is utterly insane form the standpoint of fourth generation warfare (AKA guerilla warfare or insurgency) because using drones to kill suspected terrorists only kills 4% of the actual terrorists and the rest of the people killed are someone’s mother or daughter or child. That enrages the insurgents and causes them to engage in more terrorist attacks.
Likewise, America’s second-generation warfare army is so far behind the times that it is not just useless, it’s actually counterproductive — putting more fire on target doesn’t win wars, it creates more of the enemy (more insurgents) and eventually loses the war, because the entire nation turns against America when they see all the innocent woman and children we’re murdering.
All of this comes out of America’s rationalistic behaviorist mindset. And it’s wrecking our foreign policy and turning the entire world against us.
I could go on about how America’s technocratic rationalistic behaviorist mindset is destroying our entirely country and our entire economy in many other ways. Amazon.com has created a toxic work culture so bad that when the New York Times recently did an article on Amazon’s toxic work culture, it became the most-commented-on article in the entire history of the Times. And every large corporation is now doing what amazon.com is doing, using tech + rationalist behaviorist principles of organization to create hellish unlivable work environments that destroy people, degrade the economy, don’t work, and wreck our society.
Chomsky’s insight that language (and many other human activities by implication) derive from neurocognitive hardwiring, rather than rationalistic behaviorist abstract principles, strikes a blow direclty at this foolish and fatally ignorant mindset. Stephen Pinker’s recent book “The Blank Slate” engender a tidal wave of mindless hate by most of the U.S. intellectual community for the same reason: Pinker’s book rips back the veneer of credibility on America’s obsession with rationalistic behaviorist mindset, and shows that in many cases rationalism and behaviorism are utterly destructive and counterproductive. The most perfect example, of course, is America’s war on drugs, domestically…but I could cite many other examples, such as U.S. housing policies toward homeless peope (first force the homeless to stop using alcohol or drugs before giving them housing, which doesn’t work — the Utah program of giving homeless people housing first works, because then the homeless people get removed from the stresses that cause them to use alcohol or drugs and they get sober) or the insane economic policies of austerity (cut welfare and unemployment benefits, which should logically cause rational unemployed people to search harder for a job, but which actually produces exaclty the opposite result, increasing unemployment because people who lose unemployment benefits drop out of the safety net and have to live in their cars, and have a _harder_ time finding a job for that reason).
Chomsky is totally relevant to all of this. And if you don’t realize it, it shows how completely superficial your thinking really is.
LAO
Good night all!
Adam L Silverman
Alright folks, I’m off to rub the doggie bellies. For everyone who is celebrating tomorrow have a Happy and Healthy Easter. For everyone else have a wonderful Sunday and remainder of your weekend.
Miss Bianca
@Emma:
Mark you, I do agree with mclaren that “Sexual Personae” marks the high-water mark of her scholarship and relevance to scholarship.I think it’s just that a female scholar so explicitly scornful of feminism and so into the cult of Beautiful Young Manhood as the driving force of Everything Significant leaves me cold. Not that I’m *not* into the cult of Beautiful Young Manhood, Heavens knows – and I did rather enjoy the line she drew from Byron to Elvis – but a prominent woman scholar who craps on the cause of feminism just strikes me as an asshole. It is *possible* to be both an asshole and a great scholar or artist – but I don’t think she’s enough of a scholar for me to feel like making excuses for her.
She’s like Cornel West to me in that regard – wrote one decent thing, and has been dining out on/lashing out at others ever since then.
Major Major Major Major
@mclaren: An excellent answer, from what I can only assume is a Master’s student on the short answer section of the final who was asked a question about Freire and forgot to do the reading for anything but the unit on automata, but remembered a bunch of unrelated stuff from Zimbardo and Zinn, who he had to read in undergrad.
Had I more time, I would have written a shorter insult.
ETA: second on the West thing.
mclaren
@Anya:
I agree with you 100% that Paglia went way off the rails with that birther lunacy.
Does that means she’s a flake? You bet it does. Does it mean that every insight she has should be dismissed out of hand? Nope.
The notion that people can be flaky and still brilliant and insightful seems to elude the average commenter on Balloon Juice. I would remind you that Isaac Newton spent more time doing alchemy and trying to decrypt mathematical messages supposedly hidden in the Bible then he spent doing orbital mechanics and universal gravitation.
Living your life with the philosophy that if you find one specific thing you deeply dislike about a human being, you should ignore and disregard and ridicule that person forever, seems like a profoundly Republican response. It’s something you’d expect from a flatworm in a science experiment, not from a thinking human being.
dogwood
@Miss Bianca:
Paglia wrote a serious book that moved her from the world of scholarship to the world of celebrity for a short time. She never looked back. Now, she writes crap to get attention. Thus birtherism.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Cacti: Chomsky is Holocaust denier? Fuck nutz. I didn’t know there were Khmer Rouge apologists.
mclaren
@Miss Bianca:
We can agree to disagree. I don’t believe that Paglia crapped on feminism as a whole, but only on radical Dworkin-style anti-sexual feminism of the 1980s. The more recent sex-positive feminism that arose in the 90s and 2000s has, unless I’m mistaken, met with quite a bit of praise from Paglia.
Paglia pretty much lost it as a political commentator in the late 90s and into the Bush maladministration, but recently she seems to have regained her footing. In any case, I find some of what Paglia writes insightful. YMMV. But it seems startlingly anti-intellectual merely to dismiss Paglia as an “idiot.” Tom Friedman, yeah, you can give some good reasons for doing that.
Friedman’s “Lexus and the Olive Tree” predicts pretty much the opposite of the world we see today, a world at peace because of increased connexions twixt nations due to international trade and a world where the developed nations are increasingly better off economically. Instead, we see a world simmering with fourth-generation warfare because third world countries react violently against globalized capitalism which they see as a form of cultural imperialist invasion and subversion. Too, global wage arbitrage has vastly impoverished most of the population of the first world (only 51% of Americans now identify themselves as “middle class” as opposed to as recently as 1985, when more than 60% of American identified themselves as middle class — we’re on the verge of a tipping point at which more American will identify themselves as lower class or working class than middle-class, something we haven’t seen since 1945).
So Friedman was catastrophically wrong…yet he’s never admitted it, never addressed his errors, never made a public apology for foolishly and insanely calling 9/11 “World war four,” he’s never apologized for all the demented cheerleading he wrote in favor of the Iraq quagmire, and so on. Being wrong is one thing, but persistently continuing in being wrong in brazen defiance of the facts and utterly refusing to admit your mistakes but merely doubling down on them…that seems to me to indicate you’re dealing with an idiot.
Paglia isn’t like Friedman. She’s supporting Sanders and writing against both Hillary and Trump. Friedman is just spewing out the same old shit, more globalized capitalism will make things better, yadda yadda yadda, rinse, wash, repeat. We can reasonably describe Friedman as an idiot. Camille Paglia, not so much.
Cacti
@Miss Bianca:
This election cycle may be West’s nadir as a public intellectual.
Not specifically because he supports Sanders, but rather, the fact that his support carried no weight at all in shaping black voters’ opinions of his preferred candidate.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@dogwood: Paglia is a birther? Holy shit. I’ve heard her interviewed before, she speaks in word salads, like Palin, only using longer words.
Cacti
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Not surprising.
It’s not a subject his fans will ever bring up.
But, read it and weep.
The Nation (magazine) gave him a platform for it. Not their finest hour either.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Cacti: West is a kook. He called the President a “nigger” on CNN and minstrel man. Because he’s a fringe character he doesn’t receive any scrutiny.
dogwood
@mclaren:
Writing in support of Sanders and against Trump and Clinton is a pretty low bar for measuring intellectual depth. It’s not exactly a unique position.
mclaren
@Cacti:
Yes, Cornel West has not covered himself with glory in this election. His treatment of president Obama was shameful and a disgrace. In the abstract, you can sort of understand what West was trying to say…he was getting at the fact that Obama ran on a platform of genuine progressive transformative change, and once in the White House, Obama instead chose to continue the War On Black People In America AKA the War on Drugs, he chose not to try to make basic changes to the U.S. prison-industrial system, to the DEA’s prioritization of cases, he chose not to try to reclassify susbtances like marijuana as non-Schedule 1, and so on.
There’s some validity to West’s criticism. But then you have to remember the fanatical racist opposition Obama faced, and the fact that Obama faced a huge financial crisis + two different endless unwinnable wars when he took office, all of which had to take priority. So Obama’s choice to prioritize getting the economy back on track and get us the hell out of Iraq makes good solid sense.
Plus, as others have pointed out, the president alone can’t end our current War on Drugs or hugely transform our current prison-industrial complex. A lot of what feeds America’s dysfunctional injustice system comes from the state level prosecutions, and the president can’t really control what state and county and local prosecutors do. The problem in America is institutionalized racism (80% of drug use is by whites, 80% of prison convictions for drugs are of blacks) and Obama by himself can’t just sign a paper and end that.
So I sort of understand what Cornel West was getting at. But, crap, what a piss-awful way of expressing himself…
dogwood
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Yeah, she’s a birther. I think she thought it would give her some tv time. But Orly Taitz had that market pretty well sewn up.
Anya
@mclaren: I generally like kooky people. I don’t mind if a brilliant person has major flaws. Creative people are often paradoxical and frustrating. That’s not my issue with Paglia. My issue with her is I don’t buy most of her opinions. I think she says stuff for affect. Early Pagalia was kooky and had legitimate ideas but then fame got to her head. Now all she says is for a reaction.
I was 15 when I first read this quote and thought it was the most simplistic thing to say about a complex profession. It’s one example of her binary thinking.
mclaren
@dogwood:
Yes, I agree. At least she’s stopped writing in favor of the policies of the Drunk-Driving C Student and his torturer sidekick. That’s more than you can say for, oh, Tom Friedman or David Brooks.
mclaren
@Anya:
I find her statement about prostitution captures an essential truth about the sexual power of women in a puritanical society like America, and its consequent demonization. But that’s just me. YMMV.
patroclus
Actually, I kind of agree with mclaren here. I find Paglia worth reading from time to time. Her shtick is that she’s a contrarian and she likes criticizing things that she finds hypocritical. Her criticism is usually unique and unconventional; not like the standard fare. It’s virtually always wrong (and badly so!) but it’s still worth reading once in awhile. She hates feminism and she’ll attack it from the left and the right. She evidently opposes Hillary and sort of sees her as (wrongly) representative of modern women, so she’ll opt for Sanders instead. But I think it’s significant that she moved left – a Sanders supporter is better than a Trump supporter, even if it’s only this primary season. At the moment, I’d rather have her inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, as it were.
The key test for her will be whether she would support Hillary if/once Sanders loses. Is her Hillary opposition more important to her than other stuff? I suspect not. But it’d be cool if I’m wrong. If it’s that proto-Fascist Trump, we need an electoral wipe-out we haven’t seen since 1964 (or ’36) and for that, I’ll gladly welcome even Camille Paglia to the fold!
Besides, with Sanders winning so big tonight, it’s should be Sanders night on the blog (even though I’m for Clinton). It’s okay to read a pro-Sanders essay. I like him. And that bird incident was really cute!.
mclaren
@efgoldman:
Yes, only posts of 144 characters or less are worthwhile.
Go back to the little kiddie’s table. Adults are talking here.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
My god: Paglia said this, “yes, there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama’s educational records remains troubling.”
Nobody releases their college grades. Not Romney, not McCain, certainly not Palin. No one. It’s a red herring.
I always knew she was a quack. Like “The New Republic” she pretends to be a feminist or progressive, but is in reality a card carrying reactionary (ie “even the liberal New Republic says progressives are wrong to oppose the Iraq invasion” – “even the feminist Camille Paglia says Obama is an illegal alien”).
Anya
@mclaren: Tom Friedman and David Brooks are extremely low bar. They are ridiculed and despised here for a reason. I don’t know why you keep using them as a comparison in defense of someone you respect.
Anya
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Don’t forget the ‘educational records’ the birthers were asking for included Obama’s kindergarten records.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@patroclus: it’s an old trotskyite/neo-con trick. Village Voice kook Nat Hentoff and Martin Peretz of TNR did the same thing in 2008. They supported Obama as a cover to bash Clinton. Once the primary was over, they (surprise, surprise) decided to support fellow discredited, incompetent Neo-Con ticket of Mccain/Palin.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman:
Think of it as a fashion decision, not an ‘intellectual’ one. Paglia, never an original thinker but one with a fine eye for the main chance, perceived an opening for a Daringly Transgressive Counter-Feminist Revolutionary Artiste, and she’s mined that slender vein very successfully for coming on thirty years now. Just as David Brooks perceived an opening for A Smart Guy Explaining That All Is for the Best in This Best of All Possible Worlds… and many years later, Ross Doubthat came out of Dartmouth’s conservative hatchery primed to assume the role of The New Young David Brooks. Or Tom Friedman, reassuring America’s middle managers that There Is Nothing In The Whole Wide World That Can’t Be Reduced to A Power-Point Presentation…
patroclus
I also agree with mclaren on Chomsky somewhat. He’s worth reading (even if a professional boor). He’s kind of a johnny-one-note on American imperial power, but he’s right – the U.S. is. Obama has done a good job of gradually changing the direction of the ship of state towards a less interventionist policy, but more needs to be done. And the next President could very easily head back in the other direction. Which is kind of a worry about Hillary. But it’s a phantasmagorical worry about Trump or Cruz. That’s the dividing line. Not between Bernie/Hillary. Between civilian targeting/carpet bombing/waterboarding/torturing and humanity.
Anne Laurie
@mclaren:
No, it’s not; it’s a trendoid performance piece larded with academic jargon to impress the squares. I read it when it first wowed the Media Village Idiots, and I’ve looked at it again, and it has not aged well. Don’t take my word, go back and check out your own tattered copy!
patroclus
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Yeah, I know. It also explains Hitchens and Sullivan (and numerous others). Clinton-hating under multiple guises has been going on for decades. But sometimes, they actually do move. Sullivan continued with his Obama support. David Brock clearly switched sides. If Sanders is a lifeboat for Paglia in her ultimate move towards supporting Clinton, then I’m fine with it. If it’s just posturing, we’ll know before the general election. Politics sometimes makes strange bedfellows. If Paglia is sincere in moving leftwards, bravo!
mclaren
At the risk of unwittingly throwing another hand grenade into the discussion, Corey Robin has a provocative article up on Crooked Timber.
“Historically, liberals and the Left have underestimated the Right. Today, they overestimate it.”
Maybe it’s wish-fulfillment fantasy. But it’s similar to the case that I’ve been making to the effect that this presidential election cycle looks like a watershed transformative upheaval. Even if Hillary is the nominee and wins, my takeaway is that we’ll still get major change because we’re likely to get a recession at some point in the next 9 years (we’re overdue for one already), and with monetary policy at the zero lower bound the Fed can’t reduce interest rates to pull us out of a depression…and the fanatically obstructionist Republican House sure won’t pass a stimulus bill to pull the economy out of a depression. So, as Barry Eichengreen points out, the next recession is likely to show us what happens when we get a major economic downturn and don’t have any kind of policy (fiscal OR monetary) to counteract it.
Things are likely to get incredibly ugly economically. As in “25%-plus unemployment.” At that point, you’re going to see backlash against the Republicans like nothing in our lifetimes…a backlash that will make 2008 look like a Republican mandate.
Then we’ll see what Democrats can do once they regain control of all three branches of the government. (I’m taking it as read that the next president will be a Democrat and will nominate a sane non-reactionary justice or two to the Supreme Court.)
Source: “Barry Eichengreen Worries About the year 2020 (and the Next President) ,” 5 March 2016.
Anne Laurie
@mclaren:
Indeed, Paglia in all cases merely repackages third-hand “transgressive” philosophers to fit the emotional biases of insecure modernists who aren’t comfortable with their own bodies and who can’t/won’t read the originals. A narrow vein, but profitable for an expert such as Paglia!
mclaren
@Anne Laurie:
Sorry, I totally disagree. It has aged very well and contains insights which continue to inform the current cultural landscape in America. Calling something as provocative and counter-puritanical as Paglia’s book “trendoid” completely misrepresents it.
mclaren
@Anne Laurie:
If that’s the sum and substance of your crticism of Sexual Personae, it fails badly. Paglia didn’t just repackage some of the more anti-Christian philosophers in Western history. If she had, she would (for example) have made a much bigger deal of Marx and Machiavelli.
Instead, Paglia emphasized the war twixt nature and human culture — something that none of the counter-englightenment philosophers like Vico or de Maistre or Nietzsche focused on. The philosophers who made a big deal of the schism twixt human culture and nature were people like Freud and, oddly, the Enlightenment figures like Rousseau.
A writer like Paglia who can find strong cultural connexions twixt Rousseau and Nietzsche is not anyone’s idea of a “trendoid” hack repackaging conventional ideas. Someone who draws a line connecting Vitruvius with Freud is most assuredly not just regurgitating old ideas in glitzy new packaging.
patroclus
I agree with Rubin that a Democratic landslide is a definite possibility. And very much desired by me! Trump is Mussolini/Berlusconi nightmare and I think it’s so obvious that most Americans will see it clearly. I think Cleveland could be a Bundyesque disaster.
I don’t agree that we’re due for a depression nor do I agree that we have no monetary tools. QE was stopped. Rates have been rising. Basel could be more lenient. Dodd-Frank requires derivatives disclosure. The U.S. is not Japan. And, even in their Lost decades, things weren’t as bad as Eichengreen forecasts. The 2007-08 crisis was the biggest since the the 1930’s. It seems unlikely to me that the next correction will be nearly so wild.
dogwood
@patroclus:
I read the Goldberg “The Obama Doctrine” piece and was impressed with the way the president has articulated his views on steering the US foreign policy in a different direction. He has made headway, but it will take time and perseverance to keep going in the right direction. Hillary’s foreign policy address at Stanford was the second part of the 1-2 punch. It aligned pretty clearly with everything he said. The Hillary haters should watch that address. If they were the least bit opened minded it might calm them down. And I wish Bernie supporters would demand that he give the Democratic Party an opportunity to hear him speak about foreign policy in an extended manner outside of a campaign rally.
Anne Laurie
@Miss Bianca:
So do I, but I also consider that high-water mark analogous to the time the downstairs toilet overflowed and left a grey line just above the floor tiles.
I give Paglia full credit for her marketing genius. She looked around her dusty little academic corner, realized there was no profit in being just another lesbian scholar-critic, and repackaged herself as the Only Bold Defender of “young beautiful male bodies” for an audience of homoerotically-curious male academics with the power to award grants and fellowships. Since she doesn’t seem to have had anything original to offer (or some hint would’ve emerged after all these years) finding such a cushy niche qualifies as its own form of creativity.
mclaren
@patroclus:
I agree that the next economic downturn is unlikely to be as big as the 2009 collapse. Eichengreen’s point is that when it hits, we’ll be out of ammo for dealing with it.
With the real prime rate near zero, the Fed can’t do anything. You would have to reduce interest rates below zero, and that’s not possible.
With the current Republican House, we’re not going to get a stimulus bill through congress to help out a Democratic president.
So we will get to see what happens when we have a recession with absolutely no countercyclic economic policy. No help from interest rates, no help from government spending.
My sense is that it will get ugly fast.
But time will tell. China’s economy is slowing and they are not handling their transition from manufacturing to services well, plus the Eurozone is hanging on the brink. If we get a Grexit or some other big crash, the whole Eurozone could tip over in a big recession, and that by itself is probably enough to pull the rest of world into a recession.
patroclus
@dogwood: Yeah, I read that too, and I saw him on Charlie Rose. Obama, with Cuba, and Iran, and Myanmar (and elsewhere) has really made an impact in steering us a little away from being the world’s SWAT team, with permanent military bases in 145 countries. But they’re there for a wide variety of reasons, and we can’t just pull em all out all at once. It’ll take at least two generations to even remotely contemplate accomplishing something like that. And that takes multiple Presidents and national will. Hillary’s been sounding the right notes and she was a good Secretary of State (one of the principal reasons I like her). But I still worry. She was wrong on Iraq.
dogwood
@Anne Laurie:
You’re right. Paglia is smart, but she chose the more lucrative path and became a provocateur and a bit of a gadfly over life in academia. That path seems to fit her persona. Likewise, I don’t think a guy like David Brooks is stupid either, but when you choose to become a political hack, you lose credibility.
patroclus
@mclaren: Obama just got $80 billion in new discretionary domestic spending and another $80 billion for defense (plus the end of sequestration) last October. We’ll see what Hillary can do. Spending money is what Congress does. Even with a (reduced) majority, Ryan and Rogers will deal. Sure, they’d be a fight. But politics is the art of the possible.
And we have monetary tools. Not as much as in a higher rate environment, but they’re there. Eichengreen is being Pagliaesque (regarding the economy).
mclaren
@dogwood:
Thanks for pointing those articles out.
Hillary’s Stanford speech differs so radically from the series of speeches she’s given over the last 3 years (particularly the speech at which she said America needs “a more assertive foreign policy”) that I have to conclude Hillary is merely repositioning herself for the election.
She wants to make clear her differences with Trump, the better to peel off moderate Republican voters. Once she gets elected president, Hillary will pivot once again to her familiar hawkish positions — which turn out to be even more hawkish and more interventionist than George W. Bush’s foreign policy, which bodes ill indeed.
Take a look at how Hillary has positioned herself as the golden girl of the U.S. intervention lobby in the military-political-intelligence Iron Triangle inside the beltway. An article like The Military-Industrial Candidate: Hillary Clinton prepares to launch the most formidable hawkish presidential campaign in a generation,” from The American Conservative, November 2014, to see what an extreme warmonger Hillary really is. Among other goals, Hillary wants to use military force against Iran, which is truly nuts. Especially now that we’ve got a treaty with them.
A lot of Hillary’s Stanford speech was the usual trademark doubletalk. She took no position on whether Apple should be forced to build a backdoor into the iPhone, for example, even though she was speaking to the widow of Apple’s cofounder in the audience.
So the Stanford speech fails to persuade me that Hillary has changed her stripes. She’s still solidly behind Madeline Albright’s fatally foolish philosophy: “What’s the good of this superb military you’re always talking about if you never use it”
Brachiator
@patroclus:
Agree about the bird. I had heard about it, and seen a photo, but had not seen a video until today. Sanders’ reaction, and that of the crowd, was very charming. A Jezebel headline compared Bernie to Snow White.
This has got to burn the Clinton crew a little bit. They’ll throw in the towel if a unicorn trots by Sanders’ podium the next time he speaks.
mclaren
@patroclus:
Sorry, just the opposite. Obama has dramatically ramped up Special Ops operations overseas. America now has black ops military teams at work in 134 different countries, far more than during Bush’s maladministration.
Obama has greatly increased the operational tempo of special ops teams in foreign countries as an alternative to direct boots-on-the-ground military intevention. The problem is that Obama doesn’t seem to realize that sending in special ops teams just kick-starts the Vietnam tarbaby. You send in special ops, you take casualities, this prompts calls for action so the president sends in military advisors, the advisors take more casualities so now actual troops must be sent in to protect the advisors, then they take casualities and now you’re forced to send full-on boots on the ground. And you’re in the quagmire up to your neck.
It’s the old Vietnam three-step. And Obama has fallen for it. Look at his initial reaction to the Syria problem. Obama’s initial response was “Do we even need to get involved in this?” Pressure from congress + pundits + the beltway public opinion + the military-industrial complex eventually forced Obama to greenlight bombing. Now the bombing has turned into a massive quagmire and we’re facing deeper involvement.
The only way to stay out is to stay out. Resist calls for action of any kind. No special ops. No military advisors. No bombing. No drones. Nothing. But it’s not clear that in the current post-9/11 undeclared martial law in America that any president can resist the cumulative hysteria to take some kind of military action when things blow up in a third world country and CNN starts showing closeups of mutilated babies 24/7.
Incidentally, under Obama the Pentagon opened up the Africa Command, setting up new bases in an continent that the Pentagon had previously left more of less alone. Obama has greatly expanded the failed and foolish Global War On Terror.
See The Nation article “Is Obama Moving the ‘War on Terror’ to Africa?” from 2014 for a detailed view of how much Obama has expanded America’s role as globocop.
dogwood
@patroclus:
She was wrong on Iraq. But for some reason that seems to matter more with her than anyone else in the party. Most of my friends who support Bernie this time harp a lot about her Iraq vote, yet almost all of them were passionate Edwards supporters in ’08.
patroclus
@Brachiator: I have to admit I got goose bumbs! I could never dislike Bernie after the clear sign that birds like him. It was amazing! And it happened in Oregon – very epic and poetic. Congrats to Bernie on a huge night!
patroclus
@mclaren: Well, we diverge here. I’m not an non-interventionist purist. Virtually all of our interventionist posture derives from WWII, which was entirely justifiable. As would have been intervention in Rwanda. Not everything is Vietnam (which, of course, was a disaster). I like non-interventionist purists, enjoy reading them and think they have an important role to play. But I’m more like Obama than them. And there are no Special Ops in Myanmar, Iran or (other than Gitmo), Cuba.
Ruckus
@patroclus:
She was wrong on Iraq.
And as has been said many times, so were many others and as well she has apologized to us for seeing things the way she did back then and making the wrong decision. Secondly she got behind the election of President Obama. And then went and worked for him, and us. And while she had some hiccups, she also did a fine job. Which all proves she’s not perfect. Just like all of us.
My feeling is that she is by far the best qualified for the job. Sanders speaks volumes towards those who have suffered from the recession. And I should be one of his outspoken supporters, considering what the recession did to me personally. But he’s a one note candidate. He doesn’t have the chops to play first chair and the longer I listen to him (and his many of his supporters) I become more convinced of this by the day.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus:
I’ve come to the same conclusion.
Applejinx
@patroclus: Not on this blog, Patroclus. It’s weird to see, but there it is: place is amazingly hostile to Berniacs, which is not terribly surprising because the Balloon Juice attitude seems to be ‘the problem with permanent Republican majority was that it was a REPUBLICAN majority. Take pretty much the same governance, replace Republican with Democrat, and the world is perfect!
Anybody who can read that classic Taibbi piece on Congress and come out of it with the notion that it’s Bernie Sanders who’s a jerk and hater, is a person I have a hard time understanding. Systems decay. Is it so hard to recognize that the American political system has decayed perhaps past redemption?
The more well Bernie does, the more of a blackout it’ll get on Balloon Juice (and the MSM, for that matter). So he can’t have done that well, because I’m seeing some mention of things like Alaska here, such as the caucus was really tiny. Okay, noted. Were there other blowouts so dire that they got the full blackout treatment here? I used to turn to this blog to hear about ALL things political, but it seems that’s not possible anymore if reality gets too liberal.
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