Sarah Palin’s Greatest Hits
Posted at 11:33 PMAfter watching a number of these Sarah Palin-Katie Couric interviews today, I have to say that they might be one of the funniest things I’ve watched in a while — much funnier than the SNL parodies, which are a complete comedic failure. Anyhow, I kind of had to search around a bit to find the best ones, so here’s a compilation:
- On the “Bush Doctrine”
- On her news sources
- On experience
- On foreign policy
- On the economy (I): job creation
- On the economy (II): another Great Depression
- On the economy (III): John McCain’s legislative record
- Update: On Roe v. Wade
- Update: On abortion and evolution
- Update: On democracy, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and Israel
I think what makes these interviews especially funny isn’t so much that she’s completely uninformed and inarticulate, although this is a significant part of it. Basically, I agree with Matthew Yglesias that what produces the bizarre and baffling effect of watching Palin speak is that she’s trying desperately to communicate in Capitol Hill jargon, but is only capable of expressionistically stringing together talking points that fail to produce a coherent thought.
Bailout Burnout
I haven’t read through all of these yet, but Talking Points Memo has a great list of various economist’s reactions, including Paul Krugman’s, Robert Reich’s, and Nouriel Roubini’s, to the failure of the bailout plan to pass through Congress and where that leaves us. Definitely worth checking out.
America: The Gift Shop
If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell? (Via Mike Soron.)
“Fleecing Shareholders”
In the comments section recently a discussion erupted extending from fascism, to liberalism, to communism, and finally to the Wall Street bail-out. Yesterday Mark featured part of the discussion on the economics of fascism. Today I want to bring up this notion of “fleecing shareholders” as a form of benefiting the majority. As Ezra Klein notes in the above link
…[T]he majority of the country doesn’t own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%.
You can see a graph over at The American Prospect, and the data comes from the Economic Policy Institute. So, again, the question with the bail-out is one chiefly concerning the question of who benefits, but seeing as the bail-out is in limbo at the moment there is not much else to add.
The Prestige and Kierkegaard
Posted at 11:44 PMRecently I was at an Indian potluck and Christopher Nolan came up as a topic of conversation. Probably something related to The Dark Knight. Anyhow, the conversation eventually moved to The Prestige and I remembered a thought I had had on the film, but had forgotten about until that afternoon.
One potential way of reading the film would be through a Kierkegaardian lens, which I think shines some light on the trinity used within the film. Hence, we can think of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialist trinity of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious as roughly equivalent to the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
The aesthetic and the pledge are essentially the same: it involves something of a pact, but crucially adorned in a baroque manner (the importance of masks, titles, and theatrics in the film and magic itself). Think of any magic show you have ever seen as well: there is always something of a glam theatric that surrounds the entire performance. We might also parallel it to Lacan’s imaginary order, the order of ego adornment and spectral identification.
The ethical, then, is roughly equivalent to the turn: in it, the object disappears from our sight, as if by magic. But the “as if” here is crucial, because in our heart of hearts we must unconsciously believe that the trick is merely an illusion, even if we consciously wish it to be something more: if we were to fully accept it as something truly mystical, our entire basis of reality would disintegrate. Here the Lacanian connection would be to the symbolic, the stable foundation of language that sutures the wound of the void, as well as what introduces the dimension of the non-all to being: as soon as there is the Word, something can both “appear” and “disappear” (similar to Freud’s Fort-Da game).
Finally we arrive at the religious, which is equivalent to the prestige, when the object returns from “inner space.” It might be helpful to think of it in terms of the Lacanian Real, the point at which we encounter the traumatic kernel at the core of the illusion: on the one hand, we can conceive of it in terms of the violence underlying the illusion, such as the killing of the bird in the disappearing bird trick or the violence the magicians inflict upon one another. Yet it’s also something more: it’s when magic truly happens, when the “illusion” is actually that the trick is merely an “illusion”: it’s the mystical that exceeds and destroys the foundation of our entire reality. It must therefore appear as something evil and monstrous, like the diabolical cloning machine that Nikola Tesla builds for Mr. Angier.
On a final note, one might argue that the truly magical kernel masked by the “mere illusion” is l’objet petit a in its purest form, the object-cause-of-desire, the “lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.”
The Economics of Fascism
Wikipedia on The Economics of Fascism:
Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote “superior” individuals and weed out the weak.[15] In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class.[16] Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because “the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.“[17]
So that we’re all aware, we’re not looking at a socialist economic bailout, but a fascist one.
Note: Bryan posted this already in the comments section, but I think it’s extremely relevant to our current national predicament so I’m posting it again. Plus I think Digg and Reddit are going to eat this up.
David Bowie Says:
There are a host of songs that I’ve recorded over the years that for one reason or another (clenched teeth) I’ve often wanted to re-record some time in the future. This track from Never Let Me Down is one of those. …
Our engineer, who had been listening to the radio, shot out of the studio and shouted: ‘There’s a whole lot of s*** going on in Russia.’
The Swiss news had picked up a Norwegian radio station that was screaming - to anyone who would listen - that huge billowing clouds were moving over from the Motherland and they weren’t rain clouds. This was the first news in Europe of the satanic Chernobyl. …
For those first few moments it felt sort of claustrophobic to know you were one of only a few witnesses to something of this magnitude.
Over the next couple of months a complicated crucible of impressions collected in my head prompted by this insanity, any one of which could have become a song. I stuck them all in Time Will Crawl. That last sentence rhymes.
Yer Blues by The Dirty Mac because… well, why not?
The Girl From Las Vegas has a surprise. Check out Judge a Book By It’s Cover for increased titillation.
Fascism: 1975 and 1993
According to Dead Horse, the definition of “fascism” has made an odd shift between 1975 and 1993, with some interesting parallels to the recent bail-out. Here are the two American Heritage definitions:
From 1975: “A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.”
From 1993: “A system of government marked by a totalitarian dictator, socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition, and usually a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.”
Dead Horse writes:
Notice what’s missing in the 1993 definition? “[M]erging of state and business leadership…” And that fascism is an extreme right phenomenon. By removing “extreme right” from the definition clowns like Goldberg were free to write “Liberal Fascism”, a most moronic combination of two antithetical terms.
An addition to the 1993 definition is “socioeconomic controls”. What form of government doesn’t have socioeconomic controls? Sweden has socioeconomic controls. Someone who didn’t know anything about fascism could grab onto “socioeconomic controls” and presume that fascism was against free markets, you know, like liberals.
Of course, fascism is against free markets. But then most people who proclaim that they are for free markets are against free markets. The question is never about the existence of socioeconomic controls. It’s about what kind of controls and who benefits. The same class of people who benefited from fascism in Germany and Italy are the same kind of people who benefit from the execution of Paulson’s plea.
It’s the merging of state and business leadership that is becoming official with this proposed bailout.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)
The Neoliberal Dominance of the State
K-punk on the financial market crisis:
One can only share the exasperation of Ads Without Products about the rash of articles describing the current bail outs of financial institutions as constituting a leftward turn. It’s puzzling how “a massive transfer of public wealth to the private sector”, how the State buying up bad debts without getting any equity in return, could be considered the return of leftism. It’s capitalist realism by other means: the only kind of state intervention that is “possible”. This kind of “nationalisation” could only happen to protect the interests of the speculator class…
…What we’re seeing is not the collapse of capitalism, but the disintegration of the illusion that capitalism is about the untrammeled free market. The developments over the last few weeks only underscore Alex Williams’s point that the State, far from being exterior to capital, is a “vital element of stabilisation” which prevents capitalism from accelerating to the point of self-destruction.
Braised Chunks of Karl Popper Served in Heavy Sauce
On the ongoing subject of BHL and his new book, The Left in Dark Times, here is a hilariously scathing review by Scott McLemee in The Nation. The whole review is worth quoting. (Via Crooked Timber.)
Karl Pilkington on Whales
From his new blog:
Whales aren’t happy at the moment cos there’s too much noise in the sea which is a bit of a cheek when whales are actually the loudest animal on the World. Their noises can be heard for miles. When I had a free face rub a few years ago, the woman put a CD on of Whale noises. I asked her to turn it off cos it was annoying me. She told me it was one of the most beautiful relaxing noises on the planet. I said “I’m sure it is, if you’re swimming with them but a cd recording is just noise.” It’s like how I don’t mind the buzz from a fly if I’m sat in a field somewhere, but when a blue bottle is buzzing round the flat it does me head in. There’s a time and a place for everything. Plus the noise could be whales moaning for all we know. It always sounds more like a moan to me. I’m not a fan of classical music cos there’s no words so a whale warbling on with itself is never going to win me over.
To follow up an unprecedented number of youtube videos, here’s an unprecedented second post about Omnichords. Oh, and it’s just another fucking youtube video.
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