Angry Nerds: How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types

The Jared-Loughner-is-a-douche train keeps a’ rolling! In this episode, Slate columnist Matt Fenney drops a pile of YOU KNOW NOTHING OF MY WORK.

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Was Jared Lee Loughner politically motivated, insane or just plain stupid?

Pop quiz: there’s a guy who’s been getting a lot of attention lately who had a long history of mental illness which ended in tragedy, an obsessive focus on grammar, a distrust of the American government, who toyed with the idea that the world we experience is not real- who am I talking about?
Jared Lee Loughner, who shot and killed six people in Tucson Arizona whilst trying to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, right? Or David Foster Wallace, about whom all of the above statements are true. Two very different people, both left legacies that the United States, and the world, is struggling to come to grips with. Despite the similarities listed above, nobody would argue that Wallace and Loughner belong in the same rough category- hell, I might lobby to have them recognised as belonging to different species- Homo Sapiens Superior and Homo Sapiens Vulgaris respectively.
The gulf that separates the two is immense, but a vast proportion of it is taken up by one single factor: intellect.
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Why Conservatives Love War

While the contrast between the true conservative and the pseudo-conservative has been drawn in different ways—the first reads Burke, the second doesn’t read; the first defends ancient liberties, the second derides them; the first seeks to limit government, the second to strengthen it—the distinction often comes down to the question of violence. Where the pseudo-conservative is captivated by war, Sullivan claims that the true conservative “wants peace and is content only with peace.” The true conservative’s endorsements of war, such as they are, are the weariest of concessions to reality. He knows that we live and love in the midst of great evil. That evil must be resisted, sometimes by violent means. All things being equal, he would like to see a world without violence. But all things are not equal, and he is not in the business of seeing the world as he’d like it to be.

The historical record suggests otherwise. Far from being saddened, burdened, or vexed by violence, conservatives have been enlivened by it. Not necessarily in a personal sense, though it’s true that many a conservative has expressed an unanticipated enthusiasm for violence. “I enjoy wars,” said Harold Macmillan, wounded three times in World War I. “Any adventure’s better than sitting in an office.” The conservative’s commitment to violence is more than psychological, however: It’s philosophical. Violence, the conservative maintains, is one of the experiences in life that makes us most feel alive, and violence, particularly warfare, is an activity that makes life, well, lively. Such arguments can be made nimbly, as in the case of Santayana, who wrote, “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” or laboriously, as in the case of Heinrich von Treitschke:

To the historian who lives in the world of will it is immediately clear that the demand for a perpetual peace is thoroughly reactionary; he sees that with war all movement, all growth, must be struck out of history. It has always been the tired, unintelligent, and enervated periods that have played with the dream of perpetual peace.

Pithy or prolix, the case boils down to this: War is life, peace is death.

More at The Chronicle of Higher Education

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THE DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE STATE: VAST, SECRET, AND DANGEROUS

Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

More at Cato Unbound.

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Is Inception the Manliest Movie of the Summer?

This post contains spoilers for the film Inception.

Inception fails the Bechdel Test: while it has two female characters (three if you consider the fact that Cillian Murphy is prettier than most girls)- Marion Cotillard’s Mal and Ellen Page’s Ariadne- and they do indeed talk to each other (for all of ten seconds) but it is, ultimately, about a man. If you’re picky you may even argue that by the virtue of Mal being a projection of Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) unconscious there is only really one female character (played by the only self-identified feminist actress of her generation). In his truly bizarre review* Andrew O’Hehir calls Inception a ‘grindingly self-serious boy-movie’. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this, and I say that as both a feminist and a gentleman, though I would prefer that O’Hehir refer to it as a ‘man-movie’, even ‘dick-flick’, if only because the only verifiable boys in the theatre when I saw it loudly declared it to be ‘well gay’. Clearly not the target market. I really do think that Inception is a ‘manly’ movie, told from a male point-of-view to a presumed audience of males- and that this is okay, since in presenting male subjectivity un-self-consciously (Christopher Nolan didn’t set out to make an especially manly film) it allows for nuance and honesty about male-ness (which isn’t the same as masculinity) that a self-concious man-movie like The Expendables won’t touch.

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Surveys like this one give me great hope that nobody has any idea what is going on.
Much of the results seem obvious- rich white Republicans are more likely to favour capitalism, scary words like ‘militia’ elicit a less positive response than nice words like ‘family values’ (which are what exactly?). There are a few curve balls: socialism loses favour and capitalism gains as a person’s education increases, which means that the old Conservative boilerplate about colleges being indoctrination centres for the huge, well-funded and completely ineffectual socialist conspiracy has the same basis in reality as all other Conservative beliefs.
What is truly interesting here is not the results which go against my pre-held suppositions about the world, which are up for revision anyway, but the genuine oddities that reveal who little people actually think about their own thoughts. For example, one in ten Republicans has a positive opinion on socialism. The Republican party, in other words, has a socialist wing that probably outnumbers supporters of Ron Paul, maybe even Sarah Palin. One quarter of Republicans have a negative view of capitalism. Take a look at the crowd in a Tea Party (*cough*noblackpeople*cough*) – one in four of those people doesn’t agree with the whole ‘going to stores and buying things with money I’ve earned’ thing. No wonder they’re pissed off all the time. The survey isn’t either/or, so there are likely to be many people who react positively to both socialism and capitalism.
Consider my favourite example of head-slapping public illogic- the political spectrum in the US is pretty evenly split between the Republican and Democratic parties, and a whole host of surveys have shown that about 85% of Americans believe that ‘the government’ is lying about 9-11 (the surveys rarely ask what is being lied about). If we over-simplify a bit and assume that there is a 50/50 split between Democrats and Republicans even assuming that one-hundred percent of Democrats believe that the Bush administration allowed 9-11 to happen doesn’t cover every believer, so 35% of Americans are supporters of the administration that in their view allowed 9-11 to happen. This means that in the 2004 election one third of Americans willingly voted for a man they believe is complicit in the largest terrorist attack on American soil, and I’d bet not one of them considered this in the voting booth.
Surveys like those Pew carry out are never satisfactory for three reasons. The first is that they assume that all respondents know what all the terms mean, even meaningless buzzwords like ‘family values’ and ideologically distorted terms like ‘socialism’. Secondly, because to be meaningful the respondents would need to have logically consistent belief systems that didn’t produce Republican-Socialists or Bush-supporting Truthers, but people just don’t work that way- they’re broken. Third, and most important to me would be for survey-takers confronted with bizarre, self-negating beliefs to use an old trick that has been working since Socrates used it to invent modern thought and Number Six used it to blow up a computer: asking ‘why’?

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Back in the pre-Facebook long-long-ago the Proletariat were definitely Alt and had a chill memes established by authentic ‘vintage’ posters like the ones above that ‘went viral’ across Japan/Livejournal. They ‘rebelled’ against ‘the system’ so that their jobs/careers would be better aligned with their personal brands.

Would being proletarian extend my personal brand 2 my bros in the Worker’s struggle?

Are Am-Appy employees proletarian?

What proletarian products are authentic/entry-level?

(Note: I have no idea why I am blogging a link to some nice posters from the 30s in the voice of Carles.)

Proletarian posters from 1930s Japan ::: Pink Tentacle.

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Since it’s the 4th of July here’s something I came across about a month ago: America – The Grim Truth

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

Given that at some point in the future America will become a Hollow State, how are Americans to respond? The first and easiest way, the way that doesn’t involve holing up in the mountains with canned food and carrying the fire, is to do what the article advocates: get out while the getting’s good. This, I would argue, is the most patriotic thing an American can do: the country’s best and brightest becoming a diaspora and spreading their skills and values across the globe is a surer and certainly less violent way of America accomplishing that much touted historical mission of spreading Democracy across the world. For example, if millions of Americans were to liquidate their assets and strike out to, say, the more peaceful parts of Africa, they would find an indigenous population receptive to American culture from cell-phones to hip-hop. The post-Americans could get their hands dirty with real Capitalism: invest money in machinery and employees to run that machinery (or retail space and salespeople etc.), make or sell something people want, invest the profits in bigger machines or more (or better paid) employees. The kind of basic stuff anyone with an MBA would scoff at that has been driving the standard of life for all of humanity upwards for the past 200 years. The next American frontier, the one after the West but before Space, would be the developing world- instead of governments and corporations stabbing Charter Cities right into a developing nation’s sovereign territory, how about Americans building the infrastructure and ‘good rules’ that will help nations develop from the grass roots up?

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The War Project – Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan tell their stories.

The War Project is a website from Susannah Breslin, formerly of Reverse Cowgirl. She’s gone from covering porn stars to another subgroup America needs to chew up and spit out to make the sun come up tomorrow- veterans. This has been quite the pallet-cleanser for me after immersing myself headfirst in the precious, privileged world of Cocorosie- on whom I’ll have an article finished in a couple of days.

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