Friday, May 20, 2016

A Tom Cat Comes Home to Die for the Day




My avidly pro-Hillaryite Colleague asked me what I think of Bernie now. I said if necessary I could send HC links to the good old harmonious days of 2008 and and a reminder when Hillary was willing to harm Barack Obama in the homestretch, so please. They're throwing chairs, HC said. No, I said, they're not, and here's the thing: you know Hillary is going to win the nomination as surely as you know she's going to lose to Trump. You keep saying the math makes it impossible for Bernie to win, let the cranky old bastard have the four fucking delegates. This is the Clinton Syndicate being the ruthlessly cynical and witlessly soulless fucks they are. HC said, wait, I don't think Hillary is going to lose to Trump. I said, you should.





  • Fleabus, best cat ever, in box last night ▲
  • UPDATE! davidly noticed, so everyone gets this Lambchop song!
  • The Corbyn media-storm: Here, then, were all the classic ingredients of a ‘Project Fear’ campaign: a toxic combination of falsehoods, insinuation, trivialisation, scaremongering, and pointed political interventions by the supposedly neutral apparatuses of the state. By and large, it did not work. This is not to say that it went without benefit for those undertaking it. Corbyn would have to struggle under any circumstances to define a radical agenda that would work in modern Britain, win the media battles to gain a voice for his objectives and assemble a viable electoral coalition behind it. In the context of ‘Project Fear’, he and his allies have had to navigate an almost daily sequence of contrived outrages, neutralise hundreds of petty but toxic talking points, and continually negotiate a truce with his own back benchers. Yet Corbyn won by a mile and remains in the leadership with the over- whelming support of the party membership. Despite dire predictions, there has not been a crash in the Labour vote, although it has not markedly improved either. The fact that Corbyn’s opponents have been unsuccessful thus far suggests that there ’s something they’re missing.
  • Love me love me love me I'm a Leninist: Now that they’ve discovered the notion that a political party, faced with a dangerous political enemy, should suppress all internal criticism of its putative leader lest she be “harmed” by that criticism, and that the party should refrain from fractious internal debates lest it be ill-equipped to defeat the enemy, I wonder if liberals are rethinking their views on Lenin.




 
  • Leftist revanchism: what baldwin - one of my heroes - would tell someone like nathaniel rich is to try to start peeling back his own racial attitudes before he starts hurling his inexplosive bombs. and i will say, as i have said before, that american leftism has been an extreme disaster for the black community. we are approximately as segregated now as we were in the 1950s. housing programs in particular, but the welfare state in general, has frozen a permanent racial underclass and destroyed black communities. democrats loved and prosecuted mass race incarceration until they pretended to see the light. that they've trapped black folks in this insane dilemma where they vote 90% democrat is unforgivable. and there is racism at the very heart of white liberalism, but it is 'unconscious': incredibly condescending, taking no account of the experience of the people whose conditions or selves it proposes to ameliorate, engaged in continual moral self-congratulation, which is what it is for.
  • Althusser is in vogue? He never fell out of fashion for a friend of mine.
  • Rights v Duties: More important, even the most generous attempts to protect the political and socioeconomic rights of individuals leave some duties of individuals to their own states and all humanity out of account, as well as some duties of states to one another. After all, not all duties that morality might impose follow from individual rights. If states have a duty to provide housing and food, do individuals have a duty to pay taxes to ensure it can do so? If inequality gallops locally and globally, is it best to frame the problem as an indirect violation of a right—there being no right to fair distribution—or as a rationale to impose on individuals, corporations, and states a duty to contribute to a just society? If the planet burns, is the remedy a personal right to a healthy environment or a collective duty to preserve the earth for future generations?
  • This tax hike in MOCO both gives and takes from Earthgirl and me. Earthgirl is a public school teacher. Forgive me if you've heard me say this too many times: my wife is a public school teacher, my parents were public school teachers, my favorite aunts and uncles were public school teachers. I am completely biased towards public school teachers. Earthgirl and I own a house in MOCO - I don't begrudge the property tax raise if it goes to public schools.
  • What is public education for?
  • Jim Jarmusch reports on Pere Ubu in 1977. I would normally post some, but there will be much in June.
  • Besides, guess what album I was listening to last night when I photographed my tablet my desk my short pants.






MIXED MEDIA

Duane Niatum

The stars grow lemon
in the field, spread
like tea leaves in
a cup; red-wing
blackbirds fold themselves
into the fence,
corn dreamers.

The sky undulating
with clouds returns
gold-throated arpeggios
to the one walking
at sunrise, sunfall.

Light as the air
I sit on my
cottage steps;
a tom cat come
home to die for
the day.


5 comments:

  1. 1) great cat photo

    2) speaking of cats and death, over the weekend our 18 year old cat was very unsteady on her feet and we wondered if it was the end, but she recovered and is now sitting on the couch next to me as i type this

    3)i have read that hillary is getting more and more pissed off at bernie

    4) i told the receptionist at the dentist's office (who was very annoyed at me several years ago when i praised the dixie chicks' dissing of bush) that, with respect to the 2016 clstrfck, i wasn't sure which probable candidate is worse

    5)and finally, the leninism of the hillaryites reminds me of the cover of

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Can_You_Be_in_Two_Places_at_Once_When_You%27re_Not_Anywhere_at_All

    ReplyDelete
  2. Replies
    1. Heh, yes, that was a happy coincidence, glad you noticed.

      I saved this Lambchop song for if someone did.

      Delete
    2. It means so much more to me that my prize gets shared with everyone.

      Delete
  3. I guess Bernie isn't filling that Judas goat role as well as expected?
    ~

    ReplyDelete