Fame is a Gun

Let's see what little Rebecca Black is up to:

Holy Smokes!  It appears this excellence is not a fluke for grown up Rebecca Black!

Entertaining Forgiveness

I ain't no freakin' monument to justice.

The past few years have been notable for their official egregiousness.  They have also been marked for me by two major sources of alienation, both of which have origins in the dismaying state of global affairs.  Israel's enormous response (in the pedantic sense of outside the scope of what could be considered normal) to the Hamas attack of October 7  2023 forced sides to be taken in what had been an uneasy truce between those with Zionist sympathies and those of us (myself included) increasingly questioning our tolerance of Israel's privileged exemptions from claims of special pleading and double standards for its treatment of the Palestinians whose homeland it has occupied.  I'm thinking in particular of artists I had an uncomplicated admiration for, whose recalcitrant Zionist stance post Oct 7 has complicated my admiration.  To be sure, plenty of assholes I had no feelings for have come out of the woodwork to bear down hard on their Israel chauvinism and they get the brunt of my unhesitant irritation.   But its always disappointing to learn (or have suspicions confirmed) that someone I'm a fan of is on the wrong side of an issue with such devastating consequences.

A bit closer to home-- ever since Bernie Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, a dismayingly large number of former Sanders allies have cordoned themselves off from those on the left who so prefer to take their chances with Democratic politicians / presidents as opposed to Republican ones that they will actually continue to vote for them.  These post left leftists will readily admit that the system is structured so that only one of two parties will win; that one of those parties -- corrupt and entrenched and elitist and venal though it is-- wreaks less havoc on the rights and needs and futures of the laboring majority of people.  They disavow electoral politics while at the same time participating in ways that hinder the least harmful outcomes and they think absolve them from the worst. Many of them are otherwise very intelligent people who on the issue of electoral politics are basically idiots.  To me, harm reduction isn't a political strategy, it's a survival mechanism.

The time has not come for forgiveness.  That will not be possible in the first case until an Israel/Palestine with a fully restored Gaza becomes a democratic non-apartheid state in which residents of all religions and ethnicities live in equality and peace.  In the second case, some corner must be turned in which all who value freedom, peace, equality and a society in which needs are treated not as privileges but as rights begin to work together to turn the tide against fascism, capitalism and oligarchy.  It shouldn't be the case, but as of this moment, it's easier for me to imagine forgiveness of the first category of transgressors than of the second.

In the meantime, I guess I still have a capacity to be horrified at acceptance of the fascist outcome.  This is a winner take all system we’re living under (against our desires).  In 2024, either Joe Biden’s DEI VP was going to take all -- she who was very likely taking a sloppy tack of promising continuance of Biden’s legacy in her campaign in order to try to overcome the perceived multiple handicaps of her ethnicity and gender  as well as her lack of cultural currency as a political brand (thanks to being sheltered away in the vice president’s residence for four years by the senile fart who very openly let voters know he was only using her ironically enough for the youth, ethnicity and gender he lacked in order to overcome his own decrepit racist and sexist brand).   Or the Fascists were going to take all.   The Biden tack failed with low-information Biden haters—it was a bad strategy based on the typical bad dem notions about the electorate as bars on a bar graph.  But even high information voters, including single issue voters did not seem to me to take the care that they needed to with the history changing differences in the two outcomes this time.   Because of that the Fascists won all.  Is this not what we are dealing with?  By the slimmest of majorities among the fraction of the electorate who actually voted, Donald Trump got it all.  I don’t think because of political wisdom or honor.  I think because people with the same information as me projected an image on Kamala Harris that was tainted by her association with Joe Biden.  People didn’t want to give Joe Biden the satisfaction, even though he wasn’t running.  You projected continuation of Biden’s administration onto her.  I projected a break from Trump and Biden.  Neither of us knew which way things would go with a Harris administration, but frankly KH was not Joe Biden.  She had resentments.  She had secret disagreements.  She was movable.  She was a different person who would I felt very probably want her own legacy.  I saw signs of the difference in the beginning before the Biden team and Jill and Joe Biden got to her.  She and Walz clammed up at one point, and I think it’s because she was advised very badly and given the limited amount of time she had available she trusted the pros. And note—I am not saying she would have been a great president.  She undoubtedly would have sucked.  But I don’t think she would have kept up a Joe Biden continuation façade, and I know we would not have the big beautiful bill and cracker racists kidnapping our neighbors and Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi and Hegseth and Kennedy and the Trump-Kennedy Center and the Trump court and Congress rolling over and playing dead.

I agree we need a new political system—Trump is the proof of that.  But what are we supposed to do in the meantime?  Watch families get ripped apart?  Watch Gaza get razed to the ground while Trump gets the Peace prize for it (Because Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his DEI mascot and therefore she had to be punished because he was no longer around to be)?  Pretend the planet is not dying because Trump doesn’t believe in climate change?  Watch reproductive rights and civil rights and voting rights and other social gains drift away?  All of those are hostage to the political system we’ve got.

The leadership of the dems has said it: For every vote they lose among the working class or the radical left, they pick up two more in the republican suburbs.  And I believe that strategy actually worked for them once so they expect it work everytime regardless of whatever else is going on. (And these are the evil soul-less neolibs I’m talking about.)  That’s why they don’t view lost voters as teachers and lesson givers but rather as ballast necessary in order for the statistics to come together for them—the spaces they leave in the democratic constituency just make extra room for the multiples of suburban professionals coming on board in response.  The ones who need the lesson don’t get the lesson.  They haven’t learned anything new since 1992.  That’s the problem.  And then the fascists win and their response is not – gee maybe if we were only more palatable to the working classes and the radical left.  It’s more like, “Maybe if we offer fascism lite we’ll attract even more Republicans.”  They are worthless.  This is actually what makes them preferable to Republicans every time.  Because the Dems are at their very worst (which sucks I agree) feckless.  But the Republicans will deliver on the fascism that they promise because they mean it.  This is a glorious, glorious time for them. And the Dems did not even learn their lesson.

I resent having to be the one to help the unsexy loser Dems keep the fascists at bay.  I resent the shirking that people whose politics (and distaste for corporate dems) I share, who winkingly give each other permission to shirk. who winkingly excuse themselves from blame for the fascists winning because the Dems, being feckless fools, can be agreed upon by them to be at fault.

At least Zionists own the havoc they wreak.

The Relations of Order

I finished Cedric Robinson’s The Terms of Order a short while ago.  T.b.h., it was a bit of a struggle but I think I finally came to terms (no pun intended) with the notion that it may have been a slog on purpose.  I came down on feeling that the book was essentially a critique of political theory using the language and canon of political theory. Robinson had a hard time getting awarded his Ph.D. from Stanford. He grew up in Oakland and was a major autodidact as a youth reading his way through the stacks at the Oakland public library system.  His depth of scholarship shows, but some members of his committee at Stanford quit saying they could not understand his thesis.  After three years of unsuccessful persuasion, he ultimately had to threaten litigious action to get the Ph.D. in 1974  and then he published the thesis as The Terms of Order.  I was feeling a bit sympathetic with the committee quitters for long stretches of the book, but every now and then his project crystallized for me, especially toward the end.  

In using the canon and language of political theory to critique it, he was essentially saying political theory is often a mythology of how society is organized politically which too often overlooks the role of violence and force.  He criticizes political theorists large and small for hammering their conclusions into a tacitly pre-agreed upon framework.  There are bits and pieces here and there that he doesn’t reject outright, but even those he caveats. In particular, he spends a lot of sympathetic time on anarchy and mutual aid.  But he contrasts all of western political theory and organization with the Stateless societies of primitive people which he says grow organically out of a mutuality in the project of survival that is missing from the hierarchical structures of the so called developed world.  

As an undergraduate, Robinson got suspended from the University of California at Berkeley for his participation in student protests there.  On getting his Ph.D. at Stanford he went on to teach African American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara  and to head the department of Black Studies there as well as the Department of Political Science.  He ultimately founded and directed the Center for Black Studies Research from which he retired in 2010, though he continued to teach Emeritus until shortly before his death in 2016.  After publishing the Terms of Order he went on to write his chef d'oeuvre Black Marxism in which he was the first to describe what he called Racial Capitalism, emphasizing the mutually bound origins of Capitalism and Racism (which he recognized manifested in Europe as exploitation toward European minority populations in parallel with the customary American exploitation of indigenous, African and Asian workers as well as the waves of non-WASP immigrant huddled masses yearning to breathe free).  

The best part of the reading experience for me was in the last chapter, as Robinson is wrapping up his discussion of western political theory by talking about the unintentional value he found in reading about quantum theory – he indicated that although the theorists likely didn’t intend it, he found value in describing ideal order as being organic from the interdependence of all matter on all other matter—the notion that relativity implies the relatedness of everything to everything else.  This resembles the political theories of Carlo Rovelli, the Italian quantum theorist who wrote Helgoland which I read last summer.  It was kind of a beautiful resonance.  (I seriously doubt Carlo Rovelli has read The Terms of Order, but Cedric Robinson definitely read the same quantum theorists that Carlo Rovelli did.) 

Having discovered The Terms of Order only recently (it was mentioned in Palo Alto), I think it’s a good thing to be aware of this rather amazing book. 

Supraliminal Seduction

Is it just me or are you too getting YouTube ads for say Carpet Cleaners that are-- how shall we say? --hard core pornographic in nature?  They aren’t video ads, they show up at the top of the recommendations whilst a video is playing and just sit there kind of like print ads, but are linked to (we presume) the carpet cleaning business.  The graphic of the ad is generally a poorly veiled image of a lady ingesting a thick cylindrical member—tinted unnaturally or otherwise obscured only enough for some vague plausible deniability but not enough that you’d be ok with it showing up in say a sharing of your screen in a zoom meeting or a visit from a child.

 When I was in junior high school in the seventies, a bestseller among my classmates was a paperback ostensibly written for adults called Subliminal Seduction.  The author was Wilson Bryan Key, a writer and associate of Marshall McLuhan specializing in mass media and communications who in this title stumbled upon a thesis that captured the pubescent imagination and gave its author his career.  The premise was that just below the threshold of consciousness, advertisements were rife with barely detectable erotic suggestions that were doing the heavy lifting on persuading the consumer to have to have the product.  Many copies of the book were worn out by being passed between the hands of middle schoolers taking turns leafing through the generous supply of illustrations to stare at the configuration of ice cubes in a whiskey glass or the haze of smoke from a cigarette or the reflection of studio lights on the paint job of a new car to try to spot the images of naked bodies supposedly floating barely below the level of detection.  

The jury is still out on whether something extra nefarious was actually going on with those images (above and beyond the nefariousness of the normal activity of the advertising business) or whether the eagerness to see them was merely an epiphenomenon of the hyperactive pareidolia of pubescent middle schoolers.  The "science" on which Key based much of his thesis has been found by other researchers to be flawed.  Nevertheless, the sleazy nature of advertising invited the hopeful scrutiny of the prurient, and the advertising business has never minded the heightened attention of the public.

Sex has always sold, but in the sixties of my youth, advertising was largely known for its bland caution.  Over the years, however, the temptation for an advertiser to hide a powerful suggestion below the radar of the viewer has been obviated by relaxed standards that appear to have kindled an arms race of open lewdness and scatology, from Big Ass Fans to country western songs about diarrhea to bears who "enjoy the go."  Entrepreneurs frankly discuss the loci of every odor and secretion of the body and invite viewers to elide the aptness of a blue pun with the body part or intimate act it's meant to conjure.  Outright pornography is a frontier I hadn't expected advertisers to cross in my lifetime, but these are unprecedented times.

After seeing 3 variations of these ads, I did report it to the YouTube authorities.  I mean how far do I extend my tolerance for such things?  If I were to post a video with that image as my thumbnail I’d probably be banned.  It’s ok if some random “business” does it?   I don’t know if I succeeded in nipping a bad YouTube trend in the bud but since reporting it I can’t seem to conjure up an example to show you but if I come across one, I’ll share it if I think of it.  Unless you too have already seen enough.

Olive Tree

A new piece from the Lebanese-French artist Bachar Mar-Khalifé, set to a backdrop of slices of West Bank life without the ugliness of Western colonialists marring up the scenery, courtesy of historic footage from UNRWA.  

 

Child Sacrifice

JD Vance answering a question from a self-identified Pro-Life member of the audience at a Turning Points USA event at the University of Mississippi in October:

Somebody asked me earlier about my Christian values, and one of the points I made is that when the settlers came to the New World they found very widespread child sacrifice.  I imagine there are some people who don't agree with my view on the pro life issue let me just make an observation.  If you go to historical archeological sites where there were brothels and the two oldest businesses in the world are gambling and prostitution so there were brothels even in very ancient civilizations.  If you go back to ancient brothels and you dig up the bones of the women who were working in these places you will very often find a lot of children who were buried with them. And the answer is that whenever a society decides to discard innocent babies, they also don't treat their women very well.  And whenever a society mistreats its women it is very often its the babies who come right after that.  There is a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world and it's one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.

If your first thought about what this has to do with White  House policy is, "Wait, whuuut..??!"  you're not wrong.  Strangely this was the second time in the evening that Vance raised the topic of child sacrifice in the New World leading me to believe he picked up something viral on the topic from the internet.  It's hard to know where to begin with it.  Certainly some instances of human sacrifice in the Americas, particularly Central and South America (as in many other parts of the planet including Europe and the Holy Land) have been documented by historians and archaeologists.  What put an end to them was not so much the insistence of the Christian European invaders who had come not to spread the good news of Christ (the Human Sacrifice to end all human sacrifices) but primarily to take the land of the indigenous people here, but rather the violent termination of those indigenous civilizations by the Europeans.  It had next to nothing to do with the European conquest of what came to be the United States.  In essence, child sacrifice is a post hoc rationalization for genocide.  What's more, give one moment of thought to it, and it's not at all hard to come up with a myriad ways that Christian civilization continues to sacrifice children.  Let's start with sending 18 year olds to die in foreign wars of choice.  How about the conservatively thousands of children killed by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the potentially millions starved by US policies such as sanctions and Trump's own cessation of USAID's promised and earmarked shipments of grains to the third world.  Charlie Kirk, late Christian extraordinaire and the honoree of Vance's appearance famously said the victims of gun violence were perhaps a decent exchange for the freedom of their murderers to purchase weaponry.

This is not even to mention the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed or injured since October 7 2023 by US funded Israeli bombs, artillery and gunfire (and now starvation).  That was the unspoken subject of remarks-- instructive in their otherwise meticulous articulation-- given by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz speaking in a plenary to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of America in Washington recently:

Today, we have social media which is a global medium.  Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews and so while in the 1990's you know a young person probably wasn't going to find Al-Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them.  They find them on their phones.  It's also this increasingly post-literate media-- less and less text; more and more videos.  So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene. 

But it isn't just foreign non-Zionist video journalism that's the problem, but ironically  the "smart bet" that Jewish cultural leaders made on "Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education" which "may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism":

,.. because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and they think, "Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people."  So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, ''Oh, I know!  The lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel.  You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people."  

The problem: 

That's not how the Holocaust happened.  We all know that.  We all know that it happened because the Germans insisted that the Jews-- 1% of the population-- were responsible for all their problems just like people insist that Israel-- the size of New Jersey-- is responsible for all the world's problems today.  But that's not really what you take away from Holocaust education.  You take away the images of Power - Powerless. And you also don't really learn about Islamist anti-Semitism and Soviet Anti-Zionism which is so much of what i'm seeing especially on campus with young people today.  

The origin of the problem according to Hurwitz  (besides apparently inadequate training in discerning who are the right kind of Nazis) is the vestiges of a 250 year old strategy of assimilation by relegating Jewishness to a "protestant style religion" to enable Jews to adopt the identity of the countries they found themselves in with the rise of Nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The once smart strategy has outlived its usefulness.

The problem is, we're not just a religion, right?  ... We are a nation, a civilization, a tribe, peoplehood, but most of all we're a family and so if you are a young person raised in America that thinks Judaism is a protestant style religion, then the 7 million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists so like if my co-religionists, I look at them and if they're not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them? 

That's a category error.  The 7 million people in Israel they are not my co-religionists.  They are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists it's very easy to slide into Anti-Zionism. You don't necessarily have that connection to them.  And you know I have to say, I think, to conclude it's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of contentless bagel and lox, Jewish mother joke identity that many American Jews have, it just doesn't cut it anymore.You know when your Jewish identity is a big empty void with a few ethnic jokes rattling around in it, it will be filled by what is around you.  And if what is around you is anti-Semitism you will be helpless to fight back.  

You will not be able to take advantage of the billions in financial and military aid bestowed on Israel by the government you pay taxes to.

Hurwitz concludes:

If someone tells you that the Jewish G-d is violent and vengeful and Judaism is a legalistic unloving religion and you know nothing about Jewish tradition then what will you say? Tikkun olam?  You know it's not a great answer.  If they say Israel is a genocidal racist state and you know nothing about Jewish history or Israel but are like 'I like Seinfeld?'  it doesn't work.  You know we need to know our Jewish story in a way that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I didn't really;  I could get away with that identity.  Young people who have that empty Jewish identity today, it is being filled by anti-Semitism and we need to give them the content to protect them.

I am not a Jew, but I am a 66 year old American (22 years older than Sarah Hurwitz) and I would call my position on Israel until 2 years ago Soft Zionism.   My views were formed not from a place of informed consideration, but by osmosis of the prevailing pro-Israel atmosphere of post-Holocaust America.*  Essentially I believed that Israel represented a legitimate reparation for the evils of the Hitler's Germany.  Never again forever.  Being essentially a softie and a natural sympathizer with the underdog, I was not a fan of what Israel had become under 16 years of on and off Benjamin Netanyahu leadership, but all of my presuppositions about Israel's right to existence and to a kind of legitimate special pleading regardless of its apartheid abuse of the Palestianians whose homeland Europe bestowed to Zionist Jews were called into question by Israel's egregious asymmetrical response to the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters who had breached Israel's Iron Dome.  I felt then and feel now that I was late to a proper understanding of Israel as the last imposition of Western European colonialism on the non-European world.  Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism.  I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters who reject the claim of European Israeli supremacist Zionists on their Jewishness, especially as a means of implicating them in Israel's elective extermination of the Palestinian population-- not least of them, its women and children--  it is aiming to replace.

Thank you, Sarah Hurwitz for your eloquent, and JD Vance for your clumsy self-exposures. 

~~~~~

* Which Hurwitz's ideological sibling and recently appointed head of CBS News Bari Weiss has announced she is determined for CBS News to revive.

Uncanny Valley*

I have read fewer books this year but more pages.  Even so a higher proportion of my read this year has been consumed with AI and its place of origin Silicon Valley.

The first of these, Karen Hao's Empire of AI, is an astonishingly well reported chronicle of contemporary AI's rise in recent years, its origins as the non-profit enterprises of self-appointed guardians of humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk prominently among them who worried about what AI left to other less prescient and prudent hands could spell for humanity's future.   Could technology that potentially fashioned a superior competition to the human species be trusted in the hands of just anyone?  But as the original vision of AI as literal intelligence programmed by humans receded into the same space occupied by jet packs and space colonies, while the stakes for arriving first to the market increased, the space race for "compute", brute computation of massive amounts of data in the processing of simulation of thought  heated up, and schisms erupted in Silicon Valley and miraculously every altruistic non-profit morphed into for profit companies in search of dominance of the field.   Hao's meticulous reporting also includes the impact that AI's sudden explosion in "compute" has had on the environment, particularly in already ravaged territories of the most vulnerable populations around the world, and especially in the global south.  The manner in which a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have imposed themselves on the resources of indigenous peoples inspired Hao to liken AI's rise to Empire, reminding us that the greatest threat to humanity is not vaporware but certain elements of humanity itself.   

Adam Becker's More Everything Forever deals with the predilections and sci-fi fantasies of Tech billionaires that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have summarized with the acronym TESCREAL (Transhumanism (the merging of the death of humanity with the rise of AI), Extropianism (a fancier name for Techno-Optimism or the belief that technology will solve all problems), Singularitarianism (belief in the inevitability of the Singularity), Cosmism (the ambition to spread human intelligence across the universe), Rationalism (Bayes Theorem supremacists),  Effective Altruism (belief that maximizing one's capacity to give charitably by maximizing one's own wealth is better for collective happiness than acting charitably or being subject to taxation for social programs) and Long-Termism (belief that one should behave now in ways that improve the conditions of the cosmically spread progeny that is yet to come even if it is at the expense of those now living).  Becker's book explains each proclivity indentifying the adherents and proponents and deftly debunking them along the way.

I knew Malcolm Harris was from Palo Alto and that his book of that name was a leftist critique of his hometown, but I wasn’t aware that it was basically making a case that Palo Alto was a (if not the) major hotbed for the worst ideas, tools and exponents of capitalism—largely through the auspices of Leland Stanford’s university and expecially as directed by one of its original class’s alumni, Herbert Hoover who lived long, long after his response to the Great Depression got him booted out of office after one term yet who remained as influential on the cadre of Stanford-affiliated capitalists as he ever was as President.  It was born out of the genocide of the Alta people who were unlucky enough to be at the terminus of the intercontinental railroad when the barons arrived.  It was the place where the most land  raping technology of the gold rush was devised and served as the prototype of exploitation of immigrants for the various projects of capital, especially in ways that assured the thievery of those immigrant’s rights as citizens and neighbors.  And when outcries against immigrant hordes were raised at various times by the temporary white majority, it invented outsourcing as a means of exploiting foreign non-whites on their own lands reducing the cost (and the bargaining power) of labor in the process.  It invented tools of war but more especially proponents of war (including those who urged the use of atomic weaponry and of anti-communist adventurism in Indochina under the pretext of the domino theory.  It was also the willful bastardizer of Binet’s theories of intelligence in devising and conquering the world with the Stanford Binet intelligences tests (literally devised to separate the cannon fodder from the officers in World War I and then adapted to promote pre-believed racist eugenicist policies and to mold the American public education system into a factory for the production of workers.  And it used all these historic means of exploitation and dominance to invent the silicon chip and the personal computer and the high tech bubble, and disruption and financialization and uberfication and surveillance capitalism and now AI.  

Harris’s book weaves the tale very adeptly, revisiting the threads that have been interwoven in the town's history decade after decade.   And in his conclusion he talks about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that have been in Palo Alto from the beginning, and that survived the genocide, only to become unrecognized by the Federal Government due to anthropology out of Stanford.  According to the US, the tribe is extinct but there has been a continuous presence of activists, working to get recognition and reparation in the sense of return of their lands to their original state.  So Malcolm Harris in his final chapter raises the possibility of ceding Stanford’s land back to the Ohlone people.  And on first reading about it, my brain automatically goes, “Oh yeah, sure!   That could happen!”  But Harris makes a passionate case for the symbolism as well the justice of the act, the start of a healing of the planet by putting an end to the locus of so much of the origin of capitalism’s interminable soulless destruction in the sole pursuit of profit and you can’t help but be struck by the simplicity of giving Stanford back to a people who will tend it back to nature.  It’s the kind of idea that is unlikely to happen on the face of it, but just the notion of it increases the presence of beauty and justice in the world.

~~~~~

* I'm reminded that this year I have also read Anna Wiener's excellent Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley.