Digital Maoism

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Thought-terminating cliche

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis”

- Robert Jay Lifton

Lets Start Again

This thing has been online for almost a decade now, and I still see just philosophers, musicians, artists, monks and religious people, psychiatrists, and even a self-help bullshitter, but that leaves out a whole half of the quadrant. I have yet to see in any of Ken's books or on this forum any deep analysis into any single, real life issue. Everything's a hypothetical or an extremely broad analysis, without any depth. I come from a discipline that lives in depth, and has learned the necessity in broad in the last 40 years or so.

- IN forum post.

Short review of Babel

My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies.

From the New Yorker. Long review to come.

Puritan Blister on IIndie Rock

Did your town not matter, you thought? Did it not contain real people
living real lives and needing real music? Was indie rock the only zone
in which people would tolerate this slummy shit? Could Les Mis tour with five people wearing Dockers, accompanied by a jambox, and still call the show Les Mis? You thought of the passage from Curtis White's novel Memories of My Father Watching TV,
about what his family would settle for: "They'd eat the most
unbelievable junk…the cheapest margarine you can imagine...it came in
gallon tubs…the manufacturer didn't even have the decency to dye it
yellow. It wasn't something to eat; it was a expression of contempt."
For some reason, you felt as if someone (everyone?) was getting a treat
and being swindled at the same time.

Happy new year everybody. I'm back and blogging and whatnot.

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Contra this list

The Atlantic has a stab at the hundrest greatest Americans. Such an exercise is obviously fraught with difficulty, so it's more about the general content rather than the specific order. Still, here's my attempt at a rewrite, as an overseas, drunken observer. The top 10, according to TG....

Washington
Lincoln
Luther King Jr.
Jefferson
Truman (faced the hardest decision of any American, period.)
Franklin
Rockefeller
Twain
Edison
Einstein (not generally considered an 'American' per se)
Whitman
Malcolm X.

Go for your life in the comments

Better than nothing?

Matthew states, with regard to Iraq:

That is not to say that the war and its handling are unimpeachable (for what war could be, ever?), but to suggest a step-back to see a bigger picture, one that sees America as trying to help the world — often failing, to be sure, but still trying. Is that not quite a bit better than not trying at all?

One possible answer, from Ken Adelman:

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself — what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN'T DO. And that's very different from LET'S GO."