Wash Av Huffy Crew: April 2006

Workers of the world untie? Unite? Unitarian? Usdfs?

Marx had ridiculous handwriting:

That is all.

About Fucking time

One more to cross out on the list of "people who for some reason or another make no logical sense being alive." We'll miss you JKG.

Another one bites the dust

Robot, I believe we called this one.

Abridged Transcript From A Phone Conversation I Had With A Police Officer The Other Night...

Earlier in the week at about 1:30am as I was leaving Greenway to go to Austin and Robbie's house, there were three very sketchy/white trashy guys out in the street fighting with each other, catcalling, etc. They were standing right in front of my car so I just decided to keep walking down Wash Ave instead of getting any closer to them, and I called Austin to come out and meet me. Once we met up, he suggested I call the police to report these guys, and my conversation with the officer went a little something like this:

Me: Hi, I live on the 6600 block of Washington Avenue in U-City, MO, and I'm calling to report three suspicious men in their early 30s who are standing out in the street fighting with each other and yelling at passers-by.
Officer: Alright ma'am, are they armed?
Me: No, sir, not that I can tell.
Officer: And these are black males?...white males?
Me: They're white males.
Officer: Ok, so three black mal - wait, white males??
Me: Yes, sir. White males.
Officer: Oh!...ok, well we'll send someone right over.

After he got over the initial shock of finding out I was reporting white guys instead of black guys, this officer sounded about as happy as if I had just told him that he had won the lottery.

And the award for grossest double chin goes to...

Lee Raymond, CEO of Exxon Mobil.

Talk about windfall profits. I'd like to see that baby sway in a summer breeze.

The Closing of the Princeton Mind

Though some of this on this blog don't see the merit of reading our fellow students' opinions, I find the experience to be quite stimulating. Often, I find it disturbing. This op-ed, from the Daily Princetonian -- for some reason linked to from politicalytheory -- is one such example. I urge you to read this brief piece before continuing.

One could do a Scantron-esque rhetorical analysis with ease. It would go something like this: "Could it be," the author J.R. de Lara questions, "in purely Marxist terms, that the revolutionary caste of 1969 has seized administrative power in some departments and now uses its position of authority to maintain a certain ideological superstructure?" I'm not sure, but when the author writes that "there is an institutional stigma associated with teaching their works," and that one professor has been said to tell her class, "Don't tell the philosophy department that you're reading Hegel," there doesn't seem much like anything administrative or superstructrural about it.

Also, when the author asks us to observe "the discrepancy between investigating the 'teleological influence of Hegel on Marxism' and finding a job in a modern economy, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Does Mr. de Lara read only books that help him get a job? If he finds the whole business to be too theoretical, does he not realize that the 'teleological influence of Hegel on Marxism' is a historical question that might help us understand how Marx's ideas came to be, and how the notion of inevitability might have influenced the Soviet Revolution, the Stalinist regime, and even the fall and decline of Marxism and Communism themselves?

When de Lara talks about "superstructure" and "teleological influence" he does so clearly as a Princeton student who has neither understood nor likely read either Hegel or Marx. He deplores the use of the term "scientific Hegelianism" as "academic fraud," but never says why. Perhaps if he had gone and done some research he would have discovered Engels' essay on "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." If he thinks Engels' was wrong, I'd like to know why, and I'd like to see textual (call it 'scientific') evidence.

The reason Mr. de Lara 's piece disturbs me is not just because he failed to do any homework (why not try to read one of these theses on Marx, for example), but because it never even crosses his mind to do so. It is the closing of a student's mind even before it was opened. And it is this closed-mindedness about ideas that so troubles me. There is nothing so anti-intellectual as dismissing a body of ideas and texts without even reading them, without even attempting to understand them. When I read Marx, for example, I do indeed disagree with the teleological aspects and the "metaphysics of the proletariat." I see his assessment of capitalism as at best only historically accurate, and his predictions as historically proved wrong. Nonetheless, I still read Marx because on some things I think he's on to something. The materialist and dialectical approach to social, political and intellectual history; his disgust of religion; and his conception of ideology as something active, forceful, and often aligned with interest are just some of the aspects of his philosophy I appreciate. Understanding these aspects, furthermore, help me better understand the ideas and thinkers I find myself more sympathetic with: Dewey, Hook, Foucault, Hofstadter, etc.

But if de Lara had his way I wouldn't be able to appreciate these aspects of Marxism. For de Lara, ideas are like shopping for fruit at a food store: you look around a bit, discarding the ones that look kind of bad and admitting those that look good.

And thus the bottom line: we're better and smarter than every student at Princeton.

How Kaavya Viswanathan got assimilated, got a book contract, and got screwed

There's been a lot of huffing and puffing lately about the alleged plagiarism on the part of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan in her new book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Viswanathan has apparently lifted several linguistic tropes from another tween-lit author, Mary McCafferty, and the structure of the novel is the same (girl nabs musician dude and delivers graduation speech with the help of three girlfriends--what stunning originality!) Mike Straka of Fox News takes the opportunity to decry this "Me" generation. Young people today, they've got such a sense of entitlement! His biggest points of comparison are Jayson Blair and James Frey, but he curiously omits the case of Ben Domenech, the conservative blogger for the Washington Post who's extremely short tenure was marred by accusations of plagiarism (including mining from other conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and P.J. O'Rourke). But I digress.

Straka's position represents a typical cultural conservative complaint tied up in a paradox, whose dilemma has its horns in (1st) social and (2nd) artistic criticism: first, that today's crop of youngsters is radically individualistic thanks to decades of left-liberal ideology, and as a result feels entitled to any and everything. Any means justify the ends, resulting in debauched and undignified behavior. What we need is a return to communitarian values, a (conservative) shared ethos and understanding of the rules. Second, conservative aesthetic critics (I'm thinking largely of Roger Kimball of the New Criterion here) bemoan the loss of the "creative individual" whose originality and vision transcend time and touch eternal values. This viewpoint is surely opposed to mass/identitarian/subjectively decentered art.

It should be apparent that it's difficult to reconcile the (1) social and (2) artistic aspects of this problem, and I would say that conservatism and classical Liberalism in general also share in it. Just to show an instance of this paradox at work, check out today's New York Times for an interesting article about "book packagers." The idea is that in order to maximize marketability and sales, a tween-lit publishing company takes a stock set of character types and situations, jumbles them up a bit in an endless stream of tokens of the same type, and finds authors to flesh out the bare-bones formula. The result is hundreds of pre-fab best-sellers such as the "Clique," "A-List," and "Gossip Girls" series.

My guess is that Viswanathan's book is not so distinguishable from this pool. (The publishers liked the fact that she was Indian, though--an untapped market!) You could probably find similarities between any number of them, but Viswanathan is young, talented, and a Harvard student, so the human interest potential is greater. If you read the Times article, you see how she was pressured by the book packager, Alloy, to cut the number of the heroine's friends down to 3 from 4, and to add the closing graduation speech scene, making the book even more similar to McCafferty's than before. So if Straka wants to criticize Viswanathan, perhaps he should look to the corporations who power the engine of the industry, who demand complete homogeneity and sameness at every turn in order to ensure the material prosperity of the individual. Then we'll see where the "creative genius" goes!

Sullivan in the sky with diamonds

Hey Andrew Sullivan readers (all 2 or so of you)--It's laughable to see that Sullivan is shocked that Ramesh Ponnuru's new anti-Democrat book is called Party of Death. I used to like Sullivan for this very reason, namely that he calls conservos out on their hyperbolic, tar-and-feathering rhetorical bullshit. But seriously, how naive can the guy be? Did anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the pundit/journalist scene not know that that was the title of Ponnuru's book? Is anyone even remotely surprised? I wonder what Sullivan thinks of Jonah Goldberg's new page-turner, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton? Sometimes I wonder what rock Sullivan lives under so I can crawl under it. He actually believes that the current administration, unlike that paragon of virtue, Ronald Reagan, has sold out, for the first time in the Republican party's history, to Christian conservatism and hate-mongering. In typical conservative fashion, he sets up the mythical Past on a ridiculous pedestal that's supposed to represent "true political discourse." Woe is he, what has happened to the Russell Kirks and Friedrich Hayek's? Could it be that they're still alive and well, writing in serious academic journals and contributing to policy think tanks? Meanwhile the current pop-culture-political environment is just a slightly nastier version of what it's always been. I envy him his idyllic daydreams.

Comedy and Reality

This is funny, but as the article is clearly contrived to be so, I'm not sure why the Times is printing it:

It seems the president, who thought he was simply fending off pressure to
dismiss Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best," he said, adding that he had no intention of letting Mr. Rumsfeld go — has unwittingly added to the lexicon of marital relations.
Anita Willoughby and Jeffrey Naiditch were just polishing off their papaya mousse cake at a dinner party in Lower Manhattan last Sunday night when Mr. Naiditch decided it was time to go home. His wife was not quite ready to leave.
"He said, 'I am the decider, I get to say,' " Ms.
Willoughby said. The small group dissolved into laughter, and a bit of nervous chatter.

Is this evidence that the New York Times has been influenced by the Onion? Has Bush been influenced by jokes about him to such an extent that he now purposely creates new material? Will Bush's incompetence finally prove that we don't want a president who is a regular guy with good advisers? Will the new Tony Snow show be a comedy? How pomo is America?

We are the reporter. You are the decider.

A sliver of relief

I moan about how religious this country is, but at least I can take pleasure in the fact that the Senator who most represents backwards-ass, religio-conservative pandering foolishness, Rick Santorum, is the least popular Senator in the United States.

Spiritual growing pains

Do you ever stop and wonder, "Hey, I'm stopping and wondering what ever happened to Kirk Cameron, AKA Mike Seaver from TV's Growing Pains"? Well, wonder no more! Kirk has found the Lord and now takes time to explain how the Bible holds up better than science. This sort of tripe is, of course, nothing new, but it's interesting that a young heartthrob actor has gone all Jesus on us. I guess his role in the made for television version of Left Behind should have tipped us off.

What's most interesting is the psychology of this TV episode. Listen to Cameron's interlocutors: when he asks them if they've ever lied about anything, they say, "Yes, of course." Aha! You've sinned! We tend to regard such a judgment as ridiculous and puerile, but Cameron finds it foolproof and conclusive. Cameron even puts the best arguments in his own mouth. "Atheists will tell you that the earth is billions of years old, and that human beings created religion in order to cope with everyday existence or to explain puzzling phenomena." Well, yeah, Kirk!

You probably find it tiring that I dwell on this stuff, but I think atheism really is one of the last unsolved frontiers of truth and justice in America. It's amazing that most Americans have come to accept racial minority rights and even have an increased tolerance towards homosexuals, and yet atheists remain a "suspicious" or "subversive" group of the population. It's truly a case of the majority crushing the recognition of the minority. Hundreds of millions of Americans believe in a higher power, more than likely a Christian one. How much critical thinking at a young age would suffice to cause them to think otherwise?

"thank the gods ~yours and mine~"

I have an admission to make. I was once interested in Role Playing Games (RPGs). Context first: this was only during elementary and some of middle school. I never actually played the games, and was always creeped out by people who did. But I bought the books and read them. Anyway, as I was strolling through the internet on my Hacker Box +12 Laptop Computer Machine, I noticed a post on Metafilter about one of the games I used to own as a kid. I went to the site it linked to out of a desire to understand my sick history and what could have been, had I not somehow turned my life around in 7th or 8th grade. The company that makes this game, Palladium Books, may be going under, and the owner is offering a limited edition piece of game artwork in order to save the company. The people who play their games are going absolutely fucking nuts. For example, my man "Citizen Lazlo" writes

"I feel as if I have been kicked in the gut.

Palladium has been one of the few constants in a life that has not always been happy or safe.

In 1983, when I was 6 or 7 my Stepfather got me my first copy of PFRPG because he knew I loved D and D. I was hooked in 10 minutes. I have run hundreds of campaigns and thousands of oners over the years.

My home was broken early and my father was a raging alcoholic and my mother was a prescription drug addict. My little brother and I spent my lonely and scary nights when we were left home alone all night, becoming heroic elves super powered heroes and eventually those awesome Ninja Turtles!

As I got older and, thank the gods ~yours and mine~ we moved in with my grandparents with our new babybrother. It was there that my dark and moody preteen self discovered After the Bomb and I still say to this day that it changed my life. My love of the postapocoliptic genre and survival against the odds grew from this game. I still run it to this day.

I got a little older and moved in with my now sobber father and my stepmother who barely tolerated me and my 'stupid games'. Robotech was my game of choice, until Rifts...." blah blah blah.

Citizen Lazlo concludes that Palladium, the company that creates this game, "is part of my family. And when your family needs you, you don't ask questions, you just lace up your boots and do what needs doing".

Wow, real devotion, buddy (isn't this a line from Sin City or something?). Just go to this forum. Your faith in your own humanity and others' lack thereof will be restored.

PS. Some might believe that this and other recent posts ("The Kazakh Dream" and the one about that nerdguy and his gf) demonstrate a lack of respect for weird people put in tough situations. That's not the case. I have zero respect for people who deal with tough circumstances by making asses of themselves. As Mansfield says in Manliness: "A real man does not engage in pussy ass shit like video games or the use of wireless snooping techniques to deal with his problems".

The Chronicle: 4/21/2006: Humans as Prey

Humans were once prey? They still are:

"It is equally clear that, outside the West, no small amount of predation occurs today on modern humans. Although we are not likely to see these facts in American newspaper headlines, each year 3,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are eaten by crocodiles, and 1,500 Tibetans are killed by bears about the size of grizzlies. In one Indian state between 1988 and 1998, over 200 people were attacked by leopards; 612 people were killed by tigers in the Sundarbans delta of India and Bangladesh between 1975 and 1985. "

Poor bastards. That's what you get for living in a third-world country.

Wash Av Huffy Crew Symposium suggestion

To the esteemed members of this inimitable collective--

The end of the semester (and thus college--yes, we must face the facts) closeth in. "Hora venit, et nunc est," as my man Jesus said. Therefore I am proposing a year-end symposium, tentatively titled "Wut I lernt in skool." The event (no, Sheriff and Kushakov, not the Event) would call for each of us to submit a post in which we tie together the ideas from at least two texts we have read over the course of this liberal education of ours. (IPH majors, do not kill me for suggesting you relive your comp exams--this time it'll be fun!)

This exercise will basically be a way to flex our humanistic muscles, which I'm pretty sure reside in the wrist and the anus. Each submission should be in a separate post, and each should entail extensive commentary and critique from the others members of the Crew. The well's run a bit dry around here lately--let's see a revival! Just to give you a taste of what such a submission might look like, I am thinking about discussing Kant's "An answer to the question, What is Enlightenment?" and Foucault's commentary "What is Enlightenment (Was ist Aufklarung)?" wherein you would get ideas of human betterment, politics, critique, and resistance to authority. I'm also kicking around the idea of doing a comparative study of the concept of injustice as found in Plato (Gorgias, Thrasymachus, etc) and Nietzsche (and commented on by Adorno and Horkheimer, but that's another beast entirely). You see the possibilities.

A final suggestion: that the comparisons not necessarily favor one position over the other (i.e. whatever you're reading and happen to agree with right now. How boring!)

I make no apologies for the fact that this symposium clearly favors those among us who have studied such things. Fuck it, we get it how we live.

ISeeFamousPeople.com - Sooo Web 2.0

Normally I wouldn’t waste precious blog-space with such a self-serving post, but since noone has posted in a week...

I have officially just launched a website! A good friend from home and I have spent literally hundreds of hours working on it this year and now its ready.

The site is ISeeFamousPeople.com

I think that the site’s purpose is best explained in its mission statement:

“Everyone has their own interesting story about a personal run-in with a famous person. And everyone enjoys telling that story to their friends. So we thought, "Why stop there?"
ISeeFamousPeople.com is a FREE interactive database where people can share these stories and pictures with people from all around the world.
We have no way of knowing which stories are true or which ones are enjoyable to read. So we encourage you to vote on all stories, because the top rated stories are displayed most prominently on this site.
There are hundreds of entertaining stories out there, with more added all the time. Enjoy!”

I know similar sites exist, but none that are designed or organized this well. The site is divided into categories with famous people from TV, film, music, sports, politics, reality TV, and ‘other.’ Stories are presented in a style similar to newspaper articles, and many even include pictures of the encounter. I promise you'll be entertained.

All I ask is that you check it out. If you like it either submit your own story or tell people about it.
And as 5-000 would say, it’s pretty Web 2.0.

The Kazakh Dream

For those of you who don't know, I attended a summer program at the Goethe Institut in Göttingen, Germany last year. The majority of the students there were from Muslim and East Asian countries, but there was a substantial American minority. Anyway, there was one guy from Kazakhstan, Igor, who roomed with a British guy, Tommy. I always thought Igor was a bit weird, but I didn't have any clue until I received this email the other day. It is disturbing stuff:
Gruss aus Kasachstan

Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 6:35 AM

hi,
how are you? I have decided to earn some money, but I didn't know how to do it. now a good idea has come to me. well, first of all, some facts.
Russian women want to marry a foreigner because it is unbearable to live in our country. so, why won't we make a business? I can find brides and you will find grooms. the grooms will pay us for information about the girls, i.e. photos, short resume, then they will come to Kazakhstan or invite a girl. I'll get the money, let's say $1000 from a groom. BUT it is well known that a Russian wife is ideal. she is beautiful, shy, honest, etc.
I'm sure the foreigners don't have any problems with getting Kazakhstan's visa. the groom transfers some money in advance and I meet him. well, you can count how much we can get each.
think it over. I'll wait for a letter from you.
with best wishes,
Igor

The thing is that this guy really wasn't that weird. There must be something going on here that I don't understand, something which I think it would be unfair to hypothesize about without a better knowledge of Kazakhstan, its people, and Igor himself. The world isn't flat just yet. There's no other explanation for this guy's insult to the institution of bourgeois friendship.

The War in Iraq

Many of my readers have asked for views on the current situation in Iraq. To tell the truth, I have not been following the news much lately, perhaps out of a desire to avoid negative thoughts. The war is not going well. Terrorist attacks are continuing and the Iraqis have failed to create a government. It is now fashionable to be against the war. I am less for it than I have been, but I think it is important to maintain a constructive view: we should ask what we should do next, not what we should have done. The question of the beginning is something we should think about before we start our next war, not something that is important in deciding what we can do now.
If the anti-war movement is a humanitarian one, then it should concern itself with the war that threatens to kill the most people: the intensifying civil war among the Iraqis themselves. The way to stop this is surely to increase or, at minimum, maintain the amount of troops to provide security. Both sides need to give up ground. Those who were for the war in the first place need to bite their lips and look for assistance from other countries. We need to loosen the restrictions on reconstruction money, etc, so that more countries develop an interest in Iraq. Clearly, however, the left is going to have to give up more in this debate. Bush has created a perfect spear for the anti-war movement to skewer itself on: anti-war voters can demand that we bring the troops home, but this will indicate that they care more about American lives than Iraqis'.
Part of a committment to democracy is an acknowledgement that it will make errors. One error is that we went to war with Iraq on phony reasons and, more importantly, with an incompetent administration. This puts us in the situation we are in now: you may oppose the administration and the war, but if you believe that Iraqis are as valuable as Americans, then you must support the means of ending war.

21st Century Taylorism? Not in Our Universities!

Every time Charles Taylor comes up in the news, I am reminded of his stay with us here in the United States. Taylor ended up having an unfortunately all too typical experience while here--he was sent to jail. Before his incarceration, however, he spent some time in an institution of higher learning: Bentley College, in pristine Waltham, MA, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1977. Perusing the college website, one is quickly whisked away by the school's vibrance, its energy, and its famed Code of Ethics for Faculty and Staff, which is prominently discussed on the school's "About" page. The question I was immediately confronted with is what "about" Bentley is capable of producing such a "horrific genius"--as the New York Times recently stated--as Charles Taylor?

The genius part I can understand. Their economics department looks pretty damn top notch, "equip[ping] students with the tools, skills and intuition necessary to make sound business decisions."

The horrific, murderous, tyrannical aspect of Taylor's personality, is clearly not a failure of the econ department. Rather, I would like forward the thesis, here in this blog post, that the institutions in place to theoretically prevent a man like Taylor from becoming who is he today, were the very same ones that sewed the seeds of his descent. In the Code of Ethics for Faculty in Staff itself, that is, is already the narrow and morbose set of ethical arrangements that allowed a wild man to ravage West African countryside. Let's go through the Code to see where exactly the failure lies. My analysis appears in brackets.

II. Compliance with the Law

College faculty and staff shall comply in good faith with all lawful requirements, both domestic and international, applicable to Bentley College. [As one can clearly see, this is some dangerously narrow stuff. Taylor clearly interpreted this, and rightly so, to apply only to faculty, staff, and Bentley College. Because it failed to address a world outside of its tiny ivory tower, it tacitly allowed for Taylor's expansionist wars into the Ivory Coast.]

III. Use of College Resources and Assets

It is expected that faculty and staff will be efficient and economical in their use of college resources, and not permit the abuse of these resources by others. [Sick stuff. If this isn't how Taylor ruled while in power, I don't know how else to describe it. As a recent NY Times feature puts it, "even before he was elected president in 1997, the vast countryside he controlled, with its rich endowment of diamonds, rubber and timber, generated an estimated $100 million in revenues a year. During his time as president, diplomats sometimes referred ot Liberia as 'Charles Taylor Inc.' " Oh yes, he was efficient and economical alright, and certainly didn't allow anyone else to "abuse" his "resources."]

V. Harassment and Discrimination

Harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin ethnicity or disability status undermines the fundamental principles of the college and is not acceptable behavior. [Evidence suggests that Mr. Taylor might have taken this to heart. He was an equal opportunity killer, never discriminating between Liberian, Ivory Coastian, or Sierra Leonian.]

VII. Conflict of Interest

A conflict of interest exists when a faculty, staff member, or a member of their family is in the position to benefit personally, directly or indirectly, from his or her dealings with an organization or person conducting business with the college. [Not to worry, he was never greedy with his spoils. He shared them with friends, including the righteous Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi.]

XIII. Violations

Ethics Code Procedure for Alleged Violations

Violations of the Code of Ethics policy will be referred to senior management by the College Ethics Committee, with recommendations for appropriate action. The decision and recommendations would go to the President of the College for review. This process may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal from employment at Bentley College. [After several notices, this is the final penalty that Bentley deems appropriate for those who break the rules. Wait, did they just threaten dismall? Let's think of this from a dictator's perspective: 'I'm Charles Taylor. I've killed 300,000 people, and have an army of loyal commanders 8-year-olds wielding automatic rifles. Please don't d-d-d-dismiss me. That's just too harsh. I'll never invade another country again, I swear.' This was the kind of penalty he thought he was going to get the whole time--hardly enough to persuade someone against committing the crimes he did.]

Whatever happens to Mr. Taylor when he is brought in front of the Hague for trial, let us not forget who really bears responsibility for all of this. Bentley College, shame on you. Your Code of Ethics is a sham, a modern day "Elders of Zion," and it must be destroyed. We need a document that will not encourage mass murder, not one that sits in silence as the world burns.

"Do not raise a clamor, men of Athens..."

John McCain gets shouted down by the demos.

This is interesting stuff. Rarely do politicians get put on the spot like this. McCain had to joke, assuage, self-efface, negotiate, etc in addressing an AFL-CIO meeting. Say what you will about the union chiefs, especially about their opposition to relaxed immigration laws, but individually and collectively they were able to challenge a US Senator. Politicians should have to prove themselves and provide reasons for their beliefs like this more often.

Hey little buddy, want some candy?

This is funny.

A Cereblation of our Fleedom!

Sheriff, you forgot an important one...

Hail Brittania

[Nothing a bit of figgy pudding and a spot of tea won't fix, Right old chap?]

This is not the British team entry into the World's Strongest Man Competition, 1946. It turns out that despite their best and most mannerly efforts to the contrary, the British themselves are human, all too human. Photos were realeased today from their secret German torture camps for suspected Communists.