Opinions, art, debate
Definitely enormously better today. Many very recognizable speakers, a lot of valuable points made. Impactful real-life stories. Altogether, there was a clear narrative that brought the speeches together.
One thing that always entertains me is when people say, “but how can he (or she) endorse the frontrunner after the horrible things they said about each other in the primaries!” The complexity of adult lives is difficult for them to accept.
The director of the Secret Service explains the failure of her agency that led to the assassination attempt on Trump as follows:
That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.
There are truly no words to describe this level of lisping, shameless childishness. A country whose secret service agents are afraid of sloped roofs. We have arrived, America. The home of the brave whose bravery stops at a moderately inconvenient roof.
Do you know how you car works? When you get into it in the morning, do you give a thought to how much work of many different people went into making sure that it starts moving whenever you want it to?
The oven, the AC, the phone, the washer and dryer, the microwave. You push a button, and it works. Everything works. Very complicated things that were created by veritable feats of human intelligence and the labor of many just work at a push of a button.
And that’s great. We want things to work. Not just objects but institutions, organizations, and systems. I always wonder when I see my university awaken from its summer torpor and roll into action smoothly each August 16. Thousands of people begin simultaneously to do what they must. They know what they should do and they all do it. And the place springs to life. It’s extraordinary.
We live in complicated societies and we are surrounded by complicated objects, is what I’m saying. And it all works. Sometimes something malfunctions but we notice the malfunction precisely because it’s so rare. My memory will retain that one time this month when we didn’t have electricity for a few hours precisely because the rest of the time we did have it.
As everything in life, this has a huge downside. We get so used to things just working that we lose sight of the complexity of things. Whenever something is uncomfortable, we start looking for a magic button to push or a magic pill to swallow. The need to plod along little by little is perceived as an insult. Aren’t things supposed to just work? Give me my magic button to press right now! As Michel Clouscard used to say, “the hard work of some guarantees the eternal adolescence of others.”
Why is this bad? Because when we start demanding magic buttons and easy solutions, things tend to stop working. Our political space has been completely conquered with appeals to eternal – I wouldn’t even say adolescents, but rather, infants – who jump up with joy at promises of magical handouts in the form of college debt forgiveness or untaxed tips.
Everybody has sat in a meeting or with a group of friends or family members and knows how hard it is to arrive at a group decision. How hard it is to make anything happen. How everybody gets distracted, everybody has their own interests, emotions, physical states. But even that personal experience is easily defeated by the belief that everything must be as easy as pressing a button and having the lights go on.
[As always in these posts, these are my thoughts inspired by my reading. I hate retelling what other people said. Instead, I talk about what their ideas suggested to me. Michel Clouscard didn’t say any of this except for the quote I gave in inverted commas.]
The best 21st-century thinkers I read – Bauman (RIP), Byung-Chul Han, Clouscard, Fusaro, Rendueles – are all European. Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain.
In the Americas, there are people who describe what’s wrong in very talented, engaging ways. Shoshana Zuboff, Joe Allen, Miklos Lukacs de Pereny, Gullo Omodeo. Or even JD Vance in his fine autobiography. As I explained before, this is a very important task. But I haven’t seen anything like original ideas, theory, philosophy come out of the Americas this century. This is new and not great. We had a lot going on in this hemisphere in what concerns generating ideas all the way until the 1990s. But since then, bupkes.
This lack of ideas, this deadlock in the understanding of the world is reflected in our politics. It’s all connected, people. Ideas, art, politics. The place where ideas are created has become shallow and geriatric, and everything else is following suit.
This is very strange given that the US has the money and the structure to bring over the best brains from anywhere in the world. We should have our own Fusaros and Hans by the bucketful but somehow it’s not working out.
What we have instead of ideas is a struggle between lunatic proposals (“let’s cut off the breasts of unhappy 14-year-olds”) and the reaction to these lunatic proposals (“no, let’s not do that, you absolute creep”). We are locked in the lunacy/reaction cycle which is, by nature, repetitive and stagnant. If all you do is say no to XYZ, you are XYZ’s slave. XYZ owns you because your existence is dominated by XYZ’s every whim.
The lunatic proposals in question do not come out of a wealth of ideas, either. Their root is the belief that there should be no limitations on human desires. Biology, society, tradition, religion, law – they all should fall away and not constrain human freedom to refashion oneself and the world in an endless act of re-creation. This fanatical dedication to the philosophy of “be ye as gods” is hardly a new and interesting idea. Rather, it’s hubris adopted in lieu of philosophy.
Europe is actually doing really well in what concerns producing ideas. Europe is on a good path. We need to get ourselves unstuck here in the Americas and start churning out fresh, interesting thought, too.
… is everywhere. Please listen to this stunningly bad performance of the national anthem:
I understand she was trying to be original but what a disaster. We have student singers perform the anthem at the convocation each year, and they all do a better job than this apparently famous performer.
Totally. A prostitute “of color” with a face tattoo, subservient Russian patsies, and a Teamster boss screeching about corporate greed.
This reminded me of an old joke. A young dude writes in his diary:
“Monday. Masturbated with the left hand. Extraordinary.
Tuesday. Masturbated with the right hand. A lot less impressive than the left hand.
Wednesday. Had sex with a woman. A pale semblance of the right hand.”
Today I made soup and folded a small amount of laundry. That must mean I’m getting better, right?
I’m measuring my recovery in household tasks.
N, by the way, bought such an extraordinary quantity of sosiski (hot dogs) that he must think I won’t be on my feet until December.
OK, I apologize. I’m in physical pain and I don’t do painkillers, so I’m irritable.
The way this works now is this. People show up at the border by the hundred thousands. They do it because there’s no alternative. They can’t apply from their homes and without disrupting their lives. That option doesn’t exist for almost anybody. Did you know that? Did you know that our system is set up to force people who want to immigrate to quit their jobs, sell their property, leave their children (or take them on a very perilous journey)? We actually engineer the situation with those detention camps, etc because we have not created an alternative. We spill crocodile’s tears about it when this could be solved tomorrow with great ease. This makes me so angry. When I emigrated to Canada, nobody forced me to schlep across continents and sit in a detention camp for weeks. The process was long, yes, but while it took place, I was living in my home, making money at my job, and not being molested and exploited by human traffickers. This is what I want for migrants into America. And for wanting that, I’m routinely excoriated as an immigrant hater. It’s extraordinary.
OK, moving on. Currently, migrants arrive at the border. There are so many of them that nobody can do anything beyond shipping them around the country and assigning them a court date sometime in the distant future that they are supposed to attend and start the process of demonstrating that they are eligible for immigration. Most of them never show up for that court date. Many don’t even understand what it means because they don’t speak the language in which they are informed about the court date.
Now please reread the preceding paragraph and tell me when exactly the vetting of these migrants for criminal antecedents is supposed to happen. How do we find out that a migrant is a Colombian Ted Bundy or a Guatemalan MS-13 gangster? Exactly, we don’t. In the process that I propose (and which has existed in other countries for decades), the vetting of criminal records happens while the applicant lives at home. This means that he has zero opportunities to commit crimes in the country where he wants to emigrate. Doesn’t it make sense to find out if one is a criminal before letting them in?
There are no wars going on in Central America right now. There are no totalitarian regimes. The crime rates have been dropping dramatically. There’s literally nothing going on that necessitates the removal of over a million people a year from their countries and their urgent transportation to the US. So why are we dragging these people over by the million so that they can sleep on the floor of Logan Airport, etc when they could be sleeping in their beds at home? My only explanation is that watching these spectacles of abjection makes us feel good.
Even a few years ago, I would have been against this girl. But now I’m thinking, who else will oppose the practice of letting naked men into girl’s locker rooms?
The Florida prosecution of Trump has been dismissed:
This was the most perilous of all 4 Trump cases.
There’s something that the Afghan withdrawal, the Secret Service actions last week and this prosecution share. They were done in a bumbling, incompetent way. Leaving aside Trump, this is bad for all of us because people in charge of government services seem utterly incapable.
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