Sing into my mouth.
Yeah, I know. But I can’t stop listening to it.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Irrespective of how much I might or might not be looking forward to a Tim Minear take on Alien Nation, there’s something terribly wrong with this sentence:
Syfy [sic] Creative Director of Original Programming Mark Stern sat with us and talked about the new reboot we’re all eagerly awaiting—
Politics as she is spoke.
It’s a truism that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. —If so, Sarah Palin just sealed the deal to become the first truly successful conservative politician since the sainted Reagan.
Upton’s rede.
It’s a popular thing to say, usually these days in the context of why it is global-warming denialists are so insistent on denying reality—
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
—which is one of the reasons why Ygelsias has become so dependent (rhetorically) on murdering Bangladesh. But:
If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault. No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.
That’s from Matt Taibbi, quoting email written in response to his magisterial article on Goldman Sachs and why we’re currently where we are, in what should have been the resurgent golden age, the return to the nines. —“I’m not even going to go there,” says Taibbi of his interlocutor; “the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it.”
Which is not to say I have an answer myself. Oh, there’s something in it of Dickinson’s corollary to Upton’s rede:
Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich, than face the reality of being poor.
From 1776; skip to about 4 minutes, 20 seconds in.
But is that enough? In the desire to deny one’s own poverty, is it really so difficult to understand that one’s own salary, the very possibility one might one day be comfortable if not rich, is being stolen by the very system one thinks one is protecting? —Somebody’s got to be rich, and it might as well not be me?
I have no idea. Just go read Taibbi.
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain—an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere—high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth—pure profit for rich individuals.
But the night was dark! And stormy!
Somewhere in San Jose a server’s straining mightily to serve up the 2009 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. As you might remember, we at the pier are not so fond of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, which has (we feel) substantially lost its way; we are pleased to note that the Lyttle Lytton awards are still running strong, and recommend the 2009 finalists to your attention as a welcome tonic. —Finally: an unlooked-for but as-welcome defense of the Great Man himself, from Jess Nevins, a champion of the welcome unlooked-for.
μῶμος.
At the age of 15, Humperson ran away from home to become a lighthouse keeper on the rugged, storm-lashed Atlantic coast. During this time he worked on a new signaling system intended to warn sailors of the various complex dangers—extending far beyond mere storms and rocks—presented by the sea. Unfortunately, because of widespread unfamiliarity with the system amongst sailors, wrecks were caused and a great many lives lost. Humperson fled to Jerusalem, where he studied anthropology and sociology in Hebrew under Martin Buber.
It was here—swatting flies in the fierce Palestine sun—that he began to develop the ideas for which he’s best remembered. Later, as a tenured professor at the University of San Marino, Humperson developed these preliminary insights into the five Laws of Meta as we know them today—
Momus extols an uncelebrated thinker.
The Bay 38.
While as with all right-thinking people I celebrate Charlie Jane Anders’ review of Revenge of the Fallen as some sort of critical apogee or at least the most fun I’ve had reading a movie review this summer so far—
And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components—male enhancement and pure id—start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.
So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality—but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There’s no such thing as the “real world,” and the only thing that’s left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you’re drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?
—Robert Humanick’s more pedestrian review from the House Next Door nonetheless proposes what I think will become the crucial metric for gaining some perspective on the era of the entertainment-industrial complex:
I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives.
Remember the Bay 38, people. Never forget.
Half-learning all the moves.
Seriously, io9, how the hell do you write even a puff-piece on The Last Airbender movie without even a gesture toward its calamitous casting calls? I mean, over a third of my traffic these days is from people googling up this article right here…
The 140 is no excuse.
There’s apparently some concern out there about the tabloidization of TPM, about which, well, Marshall & co. have always had an impish gleam in their collective eye, and anyway, how much further do they have to fall before they’re even as bad as the Washington Post?
No, I come to criticize TPM for something altogether other: popularizing the use of “spox” as some sort of ghastly Varietysprech for “spokesperson”:
ABC’s Jake Tapper just twittered in a report that Gov. Sanford has now made contact with his office.
Gov Sanford called office + was “taken aback” when learning of interest his trip has garnered, his spox sez. Will return to office tomorrow.
I don’t care how much trim you have to lose to fit the hed. This must stop. Immediately.
The consonants and vowels; the consequence of sounds.
And here I am, (belatedly) recommending you go read Barry’s transactional analysis of free (as in speech).
A question for the ages is answered.
They say everything is on the internet somewhere, so here you go: the reason why Yellow is orange.
If you ever wondered what it is I sound like,
I read “Bottom Feeding,” by Tim Pratt, for Podcastle.
Crap.
Saw this taped to the back window of a Suzuki on the way into work, not so much a bumper sticker as a placard—
A government big enough to supply you with everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything you have…
—Thomas Jefferson
And I hope your nose wrinkled as immediately at that as mine did: I hope the horrid clanging dissonance between the words spoken and the speaker putated, in language, in political and historical consciousness, in punctuation, struck you as hard and as fast as it did me. “Bullshit,” I snarled, with perhaps more vituperation than was absolutely necessary, but commuting makes me cranky, and anyway he was driving like a dick.
But, I thought to myself mere moments after the outburst, is it really? —Bullshit implies some awareness on the bullshitter’s part of the truthy nature of one’s utterances. If one were in the course of a heated discussion on the un-American nature of single-payer health care to suddenly bust out with “Oh, yeah, well I think it was Jefferson once said that a government big enough to yadda yadda” then I think we could all agree that one was bullshitting us with a cliché draped in a disastrously silly argument from authority and move on from there. But to print it out and tape it to the back window of your car for all to see one’s apparent ignorance of the language, the historical and poltical consciousness, the punctuation of the very Founding Fathers to whose imprimatur one so desperately clings? To so apparently believe the thing so clearly wrong? —We need a different word, I think.
Horseshit?
But the relationship between the two is close, perhaps too close: most horseshit begins as bullshit, for instance, much as the example above—the words are the same; it’s the purveyors’ attitudes toward them that make the only difference. And what of those who deploy bullshit to defend a core notion of horseshit: does the reliance on what one ostensibly knows to be truthy call into question the degree of one’s actual ignorance of the truthiness of that which one’s defending? And think of the nightmarish, irresolvable arguments over Liberal Fascism: bullshit or horseshit?
Also, the bull and the horse don’t work so well in the metaphoric relationship. —Maybe it’s all bullshit, and it’s more that there’s those who shovel it, and those who don’t seem to notice they’re walking around covered in it?
(Gerald Ford, August 12, 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild [sic], and government to gain ground.” —Lost lashings of nuance aside, theories as to why Ford got transmogrified into Jefferson as the authority from which to argue tingle deliciously, don’t they?)
Was, is, and ever shall be.
Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images.
On a clear day you can see the ambiguous heterotopia.
“You’re supposed to have slightly less than one-fifth of your population in families producing children,” the man with the beard and rings said, “and at the same time, slightly over a fifth of your population is frozen on welfare…” Then he nodded and made a knowing sound with m’s that seemed so absurd Bron wondered, looking at the colored stones at his ears and knuckles, if he was mentally retarded.
“Well, first,” Sam said from down the table, “there’s very little overlap between those fifths—less than a percent. Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here.” (Bron noted even Sam’s inexhaustible affability had developed a bright edge.) “Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and ouse a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.”
“Oh, I can.” The man fingered a gemmed ear. “Once I spent a month on Galileo; and I was on it!” But he laughed, which seemed like an efficient enough way to halt a subject made unpleasant by the demands of that insistent, earthie ignorance.
—Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton
Triton broke my brain more than any other book I ever read as a kid: I saw things differently after I read it—politics, sexuality, protagonists, sf. I read differently after I read it. And part of it was the thorny, prickly, problematic, nonexistent government of Triton and all the other Satellites, where you’re free to live under whatever system you want to vote for, or squat in the unlicensed free zones of whatever city you like—but behind it all that immutable, implacable, eminently sensible hand that invisibly takes what each might provide and in turn provides what each might need, but that also enables its agents to speak of “a” state and “a” system and to wage war on its behalf let’s not forget.
But it’s this idea of welfare, this road-not-taken over on the other side of the gulch from years of Reagan-Bush-Clinton, this road we might never have been able to take, but is nonetheless so dam’ sensible, where everyone’s given a hand up when they’re setting out regardless of etc. (and where everyone’s a stakeholder, and thus the system’s as untouchable as Social Security)—it’s this that came to mind when I read about a recent appearance on Glenn Beck’s medicine show by the Incredible paterfamilias himself, Craig T. Nelson, who in the course of a rant on how he’s sick of paying taxes for things that do not benefit him by God, said the following—
I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Did anybody help me out? No!
It’s becoming clear that the question that will define the early 21st century is this: can the white man create a sense of entitled privilege so large even he can see it?
All signs point to no.
