Obama: America’s #1 Conservative

Oh yes. Fiscal restraint is the oft-babbled, seldom-understood meme of conservatism. Ironic that the guy this faction calls socialist is telling our heavily liberalized markets to show fiscal restraint and sound investment. America is getting worse at playing the language game of ideology. It is harder and harder to tell who is on the left and who is on the right anymore. Democracy fails when the forces of discourse become homogenized. After all, what is a healthy democracy besides the interplay of conflicting discourses? As far as the “public institutions have no business interfering in private affairs of industry” argument, let me counter that by asserting the contrary: “private industry has no business interfering in the affairs of public institutions.” In traditional logic: ~ G => P = ~P => G, where G is governmental dominance over the functioning of society and P is private industrial dominance of such. When carried to its logical conclusion, the solution to this problem is a strict wall of separation between government and private industry.

But… that’s not the way the world works. You can never create this fantasy land of a laissez-faire capitalist state. It has never existed and never will because capitalism needs the state to even exist. Capitalism was born out of the feudal system and not the other way around. But since they both exist now, we can toss around how much of one and how much of the other. It’s a legitimate concern to point out examples of when the government was heavily involved with private industry: Stalin, Mussolini, Castro. It’s nice to rake peoples fears of a world being run by mafioso business/bureaucrat/political elite who have, with their cronies, their dirty hands in the money pot. But left and right are really just red herrings. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, it’s them damn (insert political affiliation here). Which explains why, since the death of Kennedy and beyond, no one really talks about voting reform, campaign finance reform, lobbying reform a whole heck of a lot. The mafia already runs the place and the current system is just a breeding ground for complacency and mediocrity. Fiscal conservatism really explained Reagan’s exorbitant spending. The reality is, like religion, there really isn’t a separation between industry and government. They bleed into each other.

tax us, we want to prove our superior progressiveness!

Rich people demand more taxes on… themselves.

I thought I was reading the Onion when I saw this. Yes, the isolation of late-capitalism, in a very Deleuzian-inspired progression of events has caused a desire of the wealthy to assert their liberal superiority by acting against their own class interests to be great apologists for the current way of doing things. Unfortunately, this is not very impressive. It only confirms the shallowness, social elitism and image consciousness that enters the culture within the socially mobile. Say, why don’t you bargain your employers for less pay, buy groceries at Aldi’s and join collective bargaining and job creation while you’re at it? The redistribution of money is not the redistribution of wealth. Rich, white liberal guilt. It’s like taking cookies from the cookie jar and then placing back a few chocolate chips so that other kids can have a bite. Then petitioning the pope for sainthood. Nice try. Saving face is not a convincing move.

Not quite as tragically unconvincing as the teabaggers, but still unconvincing nonetheless.

global warming? mother earth is not impressed

Yeah, so apparently the recent volcano eruption up in Iceland which has delayed flights in Western European airports packed enough of a punch to throw the scales on the global climate trends. While I agree with the conclusion that humans should stop modeling industry based on the exploitation of natural resources and other humans, the premise that humans are primarily responsible for every shift in global ecological and natural systems is questionable, at best. See, the fact is global systems science is fairly new (possibly less aged than computer science since computers are required to monitor global systems) and thus, still primarily conceptualization, debate and analysis. The question should not be “are our industrial practices creating nearly irreversible, negative impact on the way the natural and ecological systems which have evolved to sustain life on planet Earth function globally?” The question should be “why do we feel like gods of the universe to the point that we fabricate yet another metanarrative to rationalize our arrogant view of the world the gave birth to us?”

I fail to see the difference between “we can make the Earth better” and “we can save poor planet Earth.” I’d rather put my faith in the most intelligent being on this planet: life. Life has been sustained on this planet for billions of years and I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon. Being that the planet has survived greater cataclysms than the human race, as dysfunctional as we are, I think I’ll put my faith that the self-correcting system called Earth will give us all a transcendent spanking when it’s all said and done.

Just a warm, fuzzy thought…

i hate to be obscene, but…

Will people please stop talking about Michael Jackson. You don’t know him aside from a few mediocre records and television reports. What a sad world… a pedophile dies and everyone cries. A woman gets shot by riot police in Iran and no one says a fucking word. So sad.

Wires

This is a poem of mine in aural/musical form. Please enjoy. Or don’t enjoy. Or “enjoy” for everyone so very pomo out there.

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You might be a hipster…

You know, in a swarm of ironic social buzzwords, many people are still very much confused as to what a hipster is. Is it an insult or a compliment? Who is called a hipster? Who calls a hipster? What exactly is a hipster?

Well, if there is any doubt in your mind, take heed… I have compiled a set of identifying guidelines worthy of Jeff Foxworthy with the self-same truckerbeard, John Deere mesh-cap, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Dukes-of-Hazard-aesthetic appeal.

1. If you have been called a hipster and scoffed a big sneer while chanting the mantra “no way, I’m not a hipster,” you might be a hipster.
2. If you’ve worn a Che Guevara t-shirt while openly describing fashion trends to corporate “cool” scouts, you might be a hipster.
3. If you shop at thrift stores with a platinum credit card, you might be a hipster.
4. If you brag about reading Foucault, Kropotkin and Kerouac, but can only parrot a few intelligent-sounding, but hardly-significant quotes, you might be a hipster.
5. If you go to a coffee shop to have conversations with your laptop, you might be a hipster.
6. If you have one black friend for the sake of saying you have a black friend, you might be a hipster.
7. If you push off a discussion of good music because your bands are too obscure to ever talk about, you might be a hipster.
8. If you are over 18 and take kickball games at the park a little too seriously, you might be a hipster.
9. If you constantly complain of being “exploited”  in a “dead-end job” and still had enough to buy a new mac, iPod, iPhone, iRefridgerator, you might be a hipster.
10. If you’ve never heard the word “gentrification” used in conjunction with “racism,” you might be a hipster.
11. If you’ve never been caught eating in public, you might be a hipster.
12. If you drink fortified wine and lack a shopping cart, you might be a hipster.
13. If you think Polaroid snapshots of random architecture is edgy, you might be a hipster.*
14. If you drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and cannot crush a beer can on your head, you might be a hipster.
15. If you are an art school dropout, you might be a hipster.
16. If you cannot decide what is “deck,” spend five hours on the streetcorner debating what is “deck,” almost come to some sort of conclusion or consensus as to what is “deck,” but subsequently decide that it’s really just “lame” and move onto some other meaningless, irrelevant or unproductive conversation, you might be a hipster.
17. If you scoff a popularity, but have more contacts in your cell phone than in Donald Trump’s rollodex, you might be a hipster.
18. If you believe there are only two domains of social geography: city and suburb, you might be a hipster.
19. If you think Ludwig von Beetoven was punk rock, you might be a hipster.
20. If you take your participation in the adult kickball league a little too seriously, you might be a hipster.
21. If you are thoroughly convinced you are cool (especially) when everyone else in the room says you’re lame, you might be a hipster.
22. If you live in Brooklyn and pretend you live in West Virginia, you might be a hipster.

* This might be a shocker, but Polaroid photography had already lost its edge in the art world by 1998, when a Polaroid fine arts photographer was featured in Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, a gay-themed film. And gay-themed films with some very notable exceptions are notorious for camp-stenched kitsch and deadbeat pastiche, or edginess, if you are a hipster.

So there you have it. Cheers, hipsters.

Kill the Hipsters

Obama, you idiot!

Just one more idiotic remark to throw onto the Republican fire, perpetuating the dichotomous American political sphere and making all the complacent Republicans with a constant chip on their shoulder to cry out and make people believe their idiotic perception that America is far left vs. far right (or in their terms “liberal vs conservative”). Way to keep the status quo. What’s the point of registering for the Green Party or the Socialist Party? Now we have yet another media circus because no one seems to be able to discern serious from silly. Both ruling parties are silly. Now, that is all we will ever hear in the national news. At least local and sometimes state-level politics actually talk about something. No wonder our federal government keeps getting bigger in both Democratic and Republican administrations.

PS: A message to Sarah Palin… STFU. You are a pompous, suburban bitch posing as an average American. Quit throwing your child with Downs Syndrome in the national media spotlight for your own political gain. That is more disgusting than any joke with the word “retard” in it. Your child is a human being and not a puppet you can pull out conveniently to satisfy your power hunger.

Let’s start a revolution…

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