Hunter S. Thompson on John Kerry
Well, actually, it’s Cripspin Sartwell:
In every case, the most fundamental values a person can have about life and freedom are sacrificed on the altar of poll numbers, of the personal ambition to be elected president.
Let me read it out for you: he can yap however he likes, but he has demonstrated - over and over again beyond the possibility of refutation - that believes nothing, that he stands for nothing, that he means nothing, that he is nothing.
But try and spot the difference with Thompson on Hubert Humphrey:
With the possible exception of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey is the purest and most disgusting example of a Political Animal in American politics to day … There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is.
Unfortunately, this time round, the contemptible shit has got the nomination. And speaking of contemptible shits, here’s Todd Gitlin on Kerry: “John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.� He goes on to do the most disgusting display of peace-police bullshit I’ve seen for some time (referring to this weekend’s protests in New York):
People should take steps that ensure that the disrupters, the Rove fans, are marginalized. United for Peace and Justice could have done us all a big favor by training monitors that would contain those people who seek only mayhem in order to further their performance piece. Since UPJ decided not to do that, I think those who march peacefully ought to feel that they have a responsibility to contain and limit the damage that’s being done by the wackos.
Luckily, just as in the 60s, none of the cool kids are listening to Gitlin.
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Impeach Blair
So, somebody (i.e., not me) has finally got off their asses and started the process to impeach Tony Blair. At this point, it’s probably a good idea to remind everyone that we do have legal precedent to behead a ruler for the crime of tyranny.
I don’t know a lot about the internal structure of the Labour
party, but is there not some way for the party to impeach (or
otherwise remove) Tony Blair? His repeated claims that he will go
ahead with foundation hospitals, for example, regardless of the
opinion of the party conference, is an obvious affront to
democracy. The whole bloody point of the Labour party is that its
policy isn’t determined by the leader or an elite group, but
by its members. Blair seems to have forgotten that, and he needs
reminding. The best way to do that is to remove him
And getting rid of Tony Blair would be a victory for the anti-war
movement. Replacing him with Brown may not be much of an improvement,
but that’s not the point. Remember all the talk back in March of
making Tony Blair pay the political price for Iraq? Well, stopping
being Prime Minister is a big political price, and Gordon Brown is the
only realistic alternative. The symbolism of getting rid of Blair is
much more important than the (minimal) political differences we’d get
by promoting Brown.
On a related note, why aren’t we protesting outside the Labour
Party Conference? It only occoured to me this morning, and it’s a bit
late now, but a big protest (and maybe direct action, too) outside the
conference would have had a bigger effect than the boring walk through
London of last weekends anti-occupation demonstration. As much as I’d
like to blame the StWC for this, I was just as unimaginative as them,
and so (as far as I can see) has everyone else been. The anti-war
movement really dropped the ball on this one.
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Surprised by joy
Dizzee Rascal, displaying the kind of Nietzscheanism we demand, but rarely get, from our pop stars, seems to be in a good mood. It turns out, contrary to expectations, that being successful actually is preferable to being unsuccessful. His current song in particular is splendid, not least because it sounds like comedy NTK favourite mark vii.
I’m not sure about the new Girls Aloud track; it’s growing on me, but it’s no ‘The Show’. Still, their performance on Top of the Pops was good, repeating the same ‘doing something unglamorous while mouthing the lyrics in an uninterested way’ trick from their last video. It strikes me as pleasingly subversive, although I’m not really sure why.
I’ve finally remembered what ‘Love Machine’ reminds me of: of course ‘Money’ by Charlie Baltimore.
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“Becoming inhuman is in the best interests of humanity�
What I like about primitivism is it’s rigorous anti-humanism. Actually existing primitivists don’t always live up to this, but the program(me) of primitivism, unlike bourgeois environmentalism (which is just the flipside of industrial enviro-dominance), has no time for human protection or (even worse) preservation of the natural world, which just reproduces a separation of people from the environment; which is to say, opression, which is to say The Problem. This is where the Animal Rights discourse, like Singer’s idea of speciesism, gets it exactly wrong (my emphasis):
…other animals are not resources or property for us to use; that they are sentient, conscious beings with individual interests, like humans.
Rather than seeking to get rid of the cage of individualism, the plan is to extend it to the whole natural world, and make animals suffer from it too. And what could be a better example of human dominance over the environment that that?
So it’s ironic that primitivism tends to support this anti-humanism towards nature with a fanatical humanism towards technology. Technology is seen as completely inhuman and denigrated as such. See, for example, this combined criticism and misunderstanding of Deleuze and Guattari (which actually comes from insurrectionists, but is similar to, for example, Zerzan’s objections to Hakim Bey):
…the philosophers known as post-structuralists, those French thinkers who, in order to defend this society from the subversion caused by the death of God … announced the death of man in every sphere, with the aim of spreading resignation by making the individual into a mere lump of social, political, technological and linguistic devices. The influence of the “desiring machines� of Deleuze and Guattari is particularly strong …
[Poststructuralists argue that] the human being must fade into the gear, that autonomy must give way to automatism, and that fantasy must surrender before functionality.
All of which could be avoided if primitivists would just read k-punk, from where the title of this post is drawn (I was going to call it ‘Half man, half machine, what does it mean, what does it mean’ but thought better of it). His Deleuzean-Gauttarean cyberpunk take on anti-capitalism, combined with his Spinozist post-humanism, is precisely what is needed to move forward the movement of movements. And I don’t share his pessimism about that movement. It’s true that its media representatives (Klein, Monbiot) don’t really have any new ideas, and that its media representations are “a pantomime sideshow,� but isn’t that what all we should expect of representation? On the streets, things look quite different (I have a story to tell, at some point, about Deleuze, Gauttari, and riot police): IndyMedia and Ya Basta! are both world-wide networks of fictional cyborgs.
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Edmund Burke for the left (or, a bargain basement Peter Hitchens knock-off)
My first thought when I saw the title of Alistair’s recent (and, he says, unfinished) series of posts, Explaining my apostasy to the Lefties was, “Oh dear, I hope he’s not just doing Christopher Hitchens with the serial numbers filed off.� Luckily, that worry turned out to be unkind and, more importantly, innacurrate. Christopher Hitchens’s was, once upon a time, a Trotskyist, and his ‘apostasy’ from the left is specifically in relation to that experience. Alistair, as far as I know (and I don’t know him very well, so I may be wrong), has never been a Trotskyist; and so, at least to that extent, his rejection of the left is going to be different.
In other words, then, Dan is (as always) right when he says that we shouldn’t consider the left or the right as sets of policies but as traditions. This disposes, I think, of Alistair’s problem that identifying with the left is adhering to an amorphous set of dogmas, rather than reasoning from “positions which actually mean something.� The intellectual basis of this kind of political commitment is not susceptible to this kind of criticism, because the left isn’t really about theory at all, but about practice, about acting in memory of certain events rather than coming to hold certain positions.
I was going to say that the central left proposition would be of the form, “that is the right way to proceed,� but, although that may be the best our everyday vocabulary of practical reasoning can do, it’s rather misleading. Political commitments aren’t propositions at all, but practical syllogisms, with events as premises and actions as conclusions: The Civil War and the bombing of Iraq entail the beheading of Tony Blair, say, or the Seattle WTO protests and the 2005 G8 meeting entail me sitting in a road somewhere near Stirling in a year’s time, or whatever.
That was a bit of a detour, but the point is that Alistair is right to criticise an identification of the left with the hip or the nice, and may well be right to distance himself from the left (note that whether Alistair is a member of the left or not is not up to him). Actions become actions when they come under a dsecription; this description is not a matter of anyone’s choice, but is a matter of what Quentin Skinner (among others) calls ‘social meaning’. Some actions mean what they do because of the history of the left; but many admirable actions don’t, and if you’re not acting in the tradition of the left, you’re not of the left. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — post-left positions, such as primitivism and insurrectionism have a lot going for them. Nonetheless, I find that I am acting under left-wing descriptions, and that pleases me.
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More semi-literate sexism
From the Maoist International Movement:
MIM reserves use of “bitch” as an enemy term and is more friendly to the position that all wimmin are “hos”.
Surprisingly, they go on to develop this in a sort-of-plausible way. Many thanks to The New Male Nudity for the link (her post on Fluffy Deleuze is cracking, too).
And here’s a quite incadescent (and I mean that in a good way) response to the Fluffy Deleuze post. K-punk finds lots (to object to) in the post which I’d skimmed over (indeed, I hadn’t even registered that the post was framed as an attack on him). I want to say something about why I liked the idea of Fluffy Theory, which I’ll try and do in the comments over at K-Punk, when I get time.
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The visionary power of Humphrey Lyttleton
With lots of the the old skool of 2001 following Richard X into legal remixes and the more-or-less demise of boom selection, it looked like comedy bootlegging was dead. But no, in fact, we’re seeing a return to the golden days of words of one song to the tune of another, coming full circle to the old Britney/Eminem tunes. Also, more Britney and Dead Prez vs. Marilyn Manson, among many others.
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Rioja rhyme that’s right on time
I’m back from a very pleasant holiday in Spain, about which I’ll have more to say later. I had dinner in the bar where the Spanish Socialist Party was founded, saw a splendid firework display which cleverly involved setting off fireworks from the inside of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostella, and enjoyed trying to decipher the copious anarchist graffiti with my minimal knowledge of Spanish. Pictures of all these things and more, shortly.
I also experienced a fine proof that capitalist globalisation is rubbish. The café in the Museo del Prado is run by the same company as the canteen where I work; but could I get a plate of octopus for two pounds this lunch-time? I think you all know the answer to that one (luckily, I brought some tinned pulpo gallego home with me, which will make its way into sandwiches soon enough).
I’m going to be living the primitivist dream for a few days from tomorrow (although I nearly decided not to go away when I realised it would mean missing the Big Brother final), so it will probably be a while until I get round to posting on England, Hegel and why, despite appearances, Alistair’s recent political reidentification is something more interesting than just a bargain basement Hitchens knock-off (now that I’ve typed that out, it looks really offensive. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post the followup, which should make that description look less mean-spirited, before Alistair sees this).
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