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Friday, Feb 25, 2005
lancing, misperceptions
i had avoided lance mannions blog because his name reminded me too much of race bannon but i can ignore it no longer despite my johnny quest flashbacks.
toolsy mctoolserson
james wolcott is the ichiro suzuki of the blogosphere. he ought henceforth be referred to merely as "Wolcott!". discuss.
condi must be crushed
i hear theyve registered at halliburton and plan to honeymoon in the green zone. what could be more romantic than bullets over baghdad?
horrible witz
the scouts love berubes early returns in the bigs versus the serially unserious kulture warriors. his strikeout to balk ratio is quite impressive. id liken him more to a young greg maddux than a rude pundit though. hes always nibbling around the corners of an argument, picking out the holes in your swinglines. yet hes old school enough to come inside with some heated debate, if necessary, when served up rehashed boiler-plate presumptions. five tool blogger, for sure. expect to see him in the rotation for years to come.
reality trip
"Later, I began to wonder far more about the ways in which orientalist images and representations were understood to be straightforward contributors to racist or imperialist ideology. The functionalism of Said’s original analysis became more and more urgent, demanding, and simplistic. To some extent, critiques that followed in the model of Orientalism began to presume, with increasingly less and less explicit theorizing, that not only were such images incorporated into racism or colonialism but were explanatory or causal to it. Eventually, the scholarship decomposed into a narrative of activism and an off-the-shelf theory of cultural interpretation. At that point, the mirroring of the cultural right and cultural left matured. Though drawn to very different texts or images, both groups in the United States shared an understanding of culture as cipher or code, that almost-subliminal references to past tropes or images or stereotypes somehow transmitted the entire history of associated ideologies and systems to later generations, that even a subtle incorporation of historical misrecognition or misrepresentation contaminated the whole of culture."
founding fodder
"We were discussing notions of individual and group rights, and how defending the rights of the former can involving infringing upon the reigning conceptions of the latter. But where does that leave the group out from which the rights-bearing individual emerged in the first place? (The specific context of the discussion was Iraq, and whether one can coherently speak of fighting against some portion of the population of a state in the name of providing "rights" to another, in some ways indistinguishable portion of the population.) With a little bit of guidance from Rousseau, we gradually came to talking about the political problem of beginnings. Figuring out how to legitimately initiate a political project is a central, perhaps the central, preoccupation of political theorists, and takes us far beyond Iraq; it haunts Locke's theory of property rights, is echoed in the fears of ancient Roman republican thinkers, and animates the argument in Plato's Republic, the touchstone of all philosophical literature in the West. The crux is always the same: as Juvenal (and then Alan Moore) put it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Or, more relevantly, who makes the rules for the rule-makers?"
astral projection
"Inept and hypocritical they are indeed, but what this scandal tells us is way more profound. As I've argued both in Cruel and Unusual and "A Patriot Act," there's a big difference between hypocrisy and projectivity. Hypocrisy means "dissimulation" pure and simple. A hypocrite does one thing privately while playing a very different role in public. Insofar as he's capable of happiness, he's happy just to live such a divided life. What he does not need is to have some demon-figure(s) onto whom he can relentlessly project those aspects of himself that he unconsciously detests. This is the animus that drives the Bushevik movement--more than greed, more than oil, more than imperialism. The movement is, ultimately, pathological. Which explains its compulsive hatefulness. Every time the Bushevik vents his spleen against "the liberals," he's actually referring to himself. "The liberals," he insists, are lying, bitter diehards, who would do anything to stay in power; they steal elections; they are "a coalition of the wild-eyed"; and on it goes forever. If the movement weren't relentlessly projective, it would just disappear. They have to stay on the attack against the demon, which they can never finally kill, because that demon is inside them."
diamond sophistries
"So, given that philosophy, I have ranked the top 20 Major League Sophomores below -- not by how their 2005 season will be, but instead their career. Think of this as a prospect ranking one year removed, now that we all know a little more."
Thursday, Feb 24, 2005
we put the sin in wisconsin
i know this should be posted at FinkFactorsFreakOutFridayThursday but i wouldnt want you to miss this classic performance art linkdada spacecake nixon.
hand jive
rude pundit is a five tool blogger.