The secret origin of white people

This is more like notes toward a post rather than a proper blog post. I have these links burning a hole in my pocket and want a place to put them.

It starts with an essay Yo, Pundits! Here’s What’s Up With the Republicans, which submits that the two tribes of American politics thesis which many people (including me) tend to favor is too simple. Drawing upon David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, it says that what is now the backbone of the Republican party is grounded in the Borderer ethnic group from the Scots-English highlands.

The more we study the Borderers’ folkways in Britain and in America, the more we see how thoroughly the Republican Party has adopted this culture's worldview and purged itself of incompatible elements.

To begin with, right-wing authoritarianism has fertile soil in two aspects of Borderer rank ways: “tanistry” and “macocracy.” Tanistry is the selection of a “thane,” or warlord, to lead a clan. “By the rule of tanistry, one man [⋯] was chosen to head the family: he who was strongest, toughest and most cunning,” Fischer writes. “The winner became the elder of his family or clan, and was honored with deference and deep respect. The losers were degraded and despised” ₍₆₉₄₎. The Borderers had no fixed social order, and they treated all outsiders alike, with what was seen as “insolence,” “impudence,” “forwardness,” “familiarity,” “unruliness,” “licentiousness” and “pride” ₍₇₅₅₎
[⋯]
“Macocracy” is a coinage derived from the “Mac-” prefix on the names of Scottish clans, defined by Fischer as “a structure of highly personal politics without deference to social rank”. In other words, it's not a man's title that gives him power, but rather his personal leadership and ability to influence others. Charismatic leaders drew fanatical personal followings among Borderers, who placed a heavy premium on personal loyalty. We see this in elected officials' deference to media figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to organizational leaders such as James Dobson and to political operatives such as Karl Rove.
[⋯]
Also, Borderer culture was intensely conformist. Those who broke the rules of Borderer society were “hated out,” or ostracized; “;[d]eviance from cultural norms was rarely tolerated[, and] opposition was suppressed by force” ₍₇₈₁₎. The Borderers’ libertarian conception of freedom did not include the right to disagree or dissent.

This combination of cultural factors produces a political culture in which people can take marching orders and “talking points” and follow them day in and day out without deviation
[⋯]
Today’s Republican Party tolerates inequality of wealth because Borderers have historically experienced more of it than any other culture in America.

The historical quotes describing Borderer culture are striking in how contemporary and fresh they seem. This stuff dates back to the colonial experience before white racial identity was invented.

It brings to mind an old favorite of mine, the screed Revenge Of The Mutt People from Joe Bageant which I have blogged before.

We the mutt faced sons and daughters of the republic. Born to kick your chicken breast meat to death for you in the darkest, most dismal corners of our great land, born to kill and be killed in stock car races, drunken domestic rows, and of course in the desert dusty back streets at the edges of the empire. Middle class urban liberals may never claim us as brothers, much less willing servants, but as they say in prison, we are your meat. We do your bidding. Your refusal to admit that we do your dirty work for you, not to mention the international smackdowns and muggings for the republic — from which you benefit more materially than we ever will — makes it no less true.
[⋯]
With the “fighting tradition” of Scots Irish behind us, we smashed upon each other ceaselessly in trailer court and tavern, night and day in rain and summer heat until finally, we reach our mid-fifties and lose our enthusiasm (not to mention stamina) for that most venerated of borderer sports.
[⋯]
liberal refusal to see white people as also being diverse, and seeing that some of them indeed need their own sort of affirmative action is exactly the kind of thing that helped the neocons lead these working white people by the nose

Updates

I found some lively criticism of Albion’s Seed …

Fischer creates a Frankenstein’s monster of “Borderers” out of bits and pieces of anecdote of specific events from the 18^th to 20^th centuries, mostly getting his methodology and analysis directly from pre-1920 sources, and ignoring most research contemporary to his own publication. His section on “Borderers” is meant to create an image of a race of uncivilized whites who are habitually violent, chaotic, stupid, and resist attempts by others to “civilize” them, when in fact the Scots-Irish often sought integration, while rural, poor Appalachianers were more often the victims of violence from these supposedly civilized groups. While Albion’s Seed was initially hailed in popular and academic reviews, when people looked closer as I did, they began to see that the “Borderers” section is one big fib.

… where, unusually, replies to the post are worth digging into … though I have a huge caveat about the commenting community.

Aaron Barlow at Academe Blog has a related post Want to Understand the Tea Party? Look to How They See Themselves:

These are primarily people of European ancestry who see themselves as simply “American,” with no ties to other nations or other cultures. They do not descend from post-Civil War immigration; ties to any “old country” were broken long ago, probably even before the age of steam. Many of them are associated with the Borderer culture that rose between Scotland and England and that was hardened on Ulster Plantation in the 17th century, either by descent or incorporation–and all of them see themselves as being the “real” Americans who created the United States.

They do not feel that they have been treated well by the federal government, of late. In fact, they may never have felt themselves treated well (they were the rebels of the War of the Regulation in the 1760s and the Whiskey Rebellion thirty years later–not to mention, many were the stalwarts of the Confederate States of America, though few would have been counted among the rich slave owners).

Colin Woodard’s “Eleven Nations” thesis

In his book Eleven Nations, an elaborate website, and countless articles, Colin Woodard argues for several distinct North American cultures with geographies which emerge from our history. In an article about the surprising geography of gun violence he starts with a good capsule summary:

The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.

Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England, the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-led upland backcountry of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different ethnographic, religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They were rivals and sometimes enemies, with even the British ones lining up on opposite sides of conflicts like the English Civil War in the 1640s. They settled much of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the U.S. in mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant third party in-migration picked up steam in the 1840s.

[⋯]

In the process they laid down the institutions, symbols, cultural norms and ideas about freedom, honor and violence that later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures, others are split between them, propelling constant and profound disagreements on politics and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Oregon.

Another article, Up In Arms also explores the connection between these different cultures and their implications for guns, violence, and contemporary politics.

Among the eleven regional cultures, there are two superpowers, nations with the identity, mission, and numbers to shape continental debate: Yankeedom and Deep South. For more than two hundred years, they’ve fought for control of the federal government and, in a sense, the nation’s soul. Over the decades, Deep South has become strongly allied with Greater Appalachia and Tidewater, and more tenuously with the Far West. Their combined agenda—to slash taxes, regulations, social services, and federal powers—is opposed by a Yankee-led bloc that includes New Netherland and the Left Coast. Other nations, especially the Midlands and El Norte, often hold the swing vote, whether in a presidential election or a congressional battle over health care reform. Those swing nations stand to play a decisive role on violence-related issues as well.

More on “Real Americans”

I realized that I should just consolidate this post with another post of links & quotes I originally did a week earlier:

The group of Americans we currently call the Tea Party believe that they are the only real Americans. When they wail that “our country is being taken away”, their conception of “us” does not include people who are not in their group.

Matt Taibbi in The Truth About the Tea Party:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

Mike the Mad Biologist points to the proto-fascist note here in Misunderstanding Palin and ‘Palinism’: It’s the Politics of the Blood:

Her policy ignorance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Palin is conceptually and intellectually poor because her politics are not about policies, but a romantic restoration of the ‘real’ America to its rightful place. The primary purpose of politics is not to govern, not to provide services, and not to solve mundane, although often important, problems. For the Palinist, politics first and foremost exists to enable the social restoration of ‘real’ Americans (think about the phrase “red blooded American”) and the emotional and social advantages that restoration would provide to its followers (obviously, if you’re not a ‘real’ American, you might view this as a bad thing…). Practicalities of governance, such as compromise and worrying about reality-based outcomes, actually get in the way. Why risk having your fantasy muddied by reality?

Robert DeNiro’s film The Good Shepherd (content warning — bigoted character saying racist things):

Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their tradition. Even the n****rs, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson? What do you have?

The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

A linkrotted Billmon Twitter thread on herrenvolk democracy:

In a U.S. context, I take “herrenvolk democracy” to mean the sacred principle that all white people (or at least, white men) are equal. [⋯] But key insight I finally had about US herrenvolk democracy (& why our politics is so peculiarly poisonous) is: it’s not just about race. To the populist right wing, liberals — like blacks, Hispanics, gays, Muslims, etc. etc. — aren’t “white.” Not part of the volk. Not “real Americans.” Which means that for the populist right wing, democratic rule by a liberal president (really, any big D Democrat) is a contradiction in terms.

Jim Henley on conservative indifference to Russian election tampering in the US:

Kurt Eichenwald < @kurteichenwald > 11:44 AM - 23 Jun 2017

---

How does GOP not get Russia cyberattack is NOT about Trump? It is about a foreign power undermining American democracy.

#PartyOverCountry

Let's talk about what we’re up against here. The GOP doesn’t think they betrayed America because they don’t think we are Americans.

Conservatives have expressed their conviction that they constitute “America” for decades.

They call where they live “Real America.”

James Watt said, I don’t talk about Democrats and Republicans. I talk about liberals and Americans.

The House Unamerican Activities Committee began “investigating” leftists in the 30s.

The American Legion began as a proto-fascist paramilitary group after WWI. They broke strikes & black heads.

Thank God No One In America Can Remember Anything About Anything Ever

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To the hard-core conservative, the rest of us are in America, but that doesn’t mean we are Americans. We are not white enough, or straight enough, or well-off enough, or we pray wrong, or don’t pray. We love the wrong sort of “freedom.” The GOP, from base to pinnacle, thinks they are the country.

Therefore, if Russia is helping the GOP, Russia is helping America. To Republicans, the GOP = Real America so Russian aid & comfort to Republican Party can’t be treason by definition.

And at bottom, nothing about this should surprise us. The US national security complex has done the same thing in other countries for decades. The US intelligence community always finds someone willing to take the money and accept the help. Those people don’t believe they’re “betraying their country.” (For the most part.) Some of them even really have been forces for local good. Others, let’s say not. But someone accepts the help.

Now we get to see it happening in the other direction. My point isn’t “we desurv it lol.” My point isn’t even “UR dumb 2B surprized.” My point is, we could wait a very long time for the GOP to be outraged at treason they don't consider treason.

Of course we deserve it BTW. “The judgments of the Almighty are true and righteous altogether.” I don’t care.

Turnabout is fair play, but that doesn’t mean I want to be on the wrong end of a global white, patriarchal counter-revolution. I don’t want to watch poor folks, black & brown folks, queer folks & others have their lives further blighted to prove a point. Putin’s Russia is the nexus of an international revanchist movement and I want no part of it — not because it’s Russian. Because it sucks.

But to the Republican Party, white revanchism is America. Plutocracy is America. The authority of bosses & dads is America.

What the Trump campaign & GOP congressional leaders abetted may be treason against the America that exists, but not the one in their hearts.

Therefore, do not anticipate them getting unduly upset about Russian “meddling.” To them, Putin isn’t the foreign power.

We are.

Evil libertarian grandfathers

In the course of a commentary on Hayek's love for Pinochet, Corey Robin gives us this quote from Mises:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

The Market is a cruel god

From Thomas Frank's One Market Under God, a summa of market triumphalists' “good cop, bad cop” routine.

The market will give you a voice, empower you to do whatever you want to do, and if you have any doubts about that, then the market will crush you and everything you’ve ever known.

Buddy Holly

“Fun Guy From Lubbock”: If you don't get the joke, never mind.

Real Americans

I decided to consolidate this post with the secret origin of white people post I made less than a week later.

Askew

A more personal word about me than I ordinarily post here, connected to some cultural politics I consider more interesting than my own story. There was no talking about the one side without the other, and no saying it any shorter, so here it is as well as I can say it at the moment.

I do not know that I feel a need for anybody to read it. But after I succumbed to a Twitter rant, I needed to revisit this a bit more properly.

2021

My original Twitter rant was sparked by a young trans person encouraging middle-aged people to come out as trans, even late in life.

I am not trans. I understand myself as a cishet man.

But saying that is a best-first-approximation with some weirdness around the edges. I wish I had better language for talking about how that is a bit fraught. Just naming it at all requires getting more long-winded than I think those complications merit. And I also think it is irresponsible to leave it unnamed. So here we are.

At the time I write this I am a bit over fifty years old. I have sunk costs in a gender identity which formed under very different conditions than the world we have now.

I was assigned male at birth and while masculinity has never sat quite right on me, I do not experience dysphoria, nor do I have a strong inner sense that I am not a man but something else.

I just find masculinity kind of dumb.

I imagine that someone born in 1996 in analagous conditions to the ones I grew up in, someone built on the same frame as me, likely might understand themself as an nonbinary demiguy, perhaps saying My Gender Is No or some such.

But that is not me. I am a product of a different world. I have a little pang of envy for the Youngs who have better vocabularies to work with than I did when I was their age, who can work out who they are in a world which offers these to them. The Youngs are magnificent and are doing a great job and I am there for them 100%. It is a victory that they simply cannot imagine the world I grew up in, in which I was exceptional in having a handful of queer friends who were out to me but could not even conceive of someone Out at large as a possibility. The current vocabulary of nonbinary idenity, or even trans identity at large, simply did not exist.

They told me I was a boy, so I found a kind of boy to be. I made a peace with it which worked well enough. I have worn long hair with a coat & tie for three decades now; “eccentric dandified man” has served me very well in a lot of ways. It should be evident I am not just talking about grooming, yes? A friend used to say that I was the only man she knew who dressed as a man and had it read like drag. It reflects a whole way of interacting with the world and its gendered understandings, a way of performing myself, a way of understanding myself. I developed hard-won skills in a certain masculinity I built for myself.

Again, this does not come from a strong draw to a different gender than I was told I was supposed to inhabit. I felt — and still feel — weakly gendered. When advocates for trans liberation say “imagine if everyone insisted that you were the other gender”, I find myself thinking, “well that doesn’t sound any worse”. I would have found a way to roll with that.

So with all that, saying I am simply a cis man in a world with better vocabularies feels a bit dishonest but I still have to count myself a cis man. “Sunk cost gender identity” is not just a joke. Do I have the time and patience to figure out something new?

When I was young, I was scrawny and soft and poorly socialized in masculinity. When I performed masculinity people were not easily convinced; they scented something different on me. Now I am flabby and beefy and my middle-aged hormone cocktail reads on my face. Masculinity has gone from hard to sell to hard to avoid. There is a way in which it is a relief for me that I have less performative work to do to read with a gender that civilians understand. Indeed, there are many people who read me as very masculine; that does not feel like they have read me wrong, but rather like I have gotten away with something. It aligns with skills which I invested time and energy to develop.

I am old and my limbs are stiff, but hardwon skill at a distinctive way of dancing masculinity means I can do those steps. I cannot easily pick up a new dance with my gender identity & performance the same way limber young people can. And that is not just about naming it to the world; that is about naming it to myself. My sense of myself is threaded with the experiences I have had moving through the world presenting and understanding myself as a man.

I move in circles where people have been introducing themselves with their pronouns for long enough that my “he or they” has now shifted in implications a couple of times … and each round has suited me. If I get read as a fella, it feels like a victory. If I don’t get read as a fella? That too feels like a victory.

And. I want to be careful about cultural politics.

A decade ago, I wrote about how in the 1990s, there was a school of thought in queer liberation which framed “queer” as a cultural and political position, such that one could be gay or lesbian but not queer, implying that perhaps there were ways to even be cisgender (though we did not yet have that term) and heterosexual yet also queer. That formulation of “queer” disappeared, but it was and is important to me for a host of reasons, not only in suiting my ambivalences about how to talk about myself. In retrospect it is obvious that a big part of what I was writing about then was non-binary gender identity which we did not yet have well-developed vocabulary to describe. So I wrote that I counted myself a little bit queer, in that old sense. (You can find that essay further down this page.)

For a time, I shared that essay around. Many people found that it reflected something they recognized in themselves. But I do not circulate it any more, after an exchange with people who hated it, taking it as appropriating the word “queer”, taking me as shouldering my way into queer spaces, evading the responsibility I bear in occuping a place of cisgender & heterosexual privilege. I had tried to avoid exactly those errors. I was stung by the harshness of the responses. But my feelings are less important than how that response reflected that people were hurt by what I wrote — people I want to support, including people I knew personally. The essay is still up on this site not because I stand behind it but to hold myself accountable for the ways in which it stepped wrong.

It is no good to name myself with a word if it hurts people who need that word more than I do.

But no other words at hand entirely hit the mark.

I need something else.

It feels dishonest to say that I simply am a cis man. I hope I have made clear why it also feels inaccurate for me to say that I am non-binary.

And having opened the door, I have to address how my sexuality is comparably blurry around the edges.

I have been attracted to and attractive to a lot of queer people assigned female at birth, including (but not only) non-binary people who would take on “they” or “he” as their pronouns years or even decades after we flirted. Some people would reject the relevance of any of that, saying I am describing nothing other than a species of heterosexuality with a side order of implicit transphobia, me misreading all AFAB folks as “women” even when they are not. I respect the very good reasons to have that skepticism. Yet on the other hand, some people who have known me for quite some time observe that this has shown up enough times in enough ways that it is absurd not to see a pattern which one cannot call “straight”. And that reflects how there are a number of other little particulars and complications which make “heterosexuality” another first approximation which is also an over-simplification. Having gotten more personal & confessional already than I like to get into in public, I hope that readers will accept that as given without further details.

If there is an identity and an orientation in that, what to call it? Despite our ongoing Cambrian Explosion of queer language, I lack anything which fits. This is part of why I think language and taxonomies around gender and sexuality will remain a moving target for a while longer; I think quite a few folks remain offshore from the mainland of clear terms and categories.

One friend, who was among those very angry at me saying that I was “a little bit queer”, proposed “askew”.

The longer I sit with that, the more I like the turn of phrase. I am cishet to a first approximation, but a bit askew.

---

I posted this update in 2021. Older versions appear below, because they are about the same thing in a way which I hope will be clear.

Related

Responding to a Dysfunctional Society

A reflection which uses this post as a springboard.

I’m not a queer radical any more than I’m a celebrity-worshipping materialist. But given a choice — and I do have a choice — I’m playing for the queer radical team.

Queer Is A Verb

To queer something, whether it’s a text, a story, or an identity, is to take a look at its foundations and question them. We can explore its limits, its biases, and its boundaries. We can look for places where there’s elasticity or discover ways we can transform it into something new. To queer is to examine our assumptions and decide which of them we want to keep, change, discard, or play with.

A little history of “gay”

People have a mistaken idea that “gay” used to mean “happy,” but that leaves out the over-the-top connotations of immoral, sexual, or irresponsible happiness that the word carried, even when used to mean “cheerful” or “happy.” [⋯] It doesn’t become a marker of sexual deviance; it is already a marker of sexual deviance.

Debating “queer”

Jenna Wortham writing at the NYT asks …

Plainly, we are in the midst of a profoundly exhilarating revolution. And “queer” has come to serve as a linguistic catchall for this broadening spectrum of identities, so much so that people who consider themselves straight, but reject heteronormativity, might even call themselves queer. But when everyone can be queer, is anyone?

… and Hugh Ryan at Slate objects …

Queer, therefore, always assumes a rejection of heteronormativity—the desire to assimilate and be like “normal” heterosexuals—because that very normalcy requires that some people, somewhere, be judged for their consensual sexual practices. For some to be sexually “normal,” after all, others must be sexually deviant. Queer is the battle cry of deviancy.

When we remove the focus on stigmatization from the word queer, we evacuate it of the only thing that made it a coherent identity in the first place. By focusing instead on inclusivity, Wortham’s article actually does the very thing it worries about: It depoliticizes the word.

For what it’s worth, Damien Williams captures a Tumblr exchange which counters both commentators’ history of the usage.

that certainly shakes up my assumption that ‘queer’ began as a slur and was then appropriated as positive

“Enby” works too hard

Given our ongoing Cambrian explosion of gender & sexuality terms, it feels awkward to suggest that we need even more categories, but “non-binary” has to cover the cases “my gender is …

• … A M/F Cocktail”
• … A Secret Third Thing”
• … Variable”
• … No”
• … Uh, Whatever”

Those are meaningfully distinct things — and I suspect that there are other distinctions which I have not named. I see a lack of language for them creating lot of little frictions in our cultural politics.

Part of what I am trying to say about myself here is a version of that last one.

The earlier post, which I titled “Queer”

July 2016

In the time since I originally wrote the essay below, it became clear that I have to retract it. That realization does not come easily, as I have received a lot of positive feedback from people (LGBT and otherwise) who found it affecting and clarifying. But I cannot stand behind it.

The question of how we use the word “queer” is fraught. In the 1980s, gay and lesbian activists reclaimed this slur for themselves. “Queer” developed, in the course of a long and difficult conversation in the relevant communities, as a term of art describing lesbians and gay men … and bisexuals … and trans people … and a range of other people with marginalized sexual and gender identities.

That conversation included a strand which saw queerness not simply as an alternative way to say “LGBT” but as a distinct quality of its own which overlaps significantly with those identities but is not congruent with them. “Being LGBT doesn’t necessarily mean you are queer; being queer doesn’t necessarily mean you are LGBT.” I know many LGBT people who advocate for this usage. This essay tried to explore some of the implications of using “queer” that way, as a response to seeing it fade away from contemporary use.

And therein lies the trouble.

Many other LGBT people have only encountered the use of “queer” in a sense synonymous with LGBT. For many of those people, this overlapping usage I talk about in this essay is not just unfamiliar, it is baffling. Bizarre. Outrageous. A disruption and violation of what they understand the word to mean. In that context, this essay sounds like me personally trying to demand a place in the LGBT tent, coöpting the credibility of communities who have struggled against terrible adversity for their place in the world.

I don’t want to do that. I deliberately tried to avoid that implication. But I failed.

Hearing support from some LGBT people and outrage from others presents a certain navigational challenge. But I cannot wound and insult people whom I ardently wish to support. And so I cannot stand behind the words, and apologize to the people wounded by them.

It is tempting to simply delete the post from the blog, or to replace it with this retraction. But that seems irresponsible, an erasure of the paper trail of what I said, even though I no longer say it. Too often I have come late to a controversy and cannot see what was originally said. It is better that I am accountable for what I wrote.

So here is the thing that I no longer say.

I originally authored this retraction in March 2016; in July I edited it to make the apology and reasons for keeping the post up more explicit.

October 2013

A little bit ago, I had a Twitter exchange that began with an exasperated tweet from Khadijah Britton saying:

Wait, wait, WAIT — Cis heteros are trying to start using the word queer? What in the holy dagnabbit is that?

(For the uninitiated, “cis” means “not transgender or transsexual”. It’s a witty use of a Latin root, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

I replied, in a series of tweets:

“Queer” means non-normative sex/gender/sexuality. So yeah, that’s a completely valid possibility.

---

Kinky butch hetero cis woman? Queer.

Poly dandy hetero cis man? Queer.

---

Russel Brand. Tilda Swinton. Dennis Rodman. Marilyn Manson.

Kinda queer.

This comes out of Queer Theory cultural politics from the late ’80s through the ’90s which framed things in terms of asking whether it was even desirable in the first place for non-normative sex/gender/sexuality to stake a claim to being “normal”, or whether a transgressive stance was actually desirable.

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Queer identity says NO to normalization. It says, “No, being gay is not just like being straight with just one difference that doesn’t matter. It is radically different, and that difference needs to be embraced and supported.”

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So the queer sensibility is actually opposed to (or more precisely, radically disinterested in) gay marriage. To the queer sensibility, which is explicitly radical, becoming just like heteronormative straight people is dumb, a denial of the genuinely different character of gay life.

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The queer sensibility lost the fight of the ’90s over the cultural politics of lesbians and gay men. Most embraced an un-queer politics. And in the trans community today, we are seeing a similar split. Are trans people meaningfully different from cis people? There are folks in the trans community on both sides of that question.

Britton replied to this Twitter rant …

Please do blog about it. I think the world forgot.

… which appeals to my Generation X vanity beautifully. Gather ’round, Millenials, as I sing the song of when I was young and cool, and had impassioned conversations in San Francisco coffeeshops about heteronormativity and Kathy Acker.

T. Thorn Coyle points to the animating principle of the queer sensibility:

Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote eloquently about the need to become “conscious pariahs” rather than parvenues, assimilationists. Attempts to assimilate to sick systems make us sicker. Breaking from our need to belong frees us to become who we really are, in touch with our core natures. This freedom enables us to choose. When we can choose, we can build what we desire.

This shows us two different ways of operating from what we would now call the oppressed position in identity politics. The assimilationist parvenu cultivates the approval of the social order which rejects them, trying to remake both themselves and society so that they are not seen as different. The conscious pariah refuses to evade society's rejection of them, instead challenging it directly. Every liberationist movement against bigotry and systemic injustice has some form of this tension between the two strategies, and it’s typical for the pendulum to swing between the approaches being favored in the broad movement.

At the moment, the parvenu/assimilationist sensibility is ascendent in the culture politics of homosexuality. As a hetereosexual fella trying to be a good ally, it’s not my place to question that choice by a group I don’t belong to. And I’ve applauded the gains that this has produced.

But I have to confess that I miss the more forcefully “conscious pariah” school of queer theory that I cut my teeth on in the 1990s.

That school argues that one should not say, “Relax, we are not a threat to society.” Rather, say “Hell yes, we are a threat to society, and we should be, because society is wrong.” One should not say, “We are just like you, quiet and monogamous and sweet and safe.” Instead say, “Our very existence is a challenge to a world which deserves to be challenged.”

From that point of view, having bourgeois monogamous married gay couples on sentimental sitcoms is the opposite of what one should be fighting for. That is tame, in every sense of the word.

OK, there’s some sheer rock ’n’ roll bravado in the queer theory stance, which is part of what appealed when I was young, but it's not only that. For there is good reason for cultural critique, is there not?

Which brings me back to the Twitter exchange which started this. The queer sensibility claims the word “queer” because it highlights outsider status. Not “normal”, which would require queer people to change to fit, to file off their rough edges. Which then takes us to seeing that queer cultural politics is not simply a different approach to advocacy for the rights of homosexuals. It represents a different set of allegiances, not defined simply by homosexuality.

I remember seeing a flyer for a queer San Francisco event years ago which said, “This event is not only for lesbians and gay men; it is for anyone queer. Not being gay doesn't mean you’re not queer. Being gay doesn’t mean you are queer. If you are, you know, so come join in.”

“Queer” claims a shared interest for all people whose relationship with sex and gender and sexuality is outside the “norms” offered by society. It includes not just lesbians and gay men but also trans people and intersexed people and sexually submissive men and butch straight women and polyamorous families and straight men who cross-dress and asexuals and countless other people who “don't fit” ... and who resist fitting. It’s an unlimited, open-ended category which defines itself in part by its refusal to police its own boundaries, which is why in my tweets I referenced heterosexual celebrities.

Which brings me to why I’m posting about this today. I started writing it yesterday, for Coming Out Day, and I’m lagging a little late.

The core idea of Coming Out Day is that visibility is important. People who can claim their gay and lesbian identity should because it helps make the world better for the people in circumstances where they cannot yet do it safely.

I’m heterosexual and hesitant to shoulder my way in to that, for all the familiar identity politics reasons. I offer my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters my applause if they are out and whatever help I can muster if they feel they cannot be.

But the principle of Coming Out Day is to serve the community through visibility. It says there’s a responsibility to be out if you can be. So while it would be irresponsible of me to “come out” as cis gendered and heterosexual, and the confessional personal narrative isn't really my thing on this blog, I’m thinking that it’s also irresponsible for me not to come out as a bit queer in the broad sense.

I’ve been living a polyamorous life since before the term “polyamory” was coined, and I’ve been living in a triad for almost a decade. I’m what Dr. Charlie Glickman charmingly calls a “dainty man”. When occasion calls for it I’m a BDSM service top. A sweetheart who identified herself as a lesbian once gave me a copy of Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues because it reminded her of me.

Yeah, I’m kinda queer. And here I am. So, as they say: get used to it.

The climax of Buffy

You don't have to love Joss Whedon the way I do. Criticize his failure to handle race in anything even resembling a sophisticated way, sure. Criticize the misfires in his feminist cultural politics, OK.

But do not tell me that Joss Is Not Really A Feminist. That is plain stupid.

The premise of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is described in the titles of every episode:

Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.

A heroic female protagonist is good, but not necessarily a victory. In the final episode of the show, Whedon gives us a climax for the entire series, in which Buffy herself criticizes and destroys this premise, saying, No, that's not good enough. Being Special Action Girl is insufficient. It's just more sexism. We have to do better. We will do better.

Here's her St. Crispin's Day speech in that climactic moment:

So here's the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one Slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power. Tomorrow, Willow will use the essence of this scythe to change our destiny. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice.

Are you ready to be strong?

I'm thinking of this because via Wolven I find this nifty series of animated GIFs showing the montage of scenes the show gives us as she's speaking.

In the middle of the St. Crispin's Day speech, we get a montage commenting on domestic violence and Title IX.

Feminist.

Crisis of the Republic

A friend reminds me of this speech about the crisis in the governance of the Republic.

You will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights. That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing. When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours … but no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. This, plainly stated, is your language.

[⋯]

In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

[⋯]

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

This commentary, so relevant to today, is not new. That comment comes from Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in his Cooper Union address in 1860. (Hat tip to Digby for introducing me to its importance years ago.) It remains the single most clarifying description of American conservatism’s inability to be satisfied that they have been adequately “respected”, their eternal complaint that their opponents refuse to “compromise”

Picking up where that quotation left off, we have Lincoln describing how they can tolerate no disagreement.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery.” But we do let them alone — have never disturbed them — so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

Obviously the question of slavery is now decided, but on other questions where Americans are deeply divided we see that conservatives cannot abide policy victories which contradict them. They are “losing their country”.

Not our country. Their country. They think they own the whole place.

Recall that when Lincoln was elected, he was proved right in this speech. Before he had time to enact any actual policy, what his opponents imagined he would do moved them to take up arms. This too should sound uncannily familiar.

Our current crisis — a willingness to destroy the US government if they cannot command it — should come as no surprise.

Resources

The Rude Pundit makes this point in their inimitable style: Republicans Will Shit On Your Lawn And Tell You It’s Your Fault.

A wise friend suggests pairing Lincoln with Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech A Tryst With Destiny. A taste:

The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for anyone of them to imagine that it can live apart.

Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

Quasi-Austrian libertarian economics

For future reference: I've found a clear, succinct description of the thesis that the US economy is based on “printing money” but the inflationary chickens have not yet come to roost because dollars are in foreign hands.

It's utter bunk, for reasons I don't have time to assemble at the moment, but it's good to have a tidy description of it handy.

Life, liberty, and property

Having been frustrated by attempts to find the phrase “life, liberty, and property” in Locke’s Two Treastises on Government (and made some interesting discoveries along the way) I believe I have the original quote at last: Second Treatise, Chapter VII, Section 87:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men

Life and liberty are a subset of property. And “estate” is interesting; what does that include?

Neuromancer

I haven't read William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer since I was a teenager.

The most memorable scene in it for me is marvelously spooky. Let me set you up: it's in the hazily-defined near future. Various prosthetic technologies are common; we meet a character who has had a lung replaced with gear for making animated holograms, another who has extensible razor blades implanted under her fingernails for fighting. Our protagonist, Case, is a “cyberspace cowboy”: he connects to the internet through a direct brain interface. At one point in the novel he uses his computer to feed him the live stream of sensory experiences from his colleague, who is working with him to unravel a mystery involving an AI program named “Wintermute”.

Here's the scene:

There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.

He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.

Automatically, he picked it up.

“Yeah?”

Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.

“Hello. Case.”

A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.

“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”

It was a chip voice.

“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”

He hung up.

On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

I love the wonderfully cinematic image of the phones ringing as he walks by them. But of course, one could not make that film now, because: payphones?

Possession

I think a lot about an interview I once saw with Jim Henson.

Of course, Kermit the Frog was sitting on Henson’s knee.

As the interviewer spoke to Henson, Kermit would occasionally comment. And I became fascinated by how throughout the interview, even when Henson was clearly thinking intently or fully engaged in speaking, Kermit looked back and forth between Henson and the interviewer, his face changing expression as he reacted to what he was hearing. This is impressive enough a demonstration of Henson's practiced hand at performing Kermit … but then something astonishing happened. Kermit interrupted Henson and Henson was obviously surprised by what Kermit had said. They had a little discussion between the two of them — as I recall, they disagreed with each other — then they returned to replying to the interviewer.

I wish I could find a clip of this half-remembered interview. It stands out in my mind because that exchange between Henson and Kermit was unmistakably, uncannily real, not merely a performance for our benefit.

(I have another example of Kermit inspiring existential terror, though this one is more intentional.)

This comes to mind because I just read a little story about Mel Blanc which is very Relevant To My Interests.

Back in 1988, I was lying in bed listening to Mel Blanc (you know, the voice of just about every well-known cartoon character, famously Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Barney Rubble … I could go on) being interviewed by the local station as part of his book tour, his autobiography That’s NOT All, Folks!. He told Robin and Maynard a tale I was too young to hear as a lad, the story of his car wreck in early 1961 that left him very near death in a coma.

Here’s the weird. Mel told the story that his doctor came by every day and ask, “Mr. Blanc, how are you?” to see if he could elicit a response. Every day, nothing. Finally, Mel said, the doctor tried a different tack; he asked, “How’s he doing in there, Bugs?” To the shock of both the doctor and Blanc's son, also in the room, Bug's voice came out, saying weakly, “Ah, he’ll be alright, Doc.”

I always loved that story. Even when I found out it was wrong, since it was wrong in a way that said so much about the nature of our brains and how we perceive the world and us within it.

---

You see, Blanc’s Doc Louis Conway didn’t ask Bugs Bunny how Mel was doing. As both he and Mel’s son Noel Blanc witnessed, the doctor asked Bugs how he was doing, as in “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?” And rather than attest to Mel’s well-being, Blanc said in Bugs’ voice, “Nyeah, What’s up Doc?”

Doctor Conway then went down a list, asking for Porky, Tweety, Foghorn … and each answered in their respective voice. Finally, after a string of six or so characters emerging, Blanc himself came out of the coma, asking about what happened and where he was.

And that’s weird; not that Blanc answered in the characters he so ably brought to life, but decades later that he would mis-remember this story on his Seattle radio interview (and, one would assume, others as well), placing these personas deep within him as guardian angels, not as shattered fragments, distinct individuals buried deep within his conscious but yet whole, sometimes whole enough to take over his body and communicate when he himself was too broken to answer.

Son Noel gives credence to this idea of the characters being a part of Blanc, noting that watching his dad, he sometimes turned down the volume from the recording studio, but could still tell which character his dad was voicing just by the posture, the demeanor Blanc assumed. “So, I think they were part of him, basically,” Noel notes in the Radiolab piece. He even evaded the question of why his father responded first to Bugs’ summons, not to dad, or father, or Mel.

The fact that Blanc did not recall what Bugs had said reminded me of a more profound manifestation of how we appear to be built to do this kind of thing. There’s a good description of it in Michael Ventura’s essay Hear That Long Snake Moan about (among other things) Voodoo, which I happen to have handy:

Spurred by the holy drums, deep in the meditation of the dance, one is literally entered by a god or a goddess. Goddesses may enter men, and gods may enter women. Westerners call this “possession.” That’s too crude a concept for this, though good writers describing the phenomenon have been forced to use it; we have no other word or concept that comes close. But instead of possession, it seems more accurate to think of “a flowing through.” The one flows through the other. They flow through each other. As Maya Deren put it in her study of Haitian Voodoo, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti: “The loa [spirit], then, partakes of the head that bears it. The principle is modified by the person.” (Deren’s italics.) The body, literally, becomes the crossroads. Human and divine are united within it — and it can happen to anyone.

What a frightening, utterly terrifying concept to our Western minds. Far from inflating the ego, the experience demolishes it while the state lasts. People who’ve been in this state commonly can’t remember what they’ve said or done, and part of the function of the ceremony is to have witnesses who will later tell them what the god said through them. In the West we are so frightened of such states that we assume, when we see them in isolated cases, that they are symptoms of psychosis, if we are charitable; if we are not, we assume — as the first Westerners to see such things assumed — that this is possession by the Devil, and that anything, anything at all, is justified in blotting it out. It is no wonder we tend not to “go south” for our philosophy.

[⋯]

The god is seen as the rider, the person is seen as the horse, and they come together in the dance. When the god speaks through the person about that person, almost every sentence is prefaced with the phrase, “Tell my horse … ” — because the “horse” will have no memory of the “ride” when it is over, and will have to learn of it from others. The morality implicit in this is stated best in Maya Deren’s favorite Haitian proverb: great gods cannot ride little horses.

“There’s a whole language of possession,” Thompson says, “a different expression and stance for each god.” All the accounts are clear that a god is instantly recognizable by its movements, and the movements are different for each. So if the ceremony is to honor Ghede, their equivalent of Hermes, perhaps Erzulie, their Aphrodite, shows up uninvited. But she is recognizable whether she rides a man or a woman because of her distinctive movements and behavior. This suggests a psychic suppleness that has to be staggering to any Westerner. Staggering, and frightening, if we are honest with ourselves. We may speak of a new model of the psyche, we may even be learning to experience life in a way that is more true to the way our many-faced psyches are structured — which is to say, the way they were created to live — but here are people who can dance it!

Here are people who can, to use Jungian terminology, embody an archetype — any single Voodoo worshiper may embody many during a lifetime of ceremonies. They will dance it, speak it, make love through it, manifest it in every possible way, entering and leaving the experience without psychosis, without “mind-expanding” drugs, and while having the support and help of their community, for all of this is integral with their daily lives.

I don’t mean to diminish possessory work by reducing it to sock puppetry; on the contrary, I want to ennoble what Henson and Blanc did by saying that their creativity is a manifestation of the same capacity that permits us contact with the gods so intimate that they can live within us as processes independent of what we ordinarily think of as our “self”. Here’s Alan Moore in an interview describing his relationship with a god who is very literally a sock puppet.

Do I believe I can raise the dead and talk to them? Yes, I do. Not in any physical sense because that would smell. I don’t see any point in that. You don’t want a maggot bag walking around your living room. But could I re-animate the idea of a person in the useful sense and be able to communicate with that person – or, at least, to believe that I was communicating with that person to such an extent that the information I received was as good as if that person was talking to me? Yes, I do. Most of the effects described in classical magical tradition I believe I can duplicate with art, possibly drugs – or some other means of integrating myself more deeply with that sort of reality, that sort of consciousness – I believe I could do most of the things that are described in traditional magic. This opens up wider possibilities. It also enables me to understand myself on a deeper level. By accepting the idea of endless pantheons of gods, I somehow accept these creatures as being distinct and separate from me, and not as being, to some degree, higher functions of me. Iain Sinclair was asking me about this: he asked me ‘do you think they are inside you, or outside you?’ The only answer I could come up with was, the more I think about it the inside is the outside. That the objective world and the non-objective world are the same thing, to some degree. Ideaspace and this space are the same space. Just different ends of the scale. That’s not a very good explanation, but the best I can come up with so far. All of these things are exploratory, they are exploring me, exploring the world of ideas, attempting to contact what I believe may be potent forms of energy. Like for example, I might do a work to put me in contact with the god Mercury. If the information I get from that is valuable to me, and new enough, it doesn’t really matter whether the god Mercury is there at all, does it? There is a channel that I have called the god Mercury, some sort of information source I have named.

I can understand that on an abstract level. If the information provided is useful, why question the actual existence of whatever is providing that information. But on a personal level, if you were receiving information that you couldn’t immediately attribute to as coming from yourself, wouldn’t you feel absolute terror?

In my own experience – and this is where we get into the complete madness here – I have only met about four gods, a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation – that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last twenty-five years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me to be a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once – it is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is late Roman snake god, called Glycon, he was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there.

Anyway, the False Prophet Alexander is a Moon and Serpent hero, a saint if you like. He was running what seemed to be a travelling Seleni medicine show, he would do a performance of the mysteries of the goddess Soi. The only reference to him is in the works of Lucien, who calls him a complete charlatan and fraud. At some point, Alexander the False Prophet said he was going to preside over the second coming of the god Aeschepylus, the serpent god of medicine. He said this is going to happen at noon tomorrow, in the marketplace. So everyone said ‘sounds good’ and they all went down there. After a little while, they said “come on, False Prophet Alexander, where is the second coming of Aeschepylus?” At which point, The False Prophet Alexander bent down, reached into a puddle at his feet, pulled up an egg, split it with his thumbnail, and there was a tiny snake inside, and said “Behold, the new Aeschepylus”, took it home with him, where over a week it apparently grew to a prodigious size until it was taller than a man, and had the head and features of a man. It had long blonde hair, ears, eyelids, a nose. At this point he started to exhibit it in his temple, providing religious meeting with this incarnate god. At which point Lucian said, it was obvious, I could have done that. Lucian is another James Randi, you know, I could have done that, he got the snake’s head under his arm, speaking tube over his shoulder, child’s play. And he’s probably right, that’s probably how he did it. If I’m going to adopt a god, I’d rather know starting out that it was a glove puppet. To me it’s a real god, there’s nothing that precludes a glove puppet from being a real god. How else would you explain the cult of Sooty? But a god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts. So I had an experience which seems to be an experience of this made-up, Basil-Brush type entity. It was devastating.

This was the pivotal experience. You were forty when you had this occult Road to Damascus.

Yes. On the day I was forty, I decided I was going to become a magician. That was on November 18th. On January 7th the following year, that was when all of a sudden the lightning bolt hit. It all got a bit strange. For a couple of months after that, I was – looking back – probably in some borderline schizophrenic state. I was very spaced out – godstruck, you babble for a while. It’s a natural response. Babble like an idiot. I’m surprised that – when I look back at what I was saying – that so much of it at least makes a fragment of sense because I was in some divine haze. “I see it all now”, you know, I must have been unbearable for two or three months. I’ve integrated that now into the rest of my life. Now I can deal with functionality on a practical level. And I still have this relationship with this imaginary snake. My imaginary pal. If I’m going to be dealing in totally imaginary territory, it struck me that it would be useful to have a native as a guide. So I can have my imaginary conversations with my imaginary snake, and maybe it gives me information I already knew in part of myself, and maybe I just needed to make up an imaginary snake to tell me it.

Do you have a ritual during which these various conversations take place?

Increasingly, with that particular god, it becomes more casual. It will be talking to the giant imaginary snake god much in the same way you talked to God when you were six, in the quiet silence of bed. If I wanted a full-scale manifestation, one that was apparent to other people, then I would do a ritual. I have displayed the snake god to other people. Or I have consciously hypnotised them into accepting my psychotic belief system, given them drugs, and made them think they are having the experience I have. Whatever you want. I’m not fussed.

The human brain is a palace with chambers set aside where the gods may dwell.

Chartjunk

A simple example on how to make your graphs less terrible from MKite on Reddit:

Conservative projection

Doug Muder's blog The Weekly Sift is my favorite lefty news roundup. This week he offered a particularly clarifying piece about conservative projection, a phenomenon much noted by lefty commentators, providing a crisp description of the psychology.

People of all religions and philosophies find it hard to “see ourselves as others see us”, but most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we should. On the Religious Right, though, it’s not just hard to look at your faith from the outside, it’s wrong. (Something similar happens on the political Right with “American exceptionalism”; it’s not just difficult for Americans to see the United States as a nation among other nations, it’s a mistake that should be rejected out of hand.)

This dogmatic quirk has a predictable result: Religious Right speakers and authors have a profound lack of self-awareness.

....

People who lack self-awareness are prone to what psychologists call projection — their repressed self-criticism doesn’t just evaporate, it comes out as criticism of others. Projection is why liars don’t trust anybody and gossips believe everyone is talking about them. Projection is why puritans imagine that everyone else is obsessed with sex, and ideologues see themselves beset by everyone else’s ideology.

Of course, savvy conservatives accuse liberals of projection ... a kind of meta-projection ....

Economic policy

Ganked entire from Brad DeLong's website: The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Equitable Growth

1. Manage the macroeconomy to match aggregate demand to potential supply. Take the dual mandate seriously: maintaining full employment is as important a central bank goal as low and stable inflation--and much more important than preserving healthy margins for the banking sector. Run large deficits--run up the national debt--in times of war, depression, or other national emergency calling for government action. Pay down the debt in other times.
2. Invest. Invest in ideas, in equipment capital, in structures capital, in education: we need more of all forms of investment. Boost public and private investment: we need both kinds.
3. Over the past generation, America has shifted enormous resources into value-substracting industries: health-care administration, prisons, finance, carbon energy. We need to reverse those shifts, and focus the American economy on the value-creating sectors rather than the value-subtracting ones.
4. We ought to have had a carbon tax 20 years ago. We still need one.
5. We need more immigration. It is much easier, worldwide, to move the people to where the institutions are already good than to make good institutions where the people are. More immigration produces a richer country for those already here. More immigration is a mitzvah for immigrants. More immigration is, to a a lesser degree, a mitzvah for those in poor countries outside who see less population pressure on resources. And a U.S. in 2070 that has 600 million people is more of an international superpower than a U.S. in 2070 that has only 400 million people.
6. We need more equality. If we want to have equality of opportunity 50 years from now, we need substantial equality of result right now.
7. We are going to need a bigger and better government. The private unregulated market does not do well at health-care finance, at pensions, or at education finance. The private unregulated market does not do well at research and early-stage development. The private unregulated market does not do well with commodities that are non-rival. We are moving into a twenty-first century in which these sectors will all be larger slices of what we do, and so a well-functioning economy will need a larger government relative to the private economy than the twentieth century did.

I'm still on the lookout for radical, soixante-huitard alternatives to growth and capitalism (do let me know if you have a solution to that which isn't stupid) but in the meantime, this will do nicely as an agenda.

Objectification

Webcomic Shortpacked offers a comment on objectification of women in comic books which is incisive even if you don't care about comics at all. That last panel is so very, very good.

Carpetbaggers

I vividly remember during the First Web Boom, when San Francisco had an influx of ’99ers, that I resisted grumbling about the folks coming to San Francisco to seek their fortunes.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1992. I met plenty of people who had a kind of chauvinism about the Bay Area, who would talk about how the real San Franciscans were only the people who had moved to SF before they did, the day they did, or the day after, and everyone else was just a newcomer and not the real thing. It's a thing you hear in any place, organization, and subculture — you should have been here in the old days — and I didn't want to be one of those folks.

So I held my tongue for a good long time, thinking that resentment of the influx of people from the Boom was more of the same. The tone of the City changed, but hey, things change. I tried to appreciate the weird excitement it brought.

Still, it bothered me, and I tried to resist letting it get under my skin ... until I figured out why.

I was doing some consulting for a doomed startup with a nonsense business plan to IPO as quickly as possible so everyone could cash out. The founder told me about his first drive down 101 to talk to the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto; he described how he felt he was “treading on hallowed ground”. I felt a surge of disgust: there was nothing holy about this guy's business plan.

The San Francisco I loved was raffish and queer and weird, and it attracted people like me who didn't quite fit anywhere else. But ’99ers weren't moving to San Francisco because it was San Francisco. They were moving here to get rich. And they resented that San Francisco was weird; they wanted it to be like anyplace else and they did their level best to make it that way.

The First Boom crashed out after just a few years. In that brief time, it seriously damaged the San Francisco ecosystem but didn't quite kill it.

And now we have a Second Boom. And for a while it wasn't so bad; the young hipsters drawn by the Boom weren't exactly San Francisco weird but a lot of them had an appreciation for it, and more than a few joined the ranks of Freak Nation after living here for a while. But this boom has lasted longer ... which also means that the phase of assholes drawn to SF wanting to get rich is lasting longer. The tone of the City is changing more, and with the double shock of two booms in a row it seems to be changing more fundamentally and permanently.

Yeah, I know that I'm middle aged now, which is a risk factor for irrational nostalgia for the the world as it was when I was young. I don't think it's only that.

There are plenty of places for assholes who want to get rich. We only have the one San Francisco. And it's getting to the point where I'm tempted to say we only had the one San Francisco.

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Update: Heather Gold comments wisely on Twitter. Chris Tacy says something very similar to my own thoughts, even more harshly.

Glenn Beck on hunting down progressives

Glenn Beck interviewed by the New York Times:

Can we stop dividing ourselves? Do racists exist? Yes. Do bigots exist? Yes. But most of us are not. Most Americans just want to get along. Why can’t we do that? What has happened to us?

But you said you were going to hunt down progressives like an Israeli Nazi hunter.

Oh, I will. I think these guys are the biggest danger in the world. It’s the people like Mao, people that believe that big government is the answer, it always leads to millions dead — always.

Sometimes when you give a speech, you hold up a napkin stained with Hitler’s blood. Why?

It could be Hitler’s, I don’t know. It was from somebody present during the July assassination attempt. The point of it is: pay attention when the trouble is small. If you don’t pay attention to people who want to regulate every aspect of your life, it spirals out of control.

How does he reconcile the contradiction between All Americans Getting Along and hunting down progressives? It's simple: he doesn't recognize progressives as “Americans”. Only the conservative tribe are real Americans. The left are all evil, and must be fought ruthlessly to save the real America.

This is called “eliminationism”, and David Neiwert explains it in detail.

The mind has a hard time accepting that folks like Beck really mean what they say. But they do. We should believe them when they say what they will do with power.

So I agree with him on one thing: pay attention when the trouble is small.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Over on the Facebooks a friend posted a link to Roberto Orci saying that critics of Star Trek: Into Darkness don't appreciate what an awesome screenwriter he is. So I spat out this rant.

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Y'know, I enjoyed JJ's first Star Trek movie.

It had almost none of the Spirit Of Star Trek. It was thoroughly nonsensical. But it was fun and it was full of little winks to Trek fans and I felt like we could use a space opera franchise and since Trek was kind of lounging around not doing anything, so why not use it for this?

But Into Darkness was gawdawful, not just as Trek but as a movie, period. The blame belongs entirely to Orci's cheap, dishonest screenwriting. I know I don't have the chops to be a professional screenwriter, but I could scribble out something better than Darkness in an afternoon while fighting a head cold.

What really offends me, that few commentators have noted, is there's a moment in the second act where it seems like we're going to get a smart movie full of intrigue. What's Harrison's plan? How are the Klingons involved? What's with the torpedoes? What's Carol Marcus' angle? What isn't Admiral Robocop telling us? Who sabotaged the warp drive, and why?

Kirk hates mysteries, they give him a bellyache; he must have had a beauty right about then. But I love ’em.

But that was all bullshit meant to make the movie seem smart. None of that stuff was gonna pay off. Harrison eventually demonstrates that he doesn't really have a coherent plan. The Klingons aren't involved; there was no reason to go to the Klingon homeworld. The torpedos do have a secret; it's just one that makes no sense. Carol Marcus is just there to have cool hair and strip down to her skivvies for a moment. Admiral Robocop does have a secret, but it doesn't make sense either. And I'm still not quite sure who sabotaged the warp drive, or why.

By the end of the movie, we're in Lost territory: anything can happen, so nothing matters.

Yes, when Spock died in Wrath he eventually got better. But there were consequences. It took an entire movie full of sacrifice to get him back, and no one emerged unscathed.

Into Darkness made me feel dirty and it made me feel angry. That it toyed with my love of Trek is part of my rage at it, but not even close to being the biggest part.

That Orci is smug about being a good writer having produced that monstrosity is disgusting.

Denial

The New York Times reports that Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard and the last surviving eyewitness of the bunker where Hitler spent his last days, has died. Through that, I discover an interview with Salon done back in 2005.

At one point, he proposes that there should be a monument to Goebbels’ children, who died in the bunker at their parents’ hands. This becomes an opening to talk about the Nazi movement, and we see his profound denial.

Um, the murder of the children was terrible, but for every one of them, 1 million Jews were killed with less reason, to say nothing of the many, many others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

That may be. But I ask you, if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Führer? How is it possible?

The million-dollar question. But I do think you’ll admit that if there were a memorial to the Goebbels children, it would become a magnet for neo-Nazis.

Ach, “neo-Nazi.” No such thing. What does “neo-Nazi” mean? New Nazi, right? There aren’t any. That’s just a buzzword. What you have are nationally conscious people, people who say, “my fatherland, right or wrong.” My fatherland, nothing more, am I right? You British say it, the Swiss say it, the Israelis say it — “My country,” they say. And I’ll fight for it. The Israelis are nationalistic people, they defend their region, they defend their people. They have as much right as anyone.

The whole Iraq war isn’t about Saddam Hussein, it’s about Israel. Israel can’t exist on avocados and oranges! A nation lives from business. They have to have money. And the Americans always pay in. This is just my opinion, but why did they occupy Iraq? Supposedly because of atomic bombs? [Laughs.] In my opinion, Iraq is a wealthy oil region, and with this money they can support Israel. They can’t keep pumping their own money in forever.

Nationalism, Jewish conspiracies, and a denial of Hitler's crimes.

Still a Nazi.

Cobb's Slice

Michael David Cobb Bowen is an old friend. He is an idiosyncratic Black conservative; I am an idiosyncratic White progressive. We disagree about damned near everything, but I often find that I profit more from thinking about my disagreements with him than from many people with whom I nominally disagree.

He and I both belong to what I sometimes call the technocratic class, which in his “Peasant Theory” he calls The Slice. (He summarizes his Peasant Theory particularly well in the last section of his post Three Types Of Class.)

His short description of The Slice is

the talented segment of society who, by their work, keep actual rich people rich

If that's a little chilling, well, it should be.

I find this longer meditation on The Slice intriguing:

My Middle Class is one that I think will emerge on a moral and ethical front. Mine is the lower upper middle class of America. We are the people who use a combination of meritocratic systems and social powers to establish and maintain our status and affluence. We know things that matter and we know how to do things that matter. We are a working class, and this is somewhat unique to an America that provides a great deal more to the common man than England did in the 1930s. For what we have in America is not only automobiles but several manufacturers of automobiles, and in this and other industries, products and services are provided in such a way as to make a larger permanent set of competencies. If England faced socialism because the permanent unemployment of coal miners (due to a small monoculture of capitalist investors), America would not because of it larger, more diverse class of capitalist investors. This, in turn establishes a social momentum that keeps a larger literate class — the upper middle class, and among them, the most capable segement I call The Slice.

I think of The Slice, however as the only substantial meritocracy, and I think of it in feudal terms. They are the people who work directly for the Powers That Be. Yet the upper middle class, which is (I estimate) 3 or 4 times larger than The Slice itself, knows exactly what The Slice should be doing, and is always vying for those positions. It is this large and competent upper middle class that define American culture and society, as everyone in the middle class and below aspire to their affluence and freedom, and the small numbers of the Ruling Class make them ineffective at controlling their creativity. In America, my wild guess is that the upper middle class numbers between 20-35 million, which is about 6-12 percent of our population. More accurately, in 2011, about 38 million households had income of 75-200k per year. The substantial point is that I see this as the proof of the establishment of a class system far beyond the conceptualizations of the early socialists such as Orwell.

America has more than a million millionaires, and that is a divergent enough class of capitalists to establish a continuity of capital that can be robust, even anti-fragile against the sorts of stagnated, narrow investments and under-investments that created permanent unemployment. The interests of the moneyed class and the talents of the upper middle class are both now so substantial that they can support much greater numbers of the needs and desires of the common man. Furthermore, the universiality of this global upper class, is the fascinating phenomenon that is transforming the world. This is the new jet set and we know what time it is UTC.

This American upper middle class is accustomed to and aware of the way it works for global capital. It lives in international cities like Los Angeles. It eats a variety of cuisines. It speaks a variety of languages. It has a style and a substance that is evidence of civilization. Where you see its garbage of empty Starbucks cups, and Perrier water bottles, you know that you are in a high rent neighborhood. What I want to suggest re-establishes the thesis — the loyalties of this class is a bit more diverse than that of The Slice. The Slice works directly for the Powers that Be, the upper middle stands in reserve and sometimes creates its own Alternative Slice in anticipation of a future seduction of new Rulers to new rules. The man who is not working for Intel today but finds a way to design tommorows computer chips in a superior way seeks to improve on the current regime. This is a ‘bottom up’ solution searching for the right investors, and the investor class is well aware of such upstarts. But what of nationalism?

I want to assert in brief that America has maintained liberty through the production of domestic products and services aimed towards the fulfillment of desires of choice above and beyond desires of need for the common man. These are, in many ways, the fundamental interests of the US — to protect the supply lines and trade arrangements that keep global capital invested here. The provide the infrastructure that keeps our international cities attractive to The Slice and to provide such a home for investors who would keep our economy fluid and strong. To provide for the broad open society that encourages the advancement of individuals and families into upward social mobility for the common man, and to maintain the infrastucture of domestic tranquility. This is constrained into nationalism out of tradition and law, but in matters of war and peace the preponderant interests of the upper middle class is unclear. There is too little of the nation's economy, unlike in the days preceding the World Wars, that stands to benefit from war production.

However, the interests of the upper middle class, are very much like the interests of the Western ruling class in that it cannot afford to operate in pre-industrial conditions. And those who threaten the infrastructure of the West are thus intolerable. That is not necessarily a national interest, but neither is it something dictated or constrained by international law, per se. It is not international law that makes Singapore attractive to the upper middle class. It is not nationalism that motivates traitors like Edward Snowden. It is the fundamental usefulness their talents provide to the Ruling Class and the high rewards that make their social standing — not only in one country, but universally.

My class is the global upper middle class. We may be nationalists only of convenience. We will not be seduced by socialism because our existence is as permanent as the global supply chain of oil, steel and data. The common man still looks up to us — as we are the common man, improved. Our native land is civil liberty.

I am a lot less sanguine than he is about the resiliency of the the economy that the aristocratic class is creating. And I am a touch more sanguine about technocrats favoring “socialism” than he is; I know a great many technocrats who favor social democracy, and I suspect that the kind of education necessary to produce effective technocrats also produces the capacity for critique of the social order. But he hints elsewhere in that essay that China proves me wrong, and I fear he is right, because the “feudal” conception of society which he regards as realistic strikes me as nightmarish.