the map is not the territory
Patrimonialism, Fascism, and the Lynching for Rape Discourse
(Kant, Weber, and Foucault)
fascism
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Trump is "not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"
1. from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.
I voted for
him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the Federal
prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going to do
good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.
2. from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14
Here the
works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets
and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to
disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand
words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!
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“At some future period, not very
distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout
the world”
“the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races”
“The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”
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Racism in England: 1864, 1869, 1894
from Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism” in Conrad ref, pp. 373-4
Darwin
himself concluded, in The Descent of Man: “At some future period, not
very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout
the world”. Alfred Russel Wallace ended his 1864 article by
saying “the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the
lower and more degraded races”. Eduard von Hartmann in his 1869
Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book Conrad read, wrote that it wasn’t
humane to prolong "the death struggles of savages who are on the verge
of extinction. . . . The true philanthropist, if he has
comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid
desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that
end.” And in 1894 in Social Evolution Benjamin Kidd observed, “The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”
English visitors to
Conrad in Kent recollected him as “not of our race”, “like a Polish
Jew”, “the conventional stage Hebrew”, “simian”, “oriental mannerisms”,
“very Oriental indeed”, “spectacularly a foreigner”, an Oriental face”,
“semi-Mongolian”, and “like a monkey”.
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Fascism is a Concept (not an epithet)
from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)
. . . concepts have their
basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of
bringing various representations under one common representaton.”
(A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations
(and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus
the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and
ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’,
‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a
rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them
under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)
Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena;
rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp
the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as
cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a
unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)
“To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare,
to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the
understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation
of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and
a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I
note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk,
the btanches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they
have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves
themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of
these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250-51)
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Three paragraphs from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):
¶ 1. Fascism may be defined as a form
of political behavior marked by 1) obsessive preoccupation with community
decline, humiliation, or victimhood and 2) by compensatory cults of unity,
energy and purity, in which 3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist
militants, 4) working in uneasy but effective collaboration with
traditional elites, 5) abandons democratic liberties and 6) pursues with
redemptive violence and 7) without ethical or legal restraints 8) goals of
internal cleansing and 9) external expansion. p. 218
¶ 2.
The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. p. 84
¶ 3. Today [2004] a "politics of ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety
and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same
"internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and
defenders of abortion rights. . . . The languge and symbols of an
authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the
original European models. They would have to be as familiar and
reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the
original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and
Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . . No swastikas in an American
fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian
crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of
allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds into this video].
These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but
an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests
for detecting the internal enemy. p. 202
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. . . embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.
from Emden, p. 75
In Die fröliche
Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to
“produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has
given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what
things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . .
. it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and
probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS
58).
For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard
as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality
through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us
realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and
construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our
experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a
network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.
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"Thoughts without intuitions are empty;
intuitions without concepts are blind."
"Philosophy always arrives too late . . . .
The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as
the dusk begins to fall."
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great
world-historic facts and personages
appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot
to add: the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce."
History without philosophy is only a screen
on which to project the shibboleths of our time.
Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce.
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1st Reconfiguration of Paxton's concept of Fascism
What is missing from Paxton's concept of fascism is Racism. That is, anti-Semitism, so central to Nazi rhetorical performativity, is only implied by Paragraph 2,
"The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" and the first sentence of Paragraph 1, "obsessive preoccupation with community
decline."
Aufhebung
[from Wiki: In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently
contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and
eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to
keep" and "to pick up"). The tension between these senses suits what
Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both
preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another
term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic
functions.)
Encounter (Deleuze)
Nazi masculinity <----> Social Origins
from
The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and
Ways of Life, "3 MENTALITIES, IDEOLOGIES, DISCOURSES: ON THE “THIRD
LEVEL” AS A THEME IN SOCIAL-HISTORICAL RESEARCH" (Princeton, 1995),
Peter Schottler
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The above Concept of Fascism Deployed and Critiqued
Paragraph 2,
"The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy"
perfectly encapsulates the "populist" performativity of
Trump's rallies.
Paragraph 1 is much more interesting.
Paragraph 1 can be broken down into nine elements, six of which (1, 4, 5, 6, 7
and 8) characterize the Trump phenomenon.
1. obsessive preoccupation with community
decline
4. working in uneasy but effective collaboration with
traditional elites (see note on the concept of elites)
5. abandons democratic liberties
6. pursues with
redemptive violence
7. without ethical or legal restraints
8. goals of
internal cleansing
More interesting is to
look at the three elements of Paxton's definition of fascism that seem
least applicable: 2, 3 and 9.
2) cults of unity,
energy and purity
3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist
militants
9) external expansion
It is here that we see the plausibility of the ratio: Hitler is to Trump as Tragedy is to Farce
Compare Paxton's Paragraph 3 with the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain (below). Atwater has shown how the discursive and symbolic elements of the
Southern Strategy were generated through the construction of a
theatrical arena in which hatred is expressed and sadism performed.
This sado-sexual
performativity is the essence of the GOP's mass appeal. Well
before Trump the evocation of evil and the channelling of rage against
a scapegoat
(various forms of the other) was the stock-in-trade of Republican
politicians, from their Know-nothing ancestors [1850s] to today’s fascist formations and modalities.
The rhetorical violence of
Trump
rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump
performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump
himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can
identify--become
intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts:
Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the
mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian
convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's
concept of redemptive violence.
On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures,
various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of
racism). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence,
sadism, and revenge. The cruelty of it all is the most important thing.
The vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering,
or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding raging hominids.
Here the works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the
air stinks of secrets and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness
is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of
grand words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny! (Nietzsche, The
Geneology of Morals, II, 14)
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Nazi Masculinity
. . . the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose
terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and
female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine
hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism.
from Ann Goldberg, “Women and Men: 1760-1960,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), p. 79
The alleged undermining of
the patriarchal family—the ruse of the ‘double earners’ (married women
performing paid labor outside the home), and sexually liberated New
Women—became a powerful symbol of the breakdown of the social fabric in
the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic, subject to intense poltical
debate, social policy interventions, and efforts to resurrect the
traditional gender order. The Nazis played directly on these
gender anxieties as they built their movement in the Weimar
years. Together with Jews and leftists, feminists and New Women
became symbols in Nazi propaganda of the decadence and weakness of
liberal democracy and modern urban life. Railing against the
‘soulless’ and ‘egotistical’ modern woman, National Socialists called
for their return to the home and for the restoration of the patriarchal
family—for, as the slogan went, ‘emancipation from emancipation’.
At the same time, the Nazis built upon the militarized masculinity and
culture of comradship that had evolved in WWI, glorifying the ideal of
a brotherhood of self-sacrificing soldier-comrades, and turning it into
an extreme cult of violence, hardness, and duty to the racial
Volk. A study of the writings of the Freicorps—right-wing
paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers and officers formed in the aftermath
of WWI—explores the unconscious fears and desires of this fascist
masculinity. It shows the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed
weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were
associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a
result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an
emotional defense mechanism.
David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Norton, 2017)
Wilbur Cash, the Proto-Dorian convention
James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (Hill and Wang, 1994)
John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920 (Johns Hopkins, 2007)
Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
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Trump and Fascism: contemporary journalism
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from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:
Let us add at once that . .
. the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard
of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the
aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine
spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and
the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . .
. gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as
if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man
were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28
. . . ressentiment is
trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What
“empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused,
but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been
treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in
his place.
from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 96-7
Now let’s see how
things are with people who are capable of revenge . . . When the
desire for revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a
time of every other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . .
Now let’s look at this mouse in action. Let’s assume it has been
humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to
avenge itself. . . . The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to
repay the offender in kind may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse
than in the natural man who, because of his innate stupidity, considers
revenge as merely justice . . . . In its repulsive, evil-smelling
nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold,
poisonous, and—most important—never-ending hatred. For forty
years, it will remember the humiliation in all its ignominious details
. . .
from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22:
Oh this insane, pathetic
beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms
of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .
All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black,
unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too
long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the
most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There
is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a
madhouse!
from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30
Indeed,
this is the very basis of
the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while
simultaneously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.
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the Lynching for Rape Discourse
from Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993), p. 150
The imagery of lynching—in literature, poetry, music, in the minds of men—was almost inescapably erotic. . . .
Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptible folk pornography in
the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the attacker became not just a
black man but a ravenous brute, the victim a beautiful, frail, young
virgin. The experience and condition of the women. . . were
described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public
fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the
woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged
attacker. . . .
The small percentage of lynchings that revolved around charges of
sexual assault gripped the southern imagination far out of proportion
to statistical reality. In such scenes, described in the popular
press in strikingly conventionalized words and phrases, the themes of
masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death
and desire.
from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)
. . . the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a
receptacle for every man’s damned-up hate, and a receptacle for every
man’s forbidden feelings. Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of
minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can
serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man
wants to befoul. That, sometimes, the lynchers do cut off genitals of
the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants
as souvenirs is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and
guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life. 162-3
In the name of sacred womanhood, of purity, of preserving the home,
lecherous old men and young ones, reeeking with impurities, who had
violated the home since they were sixteen yers old, whipped up
lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and
ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing
the “menace” of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape
“our” women 145
Two chapters from Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, (Ohio State U. Press, 1998):
Terence Finnegan, "The Equal of Some White Men
and the Superior of Others": Masculinity and the 1916 Lynching of
Anthony Crawford in Abbeville County, South Carolina
Stephen Kantrowitz, “White Supremacist Justice and the Rule of Law: Lynching, Honor, and the Statte in Ben Tillman’s South Carolina”
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
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on the hermeneutics of "intelligent design"
from MEMORANDUM OPINION, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005); John E. Jones III,
United States District Judge of the United States District Court for
the Middle District of Pennsylvania (also Wikipedia articleDoverAreaSchoolDistrict).
1. An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching About "Gaps"
and "Problems" in Evolutionary Theory are Creationist, Religious
Strategies that Evolved from Earlier Forms of Creationism
The history of the intelligent design movement (hereinafter "IDM") and
the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by
focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the
historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board
acted in adopting the challenged ID Policy. As a reasonable observer,
whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which
the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning
of Defendants' actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM.
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the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain
from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others
put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have
been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do
that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in
place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal
conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole
cluster.
Questioner:
But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter
and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal
services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you
can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product
of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously
maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if
it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because
obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more
abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract
than "Nigger, nigger."
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Paxton on Fascism in U.S: History, 1845-1938
Altough Anatomy of
Fascism
was published in 2004, it describes
the
anti-Obama Tea Party uproar of 2009 with uncanny prescience--the Youtube video below
(click on link below screenshot) is a good example.
The
United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed,
antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America
since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party
ofthe 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies,
derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States.
The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler
Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William
Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . .
. . Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically
Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan
revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to
cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin
gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an
anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after
1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of
Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party
and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke,
might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201
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after the Southern strategy: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" (circa 2016-19)
Donald Trump says:
“When Mexico sends its
people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you.
They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of
problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing
drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are
good people.”
a
Trump voter in the Florida panhandle says: (from "It’s Just Too Much: A
Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.)
I voted for
him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the Federal
prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going to do
good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.
Friedrich Nietzsche says: (from The Geneology of Morals, II, 14)
Here the
works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets
and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to
disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand
words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!
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Richard Staley, Einstein's Generation : The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (University of Chicago, 2009)
George Makari, Revolution in Mind: the Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper-Collins 2008)
Margaret Jacobs, Alcorn
Ernst Cassirer
This is the home page of G. J. Mattey’s Philosophy 175, Kant, for Winter Quarter, 2019.
the distinction between inuitions and concepts is critical.
In the media concepts that are too abstract are laughed off the
stage. Ossified concepts, which are deployed as if they were
immediately knowable and true, are the only "concepts" admissible to
media discourse.
from F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
A mobile
army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of
human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which
one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn
out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures
and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
A striking illustration of the cognitive limitations of liberals is
that they fail to note the obvious--that is, they fail to conceptualize
the generic character of this stream of sado-sexual performances.
The excerpt at the right from a study of Rush Limbaugh and the
Conservative Media Establishment makes this clear. Jamieson and
Cappella just don't get it: The vulgarity and sadism of Limbaugh's
rhetoric is the main event in this theater of ressentiment, while the
"issues" are merely the occasion for the expression of emotionally
appealing sexual inuendo and sadism. This is the stuff of
Nietzsche's ressentiment.
Maureen
Dowd does get it. Her pithy summary of the sado-sexual character
of the GOP's impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 should be
compared to the bemused perplexity of Jamieson and Cappella.
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from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush
Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy
Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)
Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the
locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was
heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz
Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large
breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18,
2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph
of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a
body builder. A naked woman has been transposed onto his
shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE.
When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she
had "opened herself" to him. Why the vulgarity in this message
does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a
question for which we have no ready answer.
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14
Here the
works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets
and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to
disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand
words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!
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from Maureen Dowd, " Starr Chamber: The Sequel. President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team," NYT, Jan 18, 2020.
The Starr chamber was a
shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan
independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and
producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read
more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages
about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale
and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read
the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an
unhealthy, warped way.
Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high
jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After
playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now
do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress
and American foreign policy is piffle.
In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted
as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women
and looking the other way when football players were accused and
sometimes convicted of sexual assaults.
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the patrimonial destruction of rational-bureuacratic instititions: the Dr. Rich Bright case
the marie yanovich case
Statement from leader of federal vaccine agency about his reassignment
Updated 4:52 PM ET, Wed April 22, 2020
(CNN)Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the agency responsible for
leading the charge on the production and purchase of vaccines in the
Trump administration, released a statement Wednesday blaming political
motives for his abrupt reassignment.
Read the statement in full:
"Yesterday, I was removed from my positions as the Director
of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)
and HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response by the
Administration and involuntarily transferred to a more limited
and less impactful position at the National Institutes of Health. I
believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the
government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to
address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted
solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack
scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly
virus, science -- not politics or cronyism -- has to lead the way.
"I have spent my entire career in vaccine development, in the
government with CDC and BARDA and also in the biotechnology industry.
My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this -- to
confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people
around the globe. To this point, I have led the government's efforts to invest in the best science available to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this resulted in clashes
with HHS political leadership, including criticism for my proactive
efforts to invest early in vaccines and supplies critical to saving
American lives. I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous
drugs promoted by those with political connections.
"Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea,
but which clearly lack scientific merit. While I am prepared to look at
all options and to think "outside the box" for effective treatments, I
rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the
American public. I insisted that these drugs be provided only to
hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the
supervision of a physician. These drugs have potentially serious risks
associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some
recent studies in patients with COVID-19.
"Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism
ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to
safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.
"I will request that the Inspector General of the Department of Health
and Human Services investigate the manner in which this Administration has
politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other
conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections
as well as efforts that lack scientific merit. Rushing blindly
towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more
deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American
people, must always trump politics.
"I am very grateful for the bipartisan support from Congress and their
confidence in my leadership of BARDA as reflected in the generous
appropriation to BARDA in the CARES 3 Act. It is my sincere hope that
the dedicated professionals at BARDA and throughout HHS will be allowed
to use the best scientific acumen and integrity to continue their
efforts to stop the pandemic without political pressure or
distractions. Americans deserve no less."
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