Royce White will not be put in a box

Here's a thing that happens. Public figure says something entirely accurate that offends the wrong person or group, maybe something trivial, maybe not. Maybe it's Wes Welker's wife pointing out that Ray Lewis is a bit murdery, maybe it's Jon Stewart calling Harry Truman a war criminal. Flak ensues. Public figure caves under pressure, issues retractions and apologies, bows down before the king and kisses his feet. 

Not my new favorite athlete, Royce White, here being a badass:

RW: It's no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions.
Chuck Klosterman: So … this is about late capitalism?
RW: Definitely. Definitely.

RW: I'm always going to run into problems with people who think business is more important than human welfare.

CK: What if stress is just part of [playing in the NBA]?
RW: What does that mean, "It's just part of it"? That's like saying people getting killed is just part of war.
CK: But people getting killed is part of war. That's the downside of war.
RW: It doesn't have to be, though. We choose that. When you say, "That's just part of it," it implies that this is natural. Volcanoes don't kill human beings. Volcanoes kill human beings because human beings build houses right next to them.

(And note this smug paternalism from Klosterman:
"There are times when White seems like a brilliant ninth-grader who just wrote a research paper on mental illness and can't stop talking about it. He's arrogant, and perhaps not as wise as he believes himself to be. But sometimes he offers genuine insight into the mediated discomfort of modernity...")

Here.

more on abortion

I don't like watching videos of cows being slaughtered. Pain is pain. Death is death. That could be me. I eat meat anyway for several reasons, many of which probably don't stand up to scrutiny, but the visceral connection is real. Cows have muscles and veins and ligaments and brains that process pain and so on. We say "meat" to distance ourselves, as if we're not made of meat. The victims of American drone attacks are labeled "terrorists" for similar reasons. If you're going to kill something, it had better not be you. And if you're going to end the future of a fetus, you'd be wise to first dismiss its humanity, to take some distance. I'm pro-fetus, in a half-assed sort of way. And I'm certainly anti-abortion in the sense that I'd like to see less of them happen. They're bad for both the pregnant woman and the fetus. Like I said, it's unwise and unneccessary to choose sides.

Fetuses are sympathetic characters. The desire to protect them from death is a good instinct, mostly, just like the nationwide grieving over the massacre in Newtown was. But as in that case, context exposes the empathy as entirely misguided, and worse, as a facade that plays a key role in perpetuating a system of domination. 

If you show Americans a picture of a beautiful Iranian woman and then explain how she was tortured by state thugs, they will feel empathy. Many will cry, even when no one's looking (though perhaps God/superego/parents are looking). Then they'll cheer as American heroes invade that country and kill countless women just like her. The feeling is real, physiologically, but systemically, it's fake. 

If a pro-lifer is actually interested in preventing abortions, as opposed to symbolically aligning themselves with the good and the true, they'll stop talking about criminalizing abortion and start talking about what they can do to address its causes. The entire American system, the same one most conservative American Catholics consider a shining beacon for the world when they're not lambasting it, has a habit of making unwanted pregnancies happen and of making abortion the least bad option. If you have no empathy for a 15 year-old black girl who grew up in a shattered family within a shattered community, the shattering of which is entirely the result and foundation of your white existence, I'd suggest you look deeper, and more inward. Abortion is the end point of a chain that you maintain.    

what to say to those who claim to love life so much they imagine they've put it in a bottle where you shouldn't be able to touch it even if it's your own body, or in it

It was the conclusion of an abortion debate in a political science class, sophomore year, and there I was, standing in front of the crowd, soaking in victory, like conquerors do. My counterpart, a female student taking the pro-choice side, was left in tears. If you're ever in 1994, track me down and kick me in the nuts, preferably in the middle of that debate for everyone to see. Not sure what I said but I'm sure I said it self-righteously. Old habits. Old embarassing habits. Rage looking for a target, and missing.

Anyway, I know how the "pro-life" argument goes, and it's something like this:

1. Human life begins at conception. This occurs outside space-time. There's a magic door between non-life and life just as there's a magic door between unbaptized and baptized, unwed and wed, and so on. It's a bit surprising the priest doesn't need to perform a ritual to officially start a life.
2. The premeditated taking of innocent human life is murder. 
3. Murder is illegal.
4. If murder were not illegal, a lot more people would do it. That is, laws against murder and their enforcement exert a tremendous downward pull on murder rates (with no negative consequences that would outweigh, by whatever standard, any gains in the reduction of unneccesary death).
5. Making abortion illegal would likewise exert a tremendous downward pull on abortion rates (with no negative consequences that would outweigh, by whatever standard, any gains in the reduction of unneccesary death).

I'm understating the last two points a bit. #4 almost always goes unstated but the implication tends to be that murder rates would be something like 100%, whatever that might mean. For people who don't think about it much, 100% will probably be the default rate. With the last point, the implication tends to be that "pro-life" policies will reduce the abortion rate from millions per year to zero.   

  

That is a good argument, no joke. All you have to do is make abortion illegal and you can prevent millions of babies from being slaughtered. Good people don't like to see babies slaughtered. Good people save babies. Are you a good person?

I take the second and third points to be true, the first, fourth, and fifth to be false. 

I tend not to get caught up in the first point. If someone believes in the priesthood, how am I gunna convince them that life isn't magic? So I always come back to the fourth and fifth, mostly the fifth. Not because I'd accept the whole thing if the fifth were true, which I wouldn't, but because I'm lazy. "Please show," I say, "what likely effects the criminalization (they don't usually like that word cuz it sounds mean) of abortion would have on abortion rates. If you can show me a solid study that demonstrates a likely meaningful reduction in abortion rates, then we'll talk (about the consequences of people forcing other people to do things at the point of a massive state-wielded gun and the patriarchy and so on)."

Another thing. If the question comes down to whether a woman has a moral obligation to carry the fetus to term, with the implication that a state should intervene if she does, we're way off track. See above.

A not-bulletproof-due-to-correlation-causation-issues-but-still-nice link regarding #5.

And for what it's worth, the Catholic Church's concern for the unborn needs to be seen alongside its equal concern for the pre-conceived. I mean the contraception thing. What does the Church care about? It has nothing to do with avoidance of suffering, to be sure. The Church is committed to suffering, implicitly, explicitly, and every other way. No, it's something about the fear of non-existence projected onto imagined selves.  

purity quest

Once I concede that a non-political power wielder like myself or whoever I'm likely talking to has little or no impact on politics via voting or principled non-voting or internet blathering or activism intended to impact political decision-makers and the like, I'm left with symbolic tirades. Does it matter if someone voted for Obama or Romney? It's like shouting at someone for "hoping so-and-so gets hit by a bus." Your wishes have no effect on anything but damn, they're impure! Which would make the whole thing therapeutic. It was already that, but now the excuse is gone.

Lupe the heretic

First there was slavery but then the white people, led by a man named Abraham, realized it was wrong and fixed their mistake. But there were still some mean white people who made black people drink from low quality water fountains and do housework. A great man named Moses Luther King used the white people's religious imagery to explain that black people are people too and hey, it's mean to be mean to people, and the white people saw the error of their ways and made it illegal to be mean to black people.* The mean white people slowly died off and at long last, in 2009, Black Jesus finished what Moses had started when he was inaugurated to the highest position of great equality -- ruler of the world Presidency of the Happily Ever Equal United States of America. Some heretics claimed that Moses was a reinvented, sanitized version of a great man named Martin Luther King, Jr. who had strongly opposed a so-called "white establishment." One heretic named Lupe Fiasco ripped Obama's mask off was removed from a stage for being anti-black Jesus, anti-equality, anti-love. No one took the heretics seriously enough to bother hanging them.

*they also (re-)made it illegal to be black

rad ain't cool

Allow me to raise a toast to this blog's impotence. That's my real name up there. I made a bet that I'd be a complete non-threat to the empire and so far I'm winning. Of course, they're not always good judges of threats. Joe McCarthy, for example...

Small sample size but the dot dot dot approach works for me. I used it for the last post to help me traverse the backs and forths of a dialectic but it matched up so well with my  general tangentiality and inability to navigate the subtle differences between "(___)" and ";" and "--" and "," and "anyway" as tangent markers that I'm going with it here and maybe later...

Speaking of my lack of threateningness, the reason my devastating arguments have failed  to turn my facebook friends into weapons against the state are as follows...

There are infinitely many true facts. What matters is which ones you focus on. In a crowded enough room, the background decibel level is higher than any particular speaker's. It's what you tune in on that matters. Your brain can block out the noise and find a lecturer's relatively low decibel voice, for example. Similarly, a plumber experiences a house tour differently than a painter does. They see what they're looking for. My bulletproof arguments are blocked out similarly. What can I do with this information?, they're thinking. What use-value does it offer me? None? Ok, on to the post about what that other friend ate for breakfast...

And about that "what to do with it?" part. A person trained in the arts of rationality may well take a statement that runs counter to most of what they believe as a challenge or a problem, something that needs to be dismissed with argument or incorporated into their belief system with argument. For most, though, the ability to incorporate or synthesize or disprove or weigh competing truth claims against each other is as non-existent as my ability to crochet. They have no use for that information...

That information also runs counter to almost everything they've ever heard. Like I've said before, propaganda doesn't win on quality, it wins on quantity...

And if they believed it or entertained it for a second, they'd be castigated by the authority figures in their head and everyone they know...

The reason I can do it, the only reason, is that I know I can win the arguments. You really need to know because the price for losing is steep. I knew long before I was willing to say it. Then I did, and realized I could handle it...

The more radical the argument, the more it undercuts entire worldviews, economic-cultural systems, the more it discredits and humanizes heroes, the more certain you have to be to say it...

Do you want stand outside the rest of the humans, judging them, exposing their flaws and arousing their anger? Do you want to be judged and mischaracterized and hated and excluded from polite society? Then become a radical... 

And, flashing back to that last post, did you notice how neatly how I framed myself just now? The good people do this, the bad people do that... 

As for "that information" mentioned above, by which I implied something "radical," well,  how about argumentum ad Hitlerium?, about which I recently responded to someone on that book...

The relation between the set "dictators" and the set "presidents" is not like that between "Darth" and "Luke" or "doctor" and "drug dealer." It's more like the relation between "Hollywood actors" and "Broadway actors." The vast majority of the job is the same. And so when people who fully accept that Hollywood actors get paid to pretend they're someone they're not paint Broadway actors as belonging to a radically different category, that's when DiCaprio v. (insert Broadway actor) comps become valid, IMO. It doesn't have to mean Obama shares the same psychopathology or whatever, just that he oversees a vast state apparatus that regularly has people killed for reasons and in ways that wouldn't be considered ethically acceptable if a non-state actor did it. The state is psychopathic and Obama is the head of state. He has personally been the driving force behind lots of its death dealing, too. As opposed to those who make Hitler comps to cast Obama as un-American, impure, a blight, and that, I use it to try to cut through the above-described category denial. In his defense, though, Hitler did at least work to enhance basic social services and infrastructure. Some of those late Roman emperors whose military adventurism left the Roman economy in tatters would admittedly be more accurate.

a self pieced together from a series of dimly remembered snapshots partially revealing reflections captured at times not remembered through teeth that may or may not have been there, or were constantly shifting, and so on, then finally recalibrated in an achievement that would seem remarkable to an omniscient onlooker

I've had "oh damn, I'm naked in public" dreams and "how did I end up on the crapper with all these people watching?" dreams but this was new:

It was too dark to see much of anything at first. Then some black and pink craters lined up in a row. I'm inside my own mouth? Oh Christ, where did my teeth go? I look deep into one pit and at the bottom, deep down, there's something small and white. A tooth? Is it trying to come back up or is it taking its last breath before sinking into oblivion? Fuck. Can I bring it up with my will power? Fuck. Can anyone see this, my shame? This is the end. I have no teeth! (I read somewhere that playing video games helps you control your own dreams. I've done it before.) There's a light, that's the outside. Are my front teeth OK? Oh, thank Jesus, they are. (I did that!) Maybe nobody will see what's back here...

I had another dream the next night, or was I just drunk? -- yes, the latter -- that I left a comment at the blog of the king of anarchotopia in some bitter tone, annoyed by what would seem to anyone but me to be nothing, specifically a lament over wasted DNA, that reminded me of a post by the king about an artist's suicide that drew a sentiment to this effect: "He was a phony, a waste of talent -- good riddance!" That motherfucker failed to entertain us! He deserved to die! Like he has some use-value for us and it's absolute. And, well, that got me thinking about how the king's genius fetishism, among other problems, is propped up by the notion that what matters is how fast the fastest sprinter is in absolute terms when in fact what humans want to know is who's fastest in relative terms. Not to their credit, mind you, that's just an observation. If it took the fastest humans 20 seconds to run 100 meters, we'd still watch. So I'm thinking about art at that point and realize only afterwards that I may have left myself open to some attack along the lines of "it's not about art, he was a computer genius, you moron, etc!" or possibly something else but I can't remember what I typed, honestly, so I can't cover all the gaps in my front teeth and I won't go back there, back inside, that is, to figure it out. A bunch of sharks over there, with sharp teeth, like mine. No thanks...

And hey, is anyone looking? Of course not. Thank God...

Though sometimes I want them to look...

I don't like seeing myself on camera or hearing my recorded voice. It's somewhat relieving to relearn that I appear as an object to other people but on the other hand, I don't appear as God, which is tragically, indescribably disappointing...

Speaking of which, a student was telling me today about her visit to a church in the U.S. years ago and in the process of trying to ascertain whether it was a Catholic Church, I mentioned how the Catholics love Mary and how her virginity is a big part of the appeal.   Now a perfect woman doesn't want to have sex with anyone but me. Her desire for someone else would suggest that her desire for me does not entirely possess her. It exposes her love as phony. But a 12 year-old boy doesn't know how to even imagine having sex so we have to have imaginary sex. Or maybe it's more about the need for purity, that if she touches me, she's dirtied by me, and then her judgments are worthless. She becomes a whore. Anyway, I'm God. Look at these fucking pearly whites...

But a Protestant friend, not so long ago, apologized vigorously for hours for sending vomit through his teeth earlier in the evening. "Nobody cares, man, stop hitting yourself in the head," I said, rubbing his back. An unbelievably excellent dude, this guy, for real, but they'd gotten to him too...

Digital love, the approval of strangers, bloghits, facebook likes. What kind of person cares?...

Do you like the dot dot dot thing? I was thinking of doing bullets. Does this work?...

I imagine a community in which kids aren't raised to impress adults, in which their value as little opera singers is not the quantifiable, objective judgment of God. Maybe they're not inclined to amplify the pain of loss with their own obsessive judgments. Maybe they  listen to music and just enjoy it. Maybe they play it for fun. Maybe they don't take a watch when they go running...

And while it's nice to rise above envy and appreciate greatness, is that what usually happens when we laud genius? Or is it more often an identification with greatness and the accompanying joy of smiting? Envy has the advantage of honesty. That's not you on that stage...

Which reminds me of an article I read at cracked.com the other day about four awesome rock stars who mind-bogglingly or whatever kicked some ass. The comments section, the bit that I read, was a bunch of "this ass-kicking reminds me of another ass-kicking that was even awesomer" and "oh, that ass-kicker is awesome." One video showed a drunk man who got on stage and tried to hug the Tool frontman, who apparently thought his mom was in the audience and would be really impressed if he showed his giant penis, which he did, but not really, when he put the fun-having drunk in a choke-hold and humiliated him for a minute or so while finishing the song. What a fine specimen. Cheers! Double-facebook like! That's me up there! Art uber alles! Entertain me, with me!...

Did you want me to use the teeth metaphor instead? I'm sorry...

Blah, blah, blah...

abfkabefa...

did you see how I controlled the presentation of my not caring?...

look, I'm not even capitalizing the first letter anymore...

impressed?...

Top runners are miserable. Artists are miserable. The superrich are miserable...

When I was in kindergarten, they had me doing math while the other kids were napping. I hated naps and liked math but I didn't like being different, above or below...

The first grade teacher gave S's for satisfactory and O's for outstanding. I got some S's. That first definitive rejection was brutal. I wanted Os but I didn't want other kids to not have Os. I wanted to not be rejected...

I joined the wrestling team in 2nd grade. The coach was a scary old bastard. He wanted volunteers to come up and get humiliated by him. "Boys, you kick ass like so and like so. You see the pain in his face? That is what you're going for." I didn't identify with him so I couldn't enjoy it...

The first match, the other team forfeited so we had a scrimmage instead and each of us wrestled a teammate. My opponent, who I knew pretty well, did some trash-talking. I pinned him in a few seconds. Adults were impressed...

Other matches, I generally didn't try. There was some vague sense, something I couldn't formulate, that went like this: "I got no beef with this guy. He doesn't deserve to lose. That's humiliating." I couldn't just make someone my enemy. I remember a few times realizing the other kid couldn't possibly be trying either...

Though one time, there was a big crowd for some reason, in our home gym, and I went up against an all-star type who outweighed me by 10 pounds. I tried, maybe because I knew I couldn't win. I lost. I later claimed that a bum ankle was to blame. Now I just remember to mention he outweighed me...

50 feet behind my house, a group of kids gathered. The older ones pitted me against another boy. Neither of us wanted to fight. They picked sides. Some thought I'd win, some thought he'd win. We wrestled. They wanted us to start punching. I don't remember if we did. I don't think we did. I remember it being a draw...

Flash forward to 22 year-old me, picking fights with strangers in Belgian bars...

Well, only a couple times and it never came to anything...

But the friends were impressed...

I've never had my ass kicked. Not really. Knock on teeth, this perfect grill. But no, don't do that. Please, it's all I have.

Snow days were the greatest thing. I didn't have to go to school and get my ass kicked...

By everything, because in school, you breathe submission, you breathe humiliation...

And now I've escaped all those institutions I used to retreat from, the ones that had me cowering in the dark. I outran them...

I work in my own house now. My first lesson starts at 11. I don't have a boss. No one seriously criticizes me and if they do, especially when I'm looking them in the face, my self-criticism is mostly proportionate to the amount of blame I actually consider myself to have, which is usually close to zero...

Which isn't to say the self-loathing is gone...

Oh, it's back there. I go in there when I dream now, apparently...

I spent two nights in the slammer once for not having an up-to-date visa. I looked everyone straight in the mouth. Those little cops. I didn't doubt myself for a second. I said "yeah, I'm an idiot for not renewing the thing but you're using a gazillion yen to lock up a peaceful, productive citizen you're just gunna let out anyway. Who are you protecting and serving here? What good is coming from this? Your systemic idiocy precedes and towers over my little flaws. I'm smarter than you. I know exactly why you're here and why you do what you do and how it's different than you think." But I said it nicely, somberly, and accompanied it with a ridiculous-from-some-angles hunger strike that was easy because I wasn't hungry anyway. And I made friends. I Zinned them. I ended up getting semi-apologies from a couple translators. They saw my noble suffering and felt guilty. I was their judge and teacher. The switcheroo. The gulag is different, of course...  

Am I bragging? Putting on a show? Funny how I was taught not to brag and yet at the same time trained to put on a show.

Back to a previous thing. I was saying I don't have bosses. The money is good, too. Enough that I feel bad about it, actually. The hours are excellent. I wake up when I want, unless the kids wake me. No alarm clocks, no hoping for snow days...

Reminds me of a line from the hero I admire and envy most, Conor O'Berst...

"my stray dog freedom"...

Ah, what to do?...