This strangest of islands

This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank?

The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused.

I knelt, and trailed my hand in the Hudson. It was frigid. Here we all were, ignoring that water, paying as little attention as possible to the pair of black eternities between which our little light intervened.

— Three quotes about New Yorkers’ relationship with the water, from Teju Cole’s Open City.

Where are the Crackpots in Treme?

I love Treme, Season 3 seems to have found a kind of groove that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before on TV. Narrative as improvisational jazz. David Simon deserves his “genius grant.” But something’s been bothering me about his representation of urban political and social life. Sure, he shows the drugs, the crime, the corruption, etc. but narratively there is no place in his vision for what I’ll call (for lack of a better word) “the crackpots.”

You know what I’m talking about. These aren’t crazy people exactly, but people who show up at a zoning board meeting to talk about some personal bugaboo which they’ve been harping about for twenty years and still haven’t gotten anyone to listen. In online forums and comment boards these people invariably show up and try to take over the conversation and they do the same in real life as well.

Of course you can’t show these people in a TV drama. Just doing so would be to let the trolls take over the story, diverting it away from the central narrative – exactly what these people want to do. But here’s the thing, if you want to show democracy in action, if you want to show diversity and civil society as it is really lived, you can’t pretend these people don’t exist. I don’t know what the solution is, but for me their absence detracts from the gritty realism Treme is trying to project.

Blaming the feminazis

The NY Times reports some on some “really alarming trends in life expectancy” among poor whites:

The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The latest estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma was 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or more. For white men, the gap was even bigger: 67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh reports on another disturbing trend.

Gramsci vs. ‘the political’

…the Schmittian concept of the political in reality participates in one of the most venerable illusions of the Western metaphysical tradition: namely, the dogmatic assertion of a moment that provides the essence for the contingent events that are determined by it. Political philosophy, as the specific form of philosophy that thinks the political (and as distinct from modern political science, which can only analyse ‘mere’ politics), claims to have a privileged access to this moment…

…this approach offers a notion of a ‘real political’ or ‘true politics’ as a substitute for the pale imitations of traditional political philosophy and ‘official’ politics. Žižek, for instance… has argued that ‘a leftist position should insist on the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the political’: ‘the internal struggle which traverses the social body’. For Žižek, the political thus ultimately finds its foundation in the social, or rather, it is precisely the suppression of the constitutive internal division of the social that requires the emergence of the political as the terrain of its resolution, in its turn suppressed or deformed by existing politics.

…Gramsci does not provide a theory of ‘the political’ as such, even less than he provides a ‘general theory of politics’. Rather, he attempts to provide an analysis of the ‘production’ or, more exactly, ‘the ‘constitution of the political’ – constitution in both the active and formalized sense – as a distinct social relation… Hegemony’ describes the process of this constitution, or the way in which historically identifiable political practices – the social relations of communication, coordination and organization of the project of a particular class or social group – have come to define the nature of ‘politics’ as such…

— Peter Thomas, Gramsci and the Political

Mathematical Objectivities

The skeptical reader may still be wondering, How exactly does the mathematical discourse relate or apply to the actual, material situations it purports to describe? How precisely do we move from the purely void-based multiples presented in ontology, which are all “qualitatively very indistinct,” to the qualitative variety of historical situations? To be sure, we know that Badiou “in no way declares that being is mathematical, that is, composed of mathematical objectivities.” Nevertheless, his conviction is that the substance of material or historical situations offers no significant resistance to their mathematization, and that insofar as they can be thought, all situations are to be subtracted from the uncertain domains of substance, perception, and the object.

Badiou: A Subject To Truth. p 105

#CTUStrike FAQ

What is at stake in the Chicago Teachers Union strike? Here are some links to articles I’ve found useful/interesting in the form of a FAQ. I will attempt to keep this post updated as best I can.

What are teachers in Chicago striking about?

Diane Ravitch has a good summary.

According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.

None of this is true.

And a more in-depth overview at Mother Jones: What’s Happening With the Chicago Teacher Strike, Explained

And this post, by a parent and former teacher is also a good corrective to some misperceptions about the union’s demands. Read More

Intelligence Gathering

Two stories about intelligence reports from the CIA and the war in Iraq. In the first one, on WMDs, the CIA got the story wrong because they fit the facts into their own preconceived narrative rather than trying to understand Iraqi behavior in its own terms:

In other words, the CIA was right to identify evidence of deception, but wrong in its analysis of why Iraq was being deceptive: not to hide WMDs, but to protect its own sovereignty and to provide ambiguous signals to its principal threats (Iran and Israel).

In the second one, on 9-11, the CIA got it right, but the neocons refused to believe the warnings because it didn’t fit with their own preconceived narrative:

the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

If you expect our government (CIA, neocons… or Obama) to learn from their mistakes, you haven’t been paying attention. And a very good argument against having something like a “kill list”…

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