March 3rd
Press Release

Is this guy for real?

Intellectual Poster Needed
Reply to: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 2006-02-27, 12:13PM EST

I am a professional intellectual with valuable market services, seeking to reach a large audience of potential clients. I special in neo-Kantian theory and the major thinkers who had beards. I provide real-time company grounded in my intellectual capacity

I am in need of a person who can help with my craiglist postings.

The position: A poster whose one responsibility will be to duplicate all current job postings on craigslist for the DC area with the word “intellectual” added to the front and a few sentences about my work added to the bod of the existing job description. Example: Change posting for “DC Houseboi” to posting for “Intellectual DC Houseboi” and insert the three lines at the beginning of this posting into the job description itself.

Skills:
* Strong writing and word-processing skills a must
* Ability to use short-cut keys, cut and paste functions, and other devices to expedite labor-intensive posting work
* Interest in 18th and 19th century European thought highly preferred but not required

Other requirements:
* Ability to work weekends and odd hours

So, Sonshine’s friend and his new girlfriend had a mishap. I tell C, this big, burly kid who helped Sonshine get his latest job, about the morning after pill. I call around for him because big, burly kid is a little shy.

Guess how much it costs? Eighty-Nine Buckaroos! I can’t even believe it. I called two places close to where C’s gf works. They both require a pregnancy test, too. uhhhh what?

Planned Parenthood is cheaper, nabbing them for $50 for the first dose and $10 a pop for emergency doses. Jeez freakin’ Louise.

For christ sake, even at the reduced rate, this is almost an entire day’s wage after taxes for these kids. WTF? It isn’t a pretty sight for anyone to have to pay eighty-fuckin’-nine bucks!

This country is so fucked sideways and upsidedown I could spit nails, one of granny’s favorite expressions. (The spit nails part!)

Doug Henwood just received this press release along with a request that he cover the book and its author on his raido program. He called it, “The Press Release of the Day.” I don’t know about that, but it shonuf was innarestin’ to see that Chicken Little is alive and well and going by the new nym, Star Parker.

Where’s our Foxy Loxy? Has anyone ever read some of the fairy tales that haven’t been cleansed for “the sake of the chil’ren”? Foxy Loxy — nasty dude.

In her new book, “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay,” (Nelson Current, March 14) Star Parker exposes the fallacy of suburbia’s strategy of isolation against the wave of immorality that has swept the nation since World War II. By holding a cracked mirror up to middle class America, she portrays a compelling, if disturbing, picture proving Middle America’s core values are no different than those of our corrupt inner cities.

For decades middle-class America has pointed an accusatory finger at the decomposition of the nation’s urban centers as being primarily responsible for national increases in crime, the decline of two-parent households, the rampant spread of sexual immorality and the spread of incurable, sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS.

In an effort to protect itself from those threats, middle class Americans retreated to suburbia, attempting to isolate themselves from the dangerous and negative influences they believed were limited to the big cities.

In a word, suburbia was in denial; Middle Class America was wrong!

“It is true that these problems are especially prevalent in these communities, especially those where single-mother black families reside,” writes Star Parker. “But what if the disproportionately higher rates of crime, illegitimacy, infant mortality, AIDS, abortion, drug abuse, and illiteracy in these poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods are simply a magnified reflection of a malaise that affects every neighborhood throughout the United States? What if the inner city is actually a mirror for the rest of our nation?”

In White Ghetto Parker reveals:

* That lust for immoral behavior, addiction to drugs and rampaging violence are not societal afflictions limited to urban centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and Miami; inner-city blacks, for example, weren’t responsible for the resounding success of shows like HBO’s “Sex in the City”

* Ghettos are color-blind; the mindset of black or white ghettos is that of an “equal opportunity employer”

* How radical liberalism is responsible for the widespread moral bankruptcy of inner-city slums and middle class suburbs alike, and how God’s values are being replaced by a pop-culture, “if-it-feels-good-do-it” mentality

* How the culture war for America’s heart and soul is being waged not just on Capitol Hill but in the kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms of every home across the country

In White Ghetto, Parker forces readers to ask tough questions, both of themselves and of their country in general: Does the sexual madness, values disorientation, and social turmoil in our inner cities reflect the moral and cultural state of America as a whole? Does the popular system of welfare truly benefit the citizens it serves? Do ethics without a biblical basis condemn man to his animal nature? And finally, can compassionate conservatism exist without first being grounded in the most fundamental tenets of Judeo-Christian morality?

White Ghetto provides irrefutable proof that the immoral godlessness of today’s America is responsible for far more social damage than that experienced in the slums and barrios of Metropolis.

And as someone who’s been there, Parker is unique among social commentators, in that she can not only pinpoint the problems from a personal perspective, but she offers rational, cogent and workable solutions to them. Talk about a breath of fresh air - someone attacking America’s moral decay who has first-hand experience with today’s most pressing social ills.

White Ghetto is America’s first must-read book of the new millennium - that is, if America is to survive until the next millennium.

Star Parker is president and founder of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), a nonprofit center that addresses the impact of social politics on America’s inner cities and the poor. Prior to her social activism, Parker was a single welfare mother. After turning to Christ, she returned to college, earning her B.S. degree, and then launched an urban Christian magazine. Now, she is a frequent lecturer at colleges and churches, a social policy consultant and media commentator, and a regular guest on national television and radio programs across the country, including Larry King Live, 20/20, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Parker is also a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service. Hometown: Los Angeles, California

The Soldiers Speak. Will President Bush Listen?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When President Bush held a public meeting with troops by satellite last fall, they were miraculously upbeat. And all along, unrepentant hawks (most of whom have never been to Iraq) have insisted that journalists are misreporting Iraq and that most soldiers are gung-ho about their mission.

Hogwash! A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq - and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, “How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?”

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush’s position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw “immediately.”

That’s one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don’t buy into it - and having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only 26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

So what would it take to win in Iraq? Maybe that was the single most depressing finding in this poll.

By a two-to-one ratio, the troops said that “to control the insurgency we need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions.” And since there is zero chance of that happening, a majority of troops seemed to be saying that they believe this war to be unwinnable.

More.

Frick. Awhile back, I was annoyed by Sam’s claims about the type of spam she supposedly received. She had a few examples of really offensive sales pitches in the subject lines, all in word case. She claimed that they represented typical viagara and penis enlargment spam in so far as they were all about creating a cock so big and/or hard that it would make women bleed, make her choke, etc. etc.

Now, as I argued in the link above, I don’t doubt that some of it’s out there. What I doubted was that she rec’d them recently since the first of this type occured 2.5 years ago. Spammers don’t use the same tricks over and over again.

What she said just didn’t ring true to me given what I did for a living for five years, some of which involved paying a lot of attention to spam and being on top of all the trends in spamming tricks, etc. I figured I should do a content analysis of the spam I actually get while posing as a male.

So, for gits and shiggles, I signed up a gmail account to things likely to receive spam, particularly anything related to dating and sex. In a little less than four weeks, this gmail account received 1209 pieces of spam mail.

NOT ONE OF THEM FOR VIAGARA or CIALIS!!!!1

I got me spam for ceegars. I got me spam for mortgage refinancing. I got me spam for tech ed colleges, software, ink cartridges, automobile loans, and offers to make money from my opinions! I even got me a spam for ephedra! (High five to Amber!)

But no spam for anything that will make my cock so hard that I can smash down walls with it or so big that I can plow a trench across these here United Sates.

Anyone out there happen to be following the Massachussetts initiative to switch to the OASIS Open Document Format for office applications? There was a meeting in November 2005 between members of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, industry reps, Mass officials, and advocates for the disablity community.

However, with those search terms (and a raging headache), I have been unable to figure out when that meeting took place in November. Anyone have any ideas?

Ha! I spent a year-and-a-half studying unemployed blue- and white-collar workers. Repeatedly, these personality tests kept coming up. However, I’ve never had to take one. Although this, obviously, isn’t an actual test, I guess it’s based on one.

I want to know what everbody else is. A Bitch insists! You know what would be cool? I should set up a poll, have you take the test and then poll your type. Then, I can make a plot chart of personality types. Awesome!

Anyway, looking up more info on this, I found this: personality types and blogging.

So weird. I don’t feel as if I’m someone who is “Creating harmony in the outside world (ESFJ, ENJF).”

Then I read this, though I don’t know where it came from:

ENFJs are the benevolent ‘pedagogues’ of humanity. They have tremendous charisma by which many are drawn into their nurturant tutelage and/or grand schemes. Many ENFJs have tremendous power to manipulate others with their phenomenal interpersonal skills and unique salesmanship. But it’s usually not meant as manipulation — ENFJs generally believe in their dreams, and see themselves as helpers and enablers, which they usually are.

ENFJs are global learners. They see the big picture. The ENFJs focus is expansive. Some can juggle an amazing number of responsibilities or projects simultaneously. Many ENFJs have tremendous entrepreneurial ability.

ENFJs are, by definition, Js, with whom we associate organization and decisiveness. But they don’t resemble the SJs or even the NTJs in organization of the environment nor occasional recalcitrance. ENFJs are organized in the arena of interpersonal affairs. Their offices may or may not be cluttered, but their conclusions (reached through feelings) about people and motives are drawn much more quickly and are more resilient than those of their NFP counterparts.

ENFJs know and appreciate people. Like most NFs, (and Feelers in general), they are apt to neglect themselves and their own needs for the needs of others. They have thinner psychological boundaries than most, and are at risk for being hurt or even abused by less sensitive people. ENFJs often take on more of the burdens of others than they can bear.

OK. So that very nearly TOTALLY sounds way too much like me — except the part about reaching conclusions through feelings. It is true that sometimes, in spite of the fact that I’ve obsessed for awhile — writing a bunch of lists, weighing pros and cons, studying the issue inside and out, and processing and/or asking advice of others — I’ll end up flipping a frickin’ coin. However, I really tend not to trust ‘gut’ instincts terribly much — unless they’re very negative.

Funny thing about the test, which you suspect with a lot of them. I went back and changed one answer which I was really unsure of. My first instinct was to answer lawyer — money! Then, I changed it to teacher. Changing that one answer back to lawyer meant that I went from an ENFJ to an ENTJ:

My quiz results:

SECOND RESULT:

From Right-wing Thinkers Go Left by Corey Robin, Lingua Franca (though this particular article is archived at 60s-L). These are several quotes from Bill Kristol and Bill Buckley included in that article.

Frankly, after reading a lot about the neocons a few years ago, I find this hard to take with out a big salt lick next to me — particularly given their penchant for being rather fond of the notion that there’s no such thing as truth, but that the leadership had to spin Noble Lies to tell the unwashed masses who, unlike the elite, couldn’t bear to live in a world without such lies.

Irving Kristol’s dictum: “Capitalism is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived.”

The end of the Soviet Union “deprived us of an enemy,” says Irving Kristol, the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism. “In politics, being deprived of an enemy is a very serious matter. You tend to get relaxed and dispirited. Turn inward.” Notorious for his self-confidence, Kristol now confesses to a sad bewilderment in the post-communist world. “That’s one of the reasons I really am not writing much these days,” he says. “I don’t know the answers.”

Kristol adds, “American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It’s so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left.” He goes on, “If you read Marx, you’d learn what a political imagination could do.”

And the capper from Chairman Bill:

At the end of our interview, I ask Buckley to imagine a younger version of himself, an aspiring political enfant terrible graduating from college in 2000, bringing to today’s political world the same insurgent spirit that Buckley brought to his. What kind of politics would this youthful Buckley embrace? “I’d be a socialist,” he replies. “A Mike Harrington socialist.” He pauses. “I’d even say a communist.” Can he really imagine a young communist Bill Buckley? He concedes that it’s difficult. The original Bill Buckley had the benefit of the Soviet Union as an enemy; without its equivalent, his doppelgnger would confront a more complicated task. “This new Buckley would have to point to other things,” he says. Buckley runs down a laundry list of left causes, global poverty, death from AIDS. But even he seems suddenly overwhelmed by the project of (in typical Buckleyese) “conjoining all of that into an arresting afflatus.” Daunted by the challenge of thinking outside the free market, Buckley pauses, then finally says, “I’ll leave that to you.”

To those reading the blog who know Kevin (who doesn’t post here), then you’ll know that Kevin was published under the same publisher as Jeffrey Hart, one of the authors reviewed by Will.

The Conservative Imagination

THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE MIND: National Review and Its Times.
By Jeffrey Hart.

IMPOSTOR: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
By Bruce Bartlett.

Review by GEORGE F. WILL

IN 1950, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling noted “the plain fact” that there were then no conservative ideas “in general circulation.” And, indeed, in 1955, when William F. Buckley started National Review, conservatism was a small church militant in an unconverted world. Conservatives were marginal and embattled, but happy. Since then, they have made their long march through the institutions - executive, legislative, judicial, even journalistic. (Only academic institutions have largely repelled conservatism.) Yet today conservatives are far from serene, for two reasons.

One is success: the conservative persuasion now has numerous adherents - arguably a majority of Americans. Hence there are many conservative sects and factions - and fractiousness. Second, during conservatism’s years as merely an opposition movement, it lacked the power to please interest groups by delivering government benefits. Hence it was interested in ideas to a degree unusual among American political movements. Having honed strong, clear convictions about government before experiencing the inevitable compromises involved in actually governing, many conservatives have found governance discomfiting.

This will make sense to no one. I am simply archiving some notes on Foucault that I’ve finally resurrected after Sheldon Ranz asked me a question in comments once. Move right along. Nothing to see here! :)

I. Heterosexuality as an institutionalized norm

a. important means of social regulation, enforced by laws, police practices, family & social policies, schools, mass media

b. The historical development of heterosexuality is tied up with the institution of masculinity as aggressive, active

c. While gay men share the privilege of being men, they are subordinated to the institution of heterosexuality and therefore their lives & experiences are not the same. Gay men, for example, share the privilege but do not participate in the interpersonal subordination of women

d. Gay men have challenged the association of heterosexuality & masculinity

We must move beyond liberal tolerance espoused by mainstream gay rights struggles to see how heterosexism serves to keep all men in line. “Breaking the silence” requires challenging heterosexism and privilege

How has this happened?

II. The history of sexuality:

he asks: how did heterosexuality come to be the dominant social relation? How did homosexuality come to be seen as perverse?

-cross cultural, historical research shows that there is no normal or natural sexuality -biological capacities are transformed & mediated culturally, producing sexuality as a social need and a social relation. Homosexuality has meaning only in and through social practices and social relations.

The repressive hypothesis advanced by Freud is social constructionist and it suggests that heterosexuality emerges from repression of polymorphous perversity. But this is problematic because it presumes that there is still some underlying core of sexuality that can be retrieved for liberatory purposes (see, for example, Foucault’s critique of the Freudo Marxists),

III. Another way to look at this issues via Foucaul

- social power & sexuality are bound together, inextricably intertwined

-sexual relations understood as changeable and as sites of personal & social struggles.

-this opens up struggle — not for release of natural sexuality, but for a much broader challenge to the ways our sexual lives are defined, regulated, controlled. Thus we can ask how and why there is a constant making and remaking of sex, desire, pleasure, and power

IV. Enter the homosexual:

The historical emergence of homosexual as a category of deviance & social control required preconditions:

A. Rise of capitalist social relations — created social spaces for emergence of homosexual cultures

B. Regime of sexuality that categorized & labeled homosexuality and sexual deviations made possible by technological advances that enabled medicine, social work, psychology, intellectual production in general, mass media, and technologies of surveillance

C. Specifically, these preconditions are, under capitalism:

- Separation of the rural household economy from industrial economy undermined the interdependent different sex household economy emergence of working class separation of work from household wage labor

- created spaces within which men lived together outside of families

D. Regime of sexuality

transition in the way kinship, sexual & class relations were organized feudal ties no longer sufficient to define ruling class (blood, lineage) rise of bourgeois middle class required further definition beyond blood, lineage class consciousness, need for differentiation: a proper, respectable sexual & gender identity became a key feature of class unity of bourgeoisie.

E. Regime of sexuality linked to ideology of individualism

- normalized relations of bourgeois family & its sexual morality -these norms were later used against the urban working class, poor — considered a threat to social order — reproductive heterosexuality

also: sexuality become terrain for expanding male-dominant fields of medicine, psychiatry, sexology

F. Cultural organization of homosexuality

-responding to ideology of individualism -organized their lives around sexuality to see themselves as different -term coined in 1869 appeal to gov’t to keep out of peoples lives -elaborated by homosexuals themselves, professional men who named their difference in order -to protect themselves from police & legal prohibitions -agencies of social control took up phrase in terms of abnormality, sickness, degeneracy, perversion -associated with gender inversion -category also provided a basis for resistance: -used in positive way to articulate difference

- the regime of sexuality and the specification of different sexual categories in an attempt to buttress the emerging norm of heterosexuality have also provided the basis for homosexual experiences, identities, and cultures.

Altogether created the basis for contemporary challenges to the hegemony of heterosexuality.

V. Enter gay liberation & the gay community:

-challenge to public/private split; the personal is political -contraceptive, reproductive technology -expansion of consumer markets, advertising — increase in public visibility of sexual images, sexual cultures -feminist challenge to the patriarchal values -social ferment of sixties.

From The Nation blog:

The federal officials who are busy assuring Americans that they’ve got their act together when it comes to managing port security are not inspiring much confidence with their approach to airline security.

When Dr. Robert Johnson, a heart surgeon who did his active duty with the U.S. Army Reserve before being honorably discharged with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, arrived at the Syracuse airport near his home in upstate New York last month for a flight to Florida, he was told he could not travel.

Why? Johnson was told that his name had been added to the federal “no-fly” list as a possible terror suspect.

Johnson, who served in the military during the time of the first Gulf War and then came home to serve as northern New York’s first board-certified thoracic surgeon and an active member of the community in his hometown of Sackets Harbor, is not a terror suspect. But he is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, who mounted a scrappy campaign for Congress as the Democratic challenger to Republican Representative John McHugh in 2004 and
who plans to challenge McHugh again in upstate New York’s sprawling 23rd District.

Johnson, who eventually made it onto the flight to Florida, is angry.

And, like a growing number of war critics whose names have ended up on “no-fly” lists - some of them prominent, many of them merely concerned citizens - he wants some answers.

Oh geez! Reading Lilith’s blog, I read about something others have covered — but I sitll can’t believe it. I’ll just quote Lil: “A woman who belongs to the Church of the SubGenius has a judge has stripped her of custody of her child. Because of the Church of the SubGenius.

Effin brill! How fucktarded!

This is what freaks me out about this. As Lil writes, “given that the Church’s most important rule is, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” and that our own holy texts have the word “LIES” on practically every page, it’s somewhat hard to believe that some people will take what we do that seriously.”

More at:
Boing Boing.
The Revealer
Jesus’ General
Bartholomew’s notes on religion
Rev. Ivan Stang

‘Coz I love the name of Tex’s blog and I didn’t want to jack the excellent title, ‘Curious George.’ Tex has the bingo with this:

But when they start with the very same premise, namely that queers have a set of “sorts of problems” to pathologize, I don’t think the diference between abusive ministry and medicalized marriage is comforting.

Are there problems that disproportionately affect queer communities? You fucking bet. But I don’t like approaching them as things that we “sometimes get into” like we’re fucking Curious George and without the propper clinical monitoring, we’re all going to become diseased meth-popping homeless washouts. I’m bluntly heartened by their finding that “Civil unions probably also increase support for gay and lesbian partnerships among families and in society at large.” I also really like T’s analysis of it all coming down to stress, but I wish that this article didn’t leave the heterosexist taste in my mouth by how they infantilized and pathologized their objects of study.

The rest here.