ON BEING POSTACADEMIC

Another tale of unhappiness and alienation in academia, told quickly, but authentically: but Mostern puts it best when he writes that academia has neither the abstraction of capitalism nor the solidarity of socialism, although it makes claims on BOTH! ON BEING POSTACADEMIC

experts, exports

From Richard Burt: an article about the Bush Administration's attempts to control access to "sensitive" research. Research Under Fire: Deemed Exports

Sacrificing the free flow of information to "patriotism" is on the Bush Administration's agenda. So I suppose the US government is ready to fight tyranny and advocate for liberty everywhere in the world but at home.

Take a Listen to Radio BC

This is what I need to hear -- the voice of outrage and racial conscience -- a voice that affirms the power of democracy (listen to the show about the Bush's "bought" blacks and his inability to deal with elected black officials such as the Black Congressional Caucus) while affirming that the US is NOT democratically functional. The Black Commentator - Radio BC

I lied

in the last post about the girls in bikinis arching their backs. They actually tried to remain as impassive as possible, -- let's say they flashed the ostentatious indifference of the novice ho.

So I just wanted the "arching" to reach from eyebrows to waist...I was reaching, I know...

Grumpy Adorno

Jet-lagged on Laguna Beach, surrounded by the happy beneficiaries of monopoly capitalism, I saw convertibles filled with tattooed, tanned, muscled young men -- all their rebellion is fueled by the 400 horsepower engines and their lovingly detailed rides. From behind their dark, silver-rimmed sunglasses, and with jaundiced eye, they check out the skimpily clad, blonde teenage girls standing at the stoplight, and the girls arch their eyebrows as they arch their backs, ready to be bought and sold. They vie for the honor of being treated like chattel. Everyone is worshipping the idol of the money power and flaunting their leisure time, blessed by the California winter, the exclusivity of the neighborhood, the proximity of cars that cost more than country houses.

I thought of grumpy Adorno, regarding the indifferent, ignorant crowds of Southern California, their self-absorbed enjoyments, their tawdry consolations.

When Adorno wrote oh so many years ago "that only the deep unconscious mistrust of the masses" had prevented them from accepting empirical reality as it had been sold to them by the culture industry little did he know that it would be the Right-Wing in the US who would eventually be able to best exploit that margin of mistrust, that deep unconscious and turn the culture industry into a contemptible object of its darkest fantasy -- the "liberal media."

The truth that this army of resentment has accepted as its own is that the liberal media have stomped on their loves, debased their enjoyments, interfered with their joy -- and that they, the righteous masses, Nixon's moral majority would come to its own and triumph and see that justice be done and the order of the world restored. So with false promises of emancipation from the "liberal media," the Republicans demand ever greater degrees of submission to its leader.

From The Culture Industry Revisited, Adorno writes that the Culture Industry

"impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order ot sustain itself and develop. If hte masses have been unjustly reviled from abovea s masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for makign them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipaiton for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit."

From above the "masses" are flattered in official dictum and the higher-ups the most infantilized of all.

Jesus in Aceh

Just as the President says that he will help liberate the world, so Christian aid workers help tsunami victims with a lethal combo of Jesus and aid. SaysAceh is Ripe for Jesus says Antioch Community Church based in Waco, TX. Even the local Methodists are horrified by their unethical methods of combining aid to injured and traumatized victims while plying them with stories of Jesus' healing powers.

Fundamentalist Christians are ready to rush to any scene in order to enslave more people to their doctrine of blind faith. But in not being able to keep Jesus out of their tsunami aid efforts, they make it apparent that what they're interested in is spiritual exploitation of the profoundly helpless.

Leo in Tainan

It's a thin screen factory back behind him, humming 24 hours a day. We were playing in its dull roar, in a "wetlands" preserve, a tiny patch of green in Tainan's Science Park, which aims to look like any place urban in California, and produces thin screen technologies for export.

Going back to the USA for Chinese New Year's

Yes, it's ironic, but Leo and I are going Stateside to celebrate a Chinese holiday with Peter, in Irvine. On this blog, I have not been chronicling the travails of academic coupledom, two jobs, one kid and three cultures (German, Chinese and American), because well, "Don't Ask Me!" I mean this was never meant to be a "personal blog' in that way, but I'm giving in to confession as I trepidatiously (is that a word?) venture back into the land that gave Bush II his "mandate."

I am missing my other half

destroy the public, everything private!

Those Republicans can't keep their hands off this big chunk of "public" change -- it's sitting there like pirate's booty -- the largest public entitlement program in the US Social Security.

Who can make money off this thing if it's public?

Red Hat: Bugging out on the Taiwanese Flag

Here is a very good article from two years ago about how the relations between the People's Republic of China "pressured" or "inspired" the writers of Red Hat Linux 8.0 to write the Taiwanese flag out of the program as a "bug"! Flag of inconvenience

The strange thing about the Mainland's hostility toward Taiwan and Red Hat's capitulation toward the Mainland market is that at present, there is a technology transfer taking place across the straits that will transform suburbs of Shanghai into the silicon goldmine that was this island's major engine of economic growth.

Taiwanese geeks are taking their expertise across the straits even as the Mainland/PRC insists upon erasing Taiwanese identity from the face of the earth.

Is Taiwan a country? Is it a rogue province? Depends on your point of view, but as Andrew Leonard at Salon showed two years ago, the formidable and growing power of the PRC is leading even the most idealistic of people -- the Red Hatters to kneel and say uncle to the Communists.

Many Iraqis say Graner sentence too lenient - Jan 16, 2005

But I suspect that "many" Americans don't care what happened to the Iraqis. Many Iraqis say Graner sentence too lenient - Jan 16, 2005. If those who voted for Bush II were truly interested in moral values, perhaps they might be reminded of the moral value of the Geneva Conventions. I'm afraid, however, that we have crossed a line here and that the revelations of torture in Iraq have not inspired the outrage say of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. We have actually regressed as a nation.

When the Right suggests that we in academia are demonically pursuing some agenda of indoctrination, I say that we are actually dissenters in a country that is more and more willing to overlook torture and the violation of the Declaration of Human Rights as well as civil liberties.

In fact the University is one of the last places where significant and meaningful dissent from Right-wing authoritarianism disguised as patriotism is taking place.

All the more reason to remind ourselves that the abandonment of the European "Enlightenment" has been premature...

MLA doesn't not do it again!

Yes, the MLA decided not to issue a resolution against the war in Iraq. Read Michael Berube's account of it here.

A resolution against hate mail intimidation of professors who do declare themselves against the war though, a particularly fulsome example of which we saw here on this blog anyone???

Anyone????

Democrats challenge Ohio vote procedures

Thanks to Jost, we can read some reportage about the Congressinal challenge to Ohio vote procedures AND about how the White House is making like the Dems are conspiracy theorists .

Missile Cuts, Hair Cuts, North Korea threatens to outlaw the bouffant!

Missile defense doesn't work, it's never worked, but it sure costs a lot of money!!! CNN.com - General: 'Glitch' caused missle defense test failure - Jan 12, 2005

So let's go for it. North Korea is a very powerful and menacing country: note their recent Haircut Defense Initiative

economic flight

this is interesting: according to the BBC, now China has declared itself ready for charter flights to and from taiwan, without having to go through hong kong.

this deal, apparently prepared by six taiwanese kuomingtang politicians, comes just as most international airlines have come under intense pressure to cease direct connections to taiwan in favor of new destinations in china.

furthermore, the way it is being announced is portraying the ruling green party as outmanoevred or against such a deal ("the deal must now be approved by the taiwanese president chen shui-bian's democratic progressive party").

but it is probably not too much of a stretch to think that this has been long coming: taiwan is one of the more important trade partners for china (not just vice versa), and thus a lucrative market for airlines.

"China refuses to talk directly to the Taiwanese government, a point it emphasised during these talks. Experts say that even if the direct flights go ahead, tensions between the two sides are unlikely to lessen."

surely the only reason the green party would be leery of this development is if all this actually is nothing more than muscling in on a profit center - access to the island?

symbolic politics aside, few politicians on the mainland or in taiwan are going to be such hard-heads as to spurn any logistical improvement in trade relations...

Naruwan!

For a dose of Taiwanese cuteness, check this out Naruwan Welcome to Taiwan. And remember that it has nothing to do with the fact that you can buy great knock off Le Corbusier chairs on one side of the street, and bump into a guy in a large straw hat on the other, sitting on a small stool at a busy intersection, with a snake in a small tub who is selling as I far as I could tell the snake or its blood during rush hour when commuters are going home and need a pick me up (snake blood is an aphrodisiac according to Chinese medicine lore). Really I didn't want to ask, snake seller saw me staring and thought I was a potential customer.

Loving Taiwan

is the slogan of the Democratic Progressive Party and their sentimentalized, rosy version of Taiwanese identity is perhaps embodied by the colorful greeting Naruwan! appropriated from the aboriginal tribes -- that is the newest Tourist Attraction strategy to give a friendlier face to the island. In fact there is a great deal to be said for Taiwan, but a cuddly place it really isn't. The rapid industrialization that has created the island's wealth has also transformed this once jewel-like subtropical place into one small Asian Ruhrgebiet.

Plastics was once the mainstay of the economy, the silicon chip soon overtook traditional manufacturing and now it's thin screens...as a remnant of its once completely export driven, self-abnegating, masochistically frugal economic policies, the top of the line computer peripherals and products it produces are exported and the lower quality cheapo stuff is sold at home, even though the increasingly wealthy Taiwanese can afford the fancy stuff.

Pretty this place aint, but fascinating yes -- and there is another strange feature of its urban architecture -- in a fit of renovation on the cheap and on the fly that characterized the way things were done around here about twenty years ago, ugly concrete buldings were covered with tile, creating the impression of giant bathrooms, turned inside out.

telling on teacher

Students with inchoate resentments, personal gripes and right wing political convictions are now taking it upon themselves to threaten their professors in a very direct manner.

While I think most administrators and department chairs are going to see this for what it is, there are certainly some who will consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the motto, "The customer is KING."

Tactics of intimidation have taken on a new edge as the right-wing feels itself empowered to quell dissent through the use of thinly veiled threats. I don't think in the end these threats will be successful, but they reveal how little the Bush faithful value democracy. And they say they are fighting for Iraqi democracy when they have no respect for the democratic values of dissent and the right to criticize the ruling party of this country!

The student/author of this letter of intimidation simply cannot stand to see evidence that those who do not support the beloved potentate of our beloved country can continue to express their views without fear of punishment.

And what the f is up with the threat of the lawsuit against the professor if he posts this letter on his website! You wrote the goddamned thing -- you delivered it, now take responsibility for it! Don't hide behind LATTE SIPPING TRIAL LAWYERS.

Jesus! And the part about how the prof is responsible for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq -- I see you are ready to join my Donald Rumsfeld pass the buck fan club.

Our great leader and his party have taught a new generation of young Americans the benefits of sophistry and false reasoning -- those who are against the war are responsible for the deaths of US soldiers.

Take a little responsibility for Chrissake! How low can you go? It's not a conspiracy, but thuggery has ever been condoned by the far-right when it comes to power. That is it's secret -- intimidation, physical and psychological has always been a part of its arsenal. It's a dark day in America.




Click to enlarge...

The Rude Pundit looks back in Anger at 2004

No one says it better than the Rude Pundit: It was a horrible year for the truth, in whatever form it might have taken, and certain people were more guilty than others in the game of RIGHTWING idolatry of 1) a stupid war, badly fought, 2) deceitful, mediocre leaders 3) an pseudo-religiosity that hates science and justice 4) moneyed Republicans screwing over their NASCAR loving brethren by convincing the working poor to subsidize the stock market gains of the rich.

after the leftist professors THE WORLD!!!!

Thanks to Michael Berube: This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

into the 21st century

to buttress the point that conspiracy thinking is the frankfurt pre-school for the media age, here's a nice quote from delillo's libra, p. 440-441 (nicholas branch, I should add, is his invented fbi agent working the cold jfk case; this is towards the end of the book).

"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded int he short term due mainly to chance."

it's amazing: a deft summary of a lot of salient aspects of conspiracy thinking: perfect closure, traceless anonymity, distraction and interpretation - and then, just as you think the feeb will be the one to debunk it, he is actually not the debunker but the one to counter what lacanians call assertitude with - chance. ouch!

of course JFK conspiracies can only be understood from an angle that Zapruder could not see, and so the symptomatic formations on the grassy knoll remain stuck on amateur video, while conspiracy theories after 9-11 have taken to mapping the covert connections of an invisible world online.

X mas blues

No matter how many times I X plain to my in-laws that I'm not a X-ian, that I am a secular person who tries to conduct herself in an ethical manner, they manage to X-press their disappointment at my and my husband's lack of X-ian feeling. Is it denial? Or is it something about X-ianity itself that makes it literally incomprehensible to believers that I don't believe and won't believe that Christ was the Messiah and that I should love our neighbors as myself?

I am beginning to believe that for true believers lack of belief is simply incomprehensible and intolerable and that among the most fervent believers, the only way to deal with lack of belief is to dismiss it as a stage or phase, something that one overcomes.

In the end, lack of belief fundamentally tests X-ian principles.