I know it is water weight gain b/c it would be humanly impossible for me to have gained weight on a diet of 1400 cals per day with exercise at 500 cals per hour each day.

I would fucking like to know WHY the fuck it’s possible to gain that much water in those few days. I could feel it to boot because my fluttering heart beat problems largely subsided for the past two weeks. But they were back with a vengeance Sunday evening. Woke up feeling like my heart was beating out of my chest this morning too. I assume this is due to the water retention or something.

Meanwhile, on the way to dinner yesterday, R and I were talking about the crazy that are republican candidates for president, which got me ranting about Corey Robin.

I’m explaining the problems I see with the book, the slippery shifting between conservatives and reactionaries, especially focusing on the way that using Robin’s framework, you can’t really address the “partial” reactionaries: namely, progressive men and women who for one reason or another can deal with leveling among *certain* groups or attempts to level hiearchies when the person happens to think those hierarchies are legitimate.

R: So you are gonna sit in the car and read a book which sounds stupid?

Me: Well, it’s interesting for tidbits of intellectual history. Certainly the situationality (word?) of reactionary thought is a proposition worth examining even if it remains unconvincing as a sweeping claim about all conservatives, though it may be applicaple to all reactionaries… But yeah, there’s something weird about this book. There are so many inconsistencies. There’s no rigor when it comes to defining terms, which is weird for a book if targeted at an academic audience. Characters from intellectual history are introduced with little explanation which is weird for a book targeted at general audience…

R: So, you are gonna sit in the car and read a book which sounds like the only reason it got published is that the author just happens to know the right people to get crap published? (Being a non-academic who likes to deal in cliches, just to get a laugh, sometimes R cuts to the chase.)

Me: Well, exactly! To borrow TINA’s characterization, Since I’m a smarty pants, I want to read it to find out why all these people think it’s so great and then reveal what a piece of crap the book is. Sheesh. Isn’t that obvious? (R tries to maintain a stone face as he stares ahead at rush hour traffic, but I see a smile curving his lips beneath the mustache and beard that needs trimming.) I mean, it’s like TINA said, I’m a smarty pants right? Of course I have to read a book that lots of lefties think is effin’ brill, just so I can explain why it isn’t effin’ brill. Duh!

And to that, we start laughing. None of which stops me from complaining about the whole gender issue that troubles me. As I noted on FB recently, I’m really irked by the way Robin writes about women’s oppression in the book.

First, he tends to want to be so sweeping in his claims, not just about reactionaries and conservatives, but about pretty much everything he writes about. Again, I’m only 25% into the book, but like Michael Pollak said, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to spout off?!

So, early on in the book, Robin writes about a social process whereby oppressed people, defined in relations of subordination to those considered their superiors, press against those constraints and rebel. This causes a reaction and we call these people reactionaries. He then speaks of the way secretaries must deal with bosses, much as workers in factories must deal with managers, serfs must deal with lords, even wives must deal with husbands. Now, the first time I read this, the word “even” jarred me. Initially I thought, well, it’s a book written to a general audience, so he might have to hold hands on that topic, warm people up to the idea that oppressive relations exist within a marriage. Good on Robin!

But then I wondered, why are factory workers the default male here, while one has to point specifically to the existence of female workers, secretaries. And then I thought, why are there workers in factories — kinda generic — but a specific occupation, secretaries. WEll, obviously, he wants to be incluuuuuuuuuuuuusive.

But then he repeats this way of listing illustrative oppressions throughout the rest of the introductory chapters where we lose the pairing secretary/boss and the only one preserved to point at gender is husband/wife. So, I keep reading sentences that include pairings like this: worker/boss, serf/lord, husband/wife. And I’m all like, wait a minute. He is ignoring all the interesting work done on oppression, for one thing: theorists have delineated the way different oppressions work and where those concerned with structural accounts of society have pointed out the problem with individualizing assumptions. I mean, if you are trying to list oppressions with illustrative pairings, then you run into some problems with, say, race. or with heterosexuality. disability. You get my point? Robin is pointing to social roles — as we might call them in sociology– but there isn’t a corresponding social role that makes sense to his formulation for other forms of oppression. Slaveholder/slave might make sense, but what about white/black? Whiteness/race? Heterosexist/homosexual? Ablist/disabled? Even women/men doesn’t work when you have a list composed of serf/landlord, worker/boss, etc.

Basically, he’s trying to say something while preserving some sort of literary decorum - where people get the basic point with gestures at social phenom. I guess. It’s like he’s trying to point at a complex issue without having to get into the boring details, without having to disrupt the grammatic flow. (tee hee, like that phrase or what?) I get the sense that this is to preserve, what?, the integrity of the writing? So you don’t let the demand for intellectual precision trip up the flow of the sentences?

Dunno. All I know is, it seems a huge shame to ignore a rich body of literature from Eric Olin Wright, Iris Marion Young, John Roemer (I think, I’m pulling this out of memory and not googling), feminists on the topic of oppression and how it works, etc. Wright, for instance, talked about people in different class locations to capture the phenom of occupations and social roles where individuals in them didn’t necessarily benefit from the direct exploitation of labor but who nonetheless existed in relations of superordination to subordinates.

Blah blah. But this constant reference to wives and husbands continued to bug the shit out of me. So I did a search on Kindle to see if women were mentioned elsewhere. As I said to R in the car, why on earth constantly refer to husbands/wives as a signifier of gender oppression?

I mean, I don’t have to be married to you to experience oppression such as when my old boss always asked me, the only woman in the room, to do secretarial type things. Or the time one of the guys told me that women weren’t good at computing. Or listening to the guys, day in and day out, make jokes about sleeping with each other’s wives. As in, “Yeah, that’s what your wife told me last night.” As in, “Where you at?” “Over here with your girl and a forty o’ beer.”

So, WTF? Searching on the words woman/women to see where gender might be dealt with in a more careful way in the book, I note that a later chapter deals with heterosexism. So, clearly, he must have concerned himself with the difficulty of individualizing relations of oppression such that labor and capital becomes factory workers/boss (I mean, why not computer programmers and boss?), such that men/women become for a moment, secretary/manager, but mostly is simply described as husbands/wives (and one, IIRC, it becomes men/wives). You can’t really do that with other forms of oppression which operate by constituting hierarchical relations between groups of people but simply don’t do so necessarily through relations of superordination/ subordination.

As I said to R, I don’t understand how such sloppy thinking gets a pass. I guess I’m used to political theory written by people with some training in the rigors of analytic school of philosophy. Those folks lay out an argument and then always present the counterarguments, and their objections to them — if they can mount an objection. If they can’t, they simply list them as noted, as problems for their account. But even the supposedly sloppy continental philosophers seem to be a bit more disciplined than what I find in this book. And even when they aren’t, it’s generally because the audience is assumed to be acclimated to the specialty and thus in no need of coddling. References to certain technical bits and uses of certain words/refs to authors are shorthand arguments for the continentals. Which is why it frustrates people who read them without the background in the lingo.

One of the reasons why he does this is that he has an “issue” with the operations of power in civil society - in the “private” sphere. He seems to think that too much attention is paid power as it operates in the “public” sphere. Which I’ll get to in another post. For now, here are some quotes to capture what I mean:

“One of the reasons the subordinate’s exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast …. is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicans and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.” (I have no idea what page this is b/c I’m using a Kindle and haven’t figured out how to figure out page numbers as they correspond to a print version. *sigh*)

That pretty much captures the obsession with private life. It also captures the simplistic dualisms. There’s “political” deliberation, constitution, amendment, rights. And then there is “private” stuff which is, apparently, not political. Alrighty then. I mean, to interpret this in a better light, you could say that what he’s trying to do is capture the always already political character of private life to begin with. But why write as if this is a new insight? Why deploy the dualisms at all, why deploy them without interrogation if he felt he must make use of them. Perhaps it’s important to deploy them, in order to demolish them via your theory? This is like a little kid putting up blocks to smash them, no?

More on the private sphere and conservativism:

“Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty — or a wariness of change, a believe in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism… But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalist, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force - the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of superiors, particular in the private sphere. “

Ahh. see? You can see the problem, right? His fetish for the private, and his fetish for individualizing relations of oppression starts here: he wants to be interesting and different in his focus on how these things take place in a private sphere by which he means intimate relations (such as that between husband/wife, boss/secretary, slaveholder/slave). Relations of superordination/subordination are intimate, individual, personally felt. In order to constantly strike that iron, you have to constantly retreat to this issue of the personal, private, individual, emotional, felt, feeling to make a point thereby. Your sieve captures nothing else.

“Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation — even wives in a marriage — in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. They are discplined and punished. They do much and receive little.”

Which is interesting because the formulations seem so archaic. No one calls themselves a secretary any more. LOL. But the funnier thing is, why not just say computer programmer and manager? Why is a factory worker perceived as fitting into this relationship of superordination/subordination. Why call out secretary? Why not insurance sales rep? Why not graphic designer? Or marketing event manager? Copywriter? All jobs that tend to be held by women. Why are managers and bosses seen as people who think they are superior to others. Really? These days? Even long ago? I’m reminded of the book, Foreman’s Empire. Factory workers and foreman, who definitely had more intimate one on one relations with line workers but whose role just doesn’t fit into this framework.

And then there’s this bit that reminds me of the famous essay “and some of them were brave”. Elizabeth Spelman and Maria Lugones called it the “ampersand problem in feminist thought.” It was a reference to the way oppression subtly worked among men and women leftists during the 60s. The list of oppressions would proceed as: women, blacks, workers, homosexuals, hispanics, aboriginals, etc. The point of the title was to underline how the word “women” was used in a way that revealed the author’s unconscious thought: that the identity woman could be separated from race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, etc. Are workers women? Why is it “blacks and women”? Should it be, more accurately, “black men and women and white women”? etc. (Sorry, again I’m being lazy and not looking up exact details of essays here. I believe the ampersand problem was in an article called, “Have we got a theory for you!”, which was also a reference to the way white women in feminist thought tended to theorize *for* women of color….)

So, I’ma gonna hit the gym. It’s pouring, so no ride today. But you can see why I was disappointed in this book. I wanted to like it, but so far I’m disturbed by what in yesterday’s entry I described as “platitudes.” It feels like these essays trade in platitudes carried around by well-meaning liberals where the struggle against oppression is something other people do and worry about, and about which they like to expound, but do not get themselves too dirtied up in the details to worry about things like the ampersand problem in their thought.

was diagnosed with a metabolic condition earlier this year. lately, the medication change seems to be associated with some health issues such as - love this! - 8 lb weight gains in 5 days. a gain that came on top of another 5 lb weight gain a couple of weeks before. Now, if I were stuffing doritos into my face and not exercising, that might make sense. but even if I were, it still doesn’t make sense. 8 lbs in 5 days would require eating 28,000 extra calories in 5 days.Lovers, that would mean, what?, about 12 large sausage pizzas in addition to a normal diet over the course of 8 days. Like I told my doctor, OK. I gained weight. But shouldn’t I have had a LOT more fun than I have had during those five days! Instead, I’ve been exercising regularly and eating, if not a balanced diet, then at least not one where I was eating almost 7000 extra calories a day than I need!

So, I’ve been in and out of doc’s for tests, medication tweaks, etc. For awhile, my heart was racing here and there, issues with fluttery/uneven heart beats, and awaking in the middle of the night or the morning feeling as if my heart stopped. That’s happened in the past but I chalked it up to a stressful lifestyle and the fact that congenital heart disease runs in the family. All my great uncles died before they were 45 and my great aunt and grandma all had heart attacks by the time they were 55.

Alas, in spite of exercising 5 days a week and biking to work regularly, including 1.5 hr rides on weekends, gaining weight steadily. So, I’m on this protein sparing modified fast and have upped the gym routine so that it’s at least an hour of stair mistress and rope training, an hour and twenty when R doesn’t come along, 6 days a week. It’s not the kind of casual stuff that will allow for reading. I’m telling ya, the stair mistress - couldn’t read if I tried on that suckah. Definitely can’t on the rope trainer. It’s one of those marpo kinetics dealios, http://www.marpokinetics.com/. Lately, to mix it up, I’ve been pulling rope up (backward) for five minutes for every 40 minute session. Then, I mix it up with a little kickboxing movement because, as Tae Bo always says, any time you get your knees above your waist, you’re killin’ the abs man. This is kinda fun to do, though kicks my ass, when I pull down on the rope, I kick up pulling knee into chest. Goal: make knee level with boob for the win! Then, I do it on one knee, so I have to balance the pulls. The reason why I do all this rope training business is because a long time ago I heard that it’s good to exercise with arms above heart - good for heart.

It’s also because, being a biker, I get way too much action on my legs. Speaking of which, one of the things I do when mashing the stairs on Stair Mistress is do it backwards. I grapevine it as well, but backwards always gets comments to the effect that people think the old broad is hard core. To which I laugh and say, “no way man. It’s easier.” Last night, some musclehead tells me that’s not true. So I look it up and by damn, he’s right: it’s harder. But I don’t understand why it *feels* easier. To some extent, it may be because you can rest on your arms, making your arms take up the burden of holding your weight, rather than legs. Which was def. true in the beginning. Sometimes, I think it’s just pyschological. Feels easier because it’s different and new. So, you are concentrating on the movement, taking your mind off boredom, pain, clock-watching. This translates into the psychological experience of feeling something is “easier”?

Beats me. Still, I have calves that make guys at the gym drool in jealousy, I’m tellin’ ya. I mean, all muscle heads want calves like chicks have, meatier and more curvaceous. But mine have now developed three tiers of bulging muscle - I know, I brag! — and in the front there is a nice ridge that pops out when I’m bulked up mid-routine. Ab muscles kick ass too. It’s the layers of fat in between them that are Teh Suck! Meanwhile, it turns out that this metabolic condition is so awesome that it makes me gain weight concentrated in one area: the gut! Isn’t that great!? Which is so cool because it increases risk of heart attack. So awesome!

So, the exercise schedule, uh, cuts into the book reading even more than the old exercise schedule did. Of course, since I’ll be riding in the centuries again this summer, I guess I’ll be that much further ahead in my training. Oh, and the other thing that cuts into reading time is the tracking of everything. Looking up calories, entering ‘em into a fitness diary, recording how many minutes of exercise, how many watts, and then assessing mood and shit. ho hum. The doctor said the results of an echo and other tests were all ok, except that she needs to up dosage for the metabolic condition. Still, she also thinks I should wear a heart monitor for a month, to get a little deeper into the whole irregular heartbeat problem. So, no heart failure showed up on the Echo heart test, but she thinks maybe we should weird out another possibility around heart conditions.

So, where the hell was I? Oh, about Robin’s book. It occured to me, in his passage on Hobbes, that one thing that is confusing is that he’s writing about reactionaries and the reactionary mind. As such, he tells us that Hobbes was an example of a reactionary disliked and distrusted by conservatives. Hmmmm. OK. It’s clear that reactionaries are this interesting breed of thinker on his thesis, people who are situational: they react to events around them and, in doing so, cultivate a reactionary ideology. And as much as Robin, in the book, wants to distinguish between reactionary and conservative, I’m afraid that, since he’s trading on interest in *conservative* thinking, then he muddies the water. This is especially true in his appearances on t.v, radio, and in published interviews where, to my mind, he doesn’t do enough to make the distinction. In fact, he appears to be guesting places in order to be the resident liberal expert on the conservative mind. This confusing things because when he starts asking or people start asking, they tend to confuse reactionary with conservatives. REactionaries, on Robin’s view (so far in my reading), are the ones who espouse an activist ideology of struggle to resurrect in modified and radicalized form the past. But conservatives, he says, don’t trust reactionaries. But what happens when he’s asked to speak is that people don’t quite grasp the distinction so that everything he specifically says he’s applied to conservatives. This happened on Up with Chris Hayes awhile back, where he was resident expert on cons, where little was said about the distinction between cons and reactionaries.

Oh shit! TBC. I have to hit the gym because I have dinner date this evening. The company, after making a team of developers work 12 hr days 6 days a week for 8 weeks is springing for dinner out with their families. I asked my boss if he was sure he wanted wives and children to be there. Really? You want dagger eyes to be tossed your way? Reallly? LOL

p.s. one thing that bugged me was the doctor asking if I wanted flomax (sp?) I think that’s the name brand she used. She asked because she said that the diuretic would relieve what has got to be water weight gain. I said, but I want to find out why this weird water weight gain, not treat the symptom. I mean, if it’s heart failure, then it’s blood cells leaking (something like that, google it beeeyotches) which is different than retaining water in my muscles and organs because of, say, a salty diet - for which diuretics are used. Yes, she said. So, wtf recommend fLomax. Hmmm. Grrrrr.

ho hum.

i just don’t get what it proves. Duncan suggested that what I see as Robin’s sloppiness, the lack of precision in his definition, might be a feature in so far as he’s writing to a general audience. Which is fine. I write to a general audience too! But if what you do is string one author together with others in order to make a grand claim about what conservativism is, without providing much of a sense of where your position fits with others, then how can it be written to a general audience? I have a vague understanding of the common claim that conservatives are opposed to change in general. The only exposure I’ve had to that idea is through reading LBO, specifically Carrol Cox writing that. After that, I have no idea what a body of literature on conservative thougth has had to say about it. Which means, I would guess, that I’m a general reader, a typical, educated reader of the leftist persuasion - precisely the kind of audience to which the book was marketed. Judging by the places where I saw mention of the book - interviews on TV, book reviews online and in print, guest appearances on radio shows - then I, perhaps egotistically, think the book is targeted at people like me.

But if I have little clue as to what are the general claims made about conservativism, then while it’s certainly possible to read and understand this book, what isn’t possible to do very well is have any handle on whether Robin is full of shit or not. Apparently, you just have to trust his reading.

But why should I? Robin doesn’t give me any reason at all to trust that his particular interpretation is worthy. He tells me that he’s making an intervention, providing a new improved way of looking at conservative thought, but I am never really given any sort of literature review so as to have some sense of where Robin’s intervention fits.

The other thing that’s missing is why? Who cares? Why the fuck should I care, why should it matter that Robin has come up with a new improved way of looking at conservative thought. When I switched to drinking diet soda made with Splenda, I had a reason to prefer it to saccharin and aspartame. Splenda = tasty. Aspartame = bitter. I would have lived with the saccharin and asparame, but Splenda = much more tasty.

So, with Robin, since I don’t really know what the alternative thoughts on conservativism were - except some vague claim once made by Carrol about conservatives not liking change - i have no idea why the other views were ok and tolerable, but just not as great at Robin’s. I don’t even know what they were, actually, since Robins doesn’t really going into them much, except for fleeting gestures at the others who say this about conservatives not liking change.

The other thing is, I have no idea why it matters politically. At least not so far. But you’d think that, in abook like this, there’d be some glimmer, early on, why I should see a political or practical or something advantage to seeing things Robin’s way and not, say, Carrol’s way. Or, perhaps, seeing things Carrol’s way AND Robin’s way. Maybe Robin addresses this later, so my comment might be premature, but so far not a peep.

So, I really have no reason why this book is compelling - haven’t been told it anyway. It’s interesting to read, but Robin strikes me as a frustrated novelist. Someone who knows how to pick up interesting phrases from other books and then ties them into his own work. Sometimes, I feel like a whole passage was written just to say something slightly clever. The tendency to stroke the phrase also suggests that this is a person who wishes he could write more of what the cook kids these days call “creative non-fiction.”

Also I find some of the approach suspect, especially when he says things like “People on the left often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” (I’d quote the page but I’m reading on a kindle and haven’t figured out if there is such a thing as figuring out the page number were this print! )

First of all: really? The left doesn’t understand that conservatives are bummed because they’ve lost a way of life, status, money, whatever? I find that hard to buy.

I find it hard, second of all, because Robin tells us that leftists used to be the ones who understood that politics was a zero sum game, and in the same paragraph as the above claim. Thus, “It used to be one of the great virtures of the left that it alone understood the often zero-sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they - and ony they - who speak for them.”

*shakes head*

wuh?

OK. This slip sliding business. Wooo. making me dizzy, man.

Does anyone see what I mean? There’s no fucking there there? It’s a lot of empty nonsense. No rigor. Like not a soul called him on a shittin thing he’s supposedly ever typed. How could anyone have let that slide?

what he really wants to slip in there is a jab at fellow leftists. *rolls eyes* So, apparently, the entire pointing of writing this is not so much to understand conservatives, but to understand why there are problems with leftists and maybe even some leftists’ views of conservatives. So, while you’re busy thinking about the nasty leftists who’ve forgotten all about *real* class conflict and *real* class politics you’re not really paying attention to the fact that he’s just figured out a way to take a jab at leftists while making hearts bleed for misunderstood conservatives who really do suffer….

oiy. lord. poor misunderstood conservatives. they really do suffer under a radical regime.

and then there is the problem he, so far, hasn’t addressed. what about white “liberals” and “progressives” - are they somehow magically free of the human tendency to love most what they no longer have - which is, in this case, white privilege?

I say in this case, because this is a formulation Robin makes frequently: we love most what we have lost, what we no longer have. Really? I lost my virginity. Sorry! I don’t miss it that much! I’ve lost my water bottle quite a few times. I mean, I’ve lost about four water bottles. Don’t miss a blessed one!

I’m no longer in povery, don’t miss that.

I mean, what kind of pap is this: we love most what we have lost?

Really? It’s .. what is that? A platitide…. unthinking. Just said because he thinks it resonates with people. but what the fuck does he mean by it? Is it a statement that holds up to scrutiny?

But, back to what I was gonna say about identity. What happens when you are a white woman leftist? Are you a conservative on race, a leftists on gender? class? Is it possible to be a reactionary against the process of dismantling white privilege and, at the same time, be a big lefty who advances all kinds of other leftists causes in the name of leveling hierarchies? Well, of course it is possible. We see it all the time! And of course there are people, like Phyllis Schafley, who are women who embrace conservative views on gender even though they haven’t appeared to lose anything. OF course, he has a disclaimer in there that it could just be the perception of lose. There’sno objective criteria for measuring if someone has really faced loss. So, then I guess we’re talking about something beyond the level of the individual psyche and the individual’s experience of loss and on to some meta-individual experience or something?

This is just one of the examples that drives me insane. Platitudes. He’s dealing in platitudes.

Then there is the slippery problem of just who can be called a conservative.

Why can’t Robin, himself, be seen as conservative. If it’s possible that a white male leftists be conservative wrt women’s liberation, but not conservative about eberything else, then why not Robin be conservative in his opposition to anarchists. I got to thinking about this reading TINA’s response to any reading of Robin to suggest that he might be sympathetic to anarchists.

Now, if anarchists are opposed to all forms of hierarchy and if TINA is right that nothing about Corey’s politics should suggest he’s a supporter of anachists and is, in fact, a firm supporter of government/state, then what makes Robin not a conservative. Why is supporting the state and representative democracy against radical democracy and full democratic participation in the decicions that effect our lives not a conservative position.

After all, Robin uses the word hiearchy and says that social struggles have been fought against social hierarchies such as patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism, ethnocentricism, etc. If movements to dismantle hierarchies are, thus, progressive and radical - revolutionary in their desire to level hierarchies between people– if what scared people during the Seattle General strike of 1919 was that people themselves took over the functions of government so that people showed that they didn’t need government to provide services, then why isn’t Robin’s (and others’) resistance to an anarchist politics a form of conservative reaction?

I think it is. Naturally, they do not. Even so, to strengthen his argument, Robin would have to address that issue. OBviously, there are differences over what constitutes a legitimate hiearchy. Robin uses the term hiearchy, but clearly thinks that some are the object of legitimate opposition while others are not. Let’s assume for instance that as a parent, he happens to be for hiearchies of authories between parents and children. There are people who advocate dismantling hiearchies between adults and children. Why is one struggle legit and not others.

Duncan mentioned that he didn’t think that the lack of rigor was necessarily a drawback. Sure, writing to an educated, popular audience doesn’t require the rigors required of academic scholarship. Still, Robin never really tells me why his book matters. He’s clear speaking to, positioning his book as an advance over, other competing treatments of conservativism. But he never goes into detail as to what those competing positions are, and why they are flawed and what his position offers to the discussion. I also don’t know why it matters politically or practically. Will something be better about political life or political debate if we elect to use Robin’s ideas?

I also feel as if he’s just stringing together quotes from conservatives. I have no idea whether he’s cherry picking or not. That’s clearly on me: I don’t know the literature well enough to make this judgment. Then, why is this book written to a general audience who, like me, won’t know the literature either. So, it makes me wonder if he’s just confused about who his audience is. The general reader? Who is just there to be massaged with quote after quote. Here, lookee me. I now know some quotes from Joseph de Maistre. Not that Corey Robin ever bothered to explain who Maistre is, mind. He drops one name after another, most of whom ring bells, but nearly all of whom I could have used a bit of a backgrounder. D’israeli? Heard that one. But that’s about it. Anyone writing to a general audience would not just use a last name and would provide a wee bit of a bio/intellectual history to position the guy.

This reads like a book for someone who wants to appear clever at dinner parties. Oh, as Maistre said of the French Revolution…..’ tee hee, ho ho, hee hee hoo ha. Try some hummus dahlink? Dim sum? Oh, can’t. Watching my carbs.

Or

guy posts a list of web sites with pieces about the demands working group. i think he was trying to show that there is lots of positive publicity for a Jobs For All demand and, therfore, a lot of support for the demand so, being popular and supported, it must be what da peepul want.

another guy points out that all but one of the articles, one by someone at glen beck’s web site, are about the controversy over demands: that the demands working group emerged but is a controversial working group because lots of people at OWS oppose demands in any form. so, there’s no consensus on what da peepul want, let alone what active participants in OWS NYC wants. all the articles seem to do is show that there is a lot of debate over the idea that there should be demands.

another guy says, the demands working group won’t get taken seriously because the thing they are demanding - jobs for all — isn’t something the 90% of the movement supports. He then says that the problem is that the demands working group doesn’t name and support things that the movement can get consensus on. Rather, the demands working group puts forward a demand that they want regardless as to the rest of the people in the OWS ‘movement’ want.

Another guy retorts that Jobs for All is in the interest of society as a whole. He says that obviously the Jobs for All demand will help the 99% so, therefore, if you are against it, then you are against the 99% and should get out of the movement because you are obviously in it for your own selfish interests.

And that’s the debate in a nutshell, I guess.

http://www.possible-futures.org/2012/01/03/a-movement-without-demands/

They make complaints about the no demands strategy, completely failing to get it through their thick skulls that the difference between an anarchist approach and their socialist approach is that the former refuse to cede recognition to government and the other does. why is that so fucking hard to understand. Thus, anarchists are guided by *theory* from the get go: it’s a theory about how society works and how to change it. It’s a theory about human consciousness - how people know - and what it is they are coming to know. This guides their strategy for how to conduct a social movement. Seems pretty fucking obvious to me. This article pretends that anarchists have no theory and no strategy rather than approaching the issue head on. Why are anarchists wrong in their claims about what consititutes social life under capitalism, how we come to know this reality, and what we can and should do about it? Why are they wrong to think that social movements should prefigure the world they want to bring into being?

Those are the questions a socialist has to address.

This article is a perfect example of why it’s a mistake to critique social life if you don’t actually participate in it. Visiting NYC a couple of times and observing exchanges on an email list doesn’t fucking count (Dean). Had either of these authors bothered, they might have learned that, Omigosh! people at OWS actually do know that the 99% isn’t a singular bloc but is, rather, constituted by a variety of “subjectivities” (gag me with a spoon). It is precisely that understanding that is behind the desire to not make demands. That’s because they have a particular theory about how people come to consciousness about what they want out of society, etc. If you happen to believe that people come to understand their needs and desires, best, by being involved in the actual struggle against the injustices of *this* world, then whatever subjectivities exist now, might not be the subjectivities that emerge through struggle.

Ahhhh fuck it. What fucking morons.

The whole Alexander Cockburn v Hitchens thing got me to poking around and I discovered this criticism, the sort of battling among upper west side Manhattanites that meant that I pretty much disliked any columnist associated with that world. They seemed like such a parochial bunch of cronies, more concerned with slamming each other in debate lists, regardless as to how much they bored everyone else with the cattiness.

DOUG HENWOOD,
Left Business Observer, Manhattan

Doug Henwood what?s this nonsense about “preliminary research.” What you actually mean is that after my column your friend Katha called up and whined on the phone and you pledged to rally to her side and now here you are, puffing?a little late?onto the battlefield. Actually, back in 1993
when I was writing about Janet Reno’s satanic abuse prosecutions in Dade County, I think I did lament to at least one Nation editor that it would be useful if Pollitt piped up and I’m not at all sure that her initial cavils at what I was writing on the subject weren?t prompted by my suggestion to her that she take a decent position on the issue. That?s my preliminary
memory anyway.

And Doug, what?s all this nonsense about “ad hominem” flames? I directed a serious piece of criticism at Pollitt dwelling solely on the substantive issue at hand. An “ad hominem” onslaught would have involved unflattering or spiteful personal slurs, of the sort you yourself indulge in from time to time, as when you once referred to Alan Greenspan as the “foul-breathed” chairman of the Fed. That?s ad hominem, Doug. Denunciation of Greenspan?s documented policies is not. As for my alleged tendency to praise right-wingers but not lefties, I’ve said kind things about right-wingers and also pwoggies marginally to the left of the mainstream like yourself. After all, for years you?ve been featuring my endorsement of your all too intermittent publication, Left Business Observer.

Apropos my supposed enthusiasm for the right, I think, Doug, your problem is that you rarely advance into the American hinterland west of the Hudson, and regard it as a place of terror infested with fundamentalists, militia men and other demons of the polite liberal metropolitan imagination inflamed by hysterical fundraising letters from Morris Dees. Last time you came to the Northwest preliminary research suggests to me you were almost too frightened to get out of the car. But you know my views. Recently you were quavering to me nervously about my hopes of a populist coalition of left and right on basic issues of liberty. I berated you for timidity and
said you?d jump at your own shadow. As it is, you sit in New York peering at your computer screen and talking pretty much exclusively to people of the same class and intellectual disposition. This leads to very conventional thought plus frantic squeals of alarm to your gossip buddies whenever your stringent norms of political correctness are transgressed.

Larry Pratt never said that Heston was a chardonnay swilling liberal sellout. I once wrote that what I liked about Pratt as head of Gunowners of America was that he regarded Heston as a chardonnay-swilling etc. etc. This prompted another round of squeals from you, plus a flurry of e-mails about the vileness of Pratt not ?I think?based on any research by your good self,
or any effort to talk to the beast Pratt but on some newspaper clips. As for your crack about the Klan, I suspect that’s what you basically think working-class rebels are, outside a few union organizers known by you on personal basis. Doug, spend less time on your List and more getting out and around.

What I’m not grasping is why they, the Demands Working Group, doesn’t seem to do things to build consensus. It looks like all they do is find other WGs to support a proposal and then rely on them to get the General Assembly filled with people who will vote for the proposal - even if those people don’t normally attend the General Assembly. And yet at the same time, what happens is that even with the endorsement, they aren’t getting agreement to come to the GA and help vote for it!

What the fuck kind of idiotic politics is that?

The way consensus works elsewhere is that you keep addressing the issues of concern, altering the proposal until you’ve got something lots of people can agree to.
It’s not easy to do that, but when done with respect for the positions of those who disagree with one another, when done on the assumption that people are disagreeing for reasons that can be worked through, then it can be a very rewarding process. You might not get what you want, if you’re someone who backed the original proposal, but if you don’t even try to work with others to figure out why they object and what can be done about those objections, you won’t get what you want either.

On the other hand, one of the respondents to the initial discussion about the latest failure said that they were simply going to go create their own General Assembly. Once they got the General Assembly they wanted, they would get the Jobs for All Demand voted on and passed. And to hell with all the anti-democratic anarchists in OWS!

Nice!

Elena:

I’m sorry it did not pass but I think we should all agree that the GA that voted it down has been relegated to irrelevance, as has been the case in some OWS’ around the country, but have then been re-formed by more sane, forward-thinking individuals. As I stated earlier, however, we shouldn’t let our demands vanquish with the irrelevance of this GA. I think a new city-wide GA would be more effective in passing demands and getting rid of this idiotic 90% consensus model that has never worked. To not have demands is to cut the movement off at the knees and we don’t have time for such self-righteous, needlessly doctrinaire approaches that benefit NO ONE.
I’m 100% on board with moving forward without the GA that voted down our first demand.

From Mexico City,
Elena

An interesting response to some of the debates:

Brothers and Sisters in Demands WG,

I cannot be there tonight it is a Jewish holiday.

But you can all feel free to articulate that I will formally resign from the Demands Working Group (as many others have) if:

a) Jobs for All goes to the GA again in the way it has now done 3 times.
b) If other Demands Subgroups think just going to the GA is acceptable or productive without getting (A YET TO BE DETERMINED, but surely more than 5 OWS WG endorsements.) There are after like 100 WGs.

As I and others have said for over two months: SPOKES COUNCIL PARTICIPATION IS VITAL, and, MOST OTHER WORKING GROUPS (HATE) OR DISTRUST THIS GROUP.

I think some of you have basic political views incompatible with my own, and that I can accept. But talk of ‘obstructionosts, of ‘Citywide GAs’, and A TOTAL lack of respect for fellow occupiers is making it a little hard to be in/ defend this group to the rest of the movement. Which some of us SPEND TOO MUCH TIME DOING.

I think some of the JFA Subgroup sabotage the effort of all of us to achieve Demands. I dont think they represent us well publicly. I think they yell and cry and shout and couch authoritarianism in some kind of faux-vangardist elitism. And that’s worked SO fucking well for the last 100 years. lol.

I propose amending our charter to make it impossible to formulate a demand and go straight to the GA without a much broader levels of consensus. I also think we ought to send a delegate to spokes at least once a week. Someone presentable and sane.

I really appreciate the hard work you all have been doing. Even those of you in JFA Subgroup whom I disagree with tactically. We ALL have put in work. I think if we do this through Solutions Cluster and clean up our groups image a bit more we will get JFA (NOT AS IS)and other demands passed in the next three months. But obviously not the way we are going about it.

Some people act like “OH MY FUCKING GOD, IF WE DONT GET IN A DEMAND THE MOVEMENT WILL IMPLODE!” I assure you that doesn’t have a realistic understanding of the poltics in play. And a gross misunderstanding of anarchists, the Anonymous, Global Revolution, and the reality of the political epoch we are now in. Demands also are a little silly when the whole movement is in retreat.

I believe that Demands WG is an Operations Group, it has a functionality to articulate demands. To do so we still have work to do to make OWS see us as allies no co-opters. I encourage all of you to think hard about standing our ground as Working Group, but drastically changing tactics toward inclusion and transparency.

I wish you all the happiest of holidays. It is time that we emerge from our bunker and work in solidarity. If you can all embrace that tacticallly I promise you that 3 months from now we will have demands. But if JFA Subgroup cannot be more humble and less old guard sectarian. Then I’ll quit this group and join Visions & Goals, or Call to Action, or Poltical and Electoral Reform or any of the 30 or 40 other WGs that were having the same conversation as us, but also with others.

And I get like 8 people yell some sectarian horseshit at this. But really folks, three long months. What exactly did we contribute as a WG to OWS?

Walter Adler
Deamnds Working Group
Money Out Subgroup
NYCGA
OWS

Apparently, a Swedish crew was in the states, documenting the Black Power movement and other events between 67-75, the film forgotten about in a cellar for 30 years.

Excellent stuff. There’s an early scene, with Stokely Carmichael hanging around with his mom, the Swedish crew trying to interview her, sitting on an iconic sofa. (If, for nothing else, you should watch this for stunning shots of most awesome circa 1972 sunglasses, skinny mod pants, flared collars, the awesome circa 67ish no-mustache-beard on one of the Swedish camera guys, and Angela Davis’s afro on film.)

She seems a little uncomfortable. Stokely grabs the mic and starts asking her questions about her life when they migrated to the u.s. It is the most unusual scene in so far as he keeps trying to get her to say *why* they lived 8 people in a three room apartment, why her husband could only find low paid transient work in spite of skills, why he was always getting laid off, etc. He has to draw it out of her, like she doesn’t have the words to say it, as if she still doesn’t know how to say that it wasn’t their fault, that they weren’t responsible for it, that it wasn’t inevitable that they lived that way.

In other words, her voice, posture, facial features suggest a woman who has internalized the idea that their poverty was of their own making, nothing to blame but themselves for being failures. She doesn’t have the words to even name is “racism.” She doesn’t know how to say Negro, still feels uncomfortable saying the word, as if she shouldn’t say it, as the only thing she can say is “colored” which, as she explains, was the only word they knew at the time.

This has got to be the most powerful scene of the movie, to see the human face reveal the powerful emotions associated with the ability to speak, to give social relations a name, to utter words that were uttered only because of a human struggle for something intangible (and lately derided as useless to real classstruggle): dignity.

The ability to name something racism, the ability to name yourself against the dominant society’s name for you - these two simple acts - of naming - were something that you could see a woman of, maybe, 40, struggle to actually achieve.

I think the next most powerful scene is the interview with the president of TV Guide who wrote a TV Guide piece accusing Switzerland, Holland, etc. of being anti-american for showing nothing but bad things about the u.s. on their TV programs.

The Swedes interview the guy defending how great the u.s. is and intersperse it with a scene of a u.s soldier beating Vietnamese prisoners.

I’m totally impressed with Perrin’s attack on Hitchens. Of course, the rhetoric is nicely crafted so you can’t see it as an attack at all. It just seems like a nice, understanding, generous letter written by a protege to a man who…

is such a fucking small minded mean spirited asshole that, upon his death, he couldn’t be bothered to mount and give a final hump to the guy licking his balls, begging for forgiveness.

and I can’t think of a better way to honor Hitchens’ legacy, to show how well you learned from him, than to manage to demonstrate what a fucking asshole Hitchens was without looking like an asshole for doing so. DP comes off, of course, as just a totally nice, loving, respecting guy, just telling his story and who doesn’t have a meanspirited bone in his body. He’s all cowered down in beta male position, showing his belly.

Bottom fighter, like a cat.

Which is great because Amanda Marcotte and whomever else will be told they are childish, one sided critics who have no heart. And yet, Perrin leaves, at least for me, the worst portrait of Hitchens I’ve yet read: a man who was apparently warm, kind, generous to underlings, who apparently didn’t lord it over even the smallest person among the literati. Yet, apparently he only did so on the condition that you never, ever betray him - and Hitchens got to define the terms of betrayal. If, at his feet you believed that it was all about the good, the true, the beautiful, if this was all about the good fight for the good society, and that what mattered most was the strength of your intellectual ideas and not the character of your person. If you made the mistake of thinking that you could criticize Hitchens just as he once criticized you, that you could hold Hitchens to the standards he’s held others and expect an explanation of the deviation if Hitch disagreed — then you would suffer for that grave error. You would be punished, banished, scorned for life by an unforgiving manipulator who dished out generosity in order to cultivate a fawning crowd around him, to protect and defend him no matter what he did.

That is a far worse character portrait than anyone paints by calling Hitchens an alcoholic, racist, mediocre writer.