Aesthetic Materialism

    People say, "If the feeling doesn't come naturally, don't force it."  In my tradition of maximum contrariness, I'm going to say the opposite: do force it.   Of course, quite often, emotions can take us by surprise.  You know how this is: you're saying to yourself, "This is stupid, this is stupid," and then you discover a lump in your throat.  You find it a little bit difficult to talk.  Your eyes are watering, quite beyond your will.   You try to hold it back, but you can't - the tears are welling up, and at a certain point you just let it go, and you feel the tears coming down your cheeks.  Those are beautiful moments.  I wouldn't trade them for anything.  And yet, I'm also going to say that emotions can and should be a matter of will.  Emotions are more valuable, the more difficult they are.  The emotions that don't come automatically - the ones that are hard to feel - these are often the most important for us to f...

  Some presidencies are obviously historic; others are quickly forgotten.  George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford will be names of which our great-grandchildren's generation will likely have to be reminded, just as we have difficulty remembering what exactly happened during Warren G. Harding's administration (or even exactly when it was).  But I think we will be talking about Donald Trump for a long, long time.  Granted, most likely he will be a historical curiosity and a bit of joke.  Bring up his name to someone in the far flung future, and they will likely reply, "Oh yeah - I know him!  He was the leader of a political faction who aggressively believed in not wearing masks during an epidemic, and then he wound up catching the disease himself!"  And everyone will laugh. Of course there's more to his presidency than that humiliating embarrassment.  Already during his presidency, and even before it, there has been a wave of think-pieces a...

  I've been saying online and on my radio show that there's a political realignment happening for a while now... though I keep changing my mind about how this realignment is happening and how it will shake out.    In the first part of the 20th century, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party switched places, and it seems to be happening again. It just occurred to me to put it this way: (and I'm not sure this completely makes sense, so help me think about it....)   The Democratic Party has become the party of the Washington establishment - they believe in listening to experts, following science and other forms of academic learning, trying to maintain some kind of consensus informed by this meritocratic expertise, and that means, when necessary, criticizing, deplatforming and silencing people who diverge too far from this consensus, and above all, maintaining some firm norms that limit the power of the government and especially its executive branch, some of them...

Fredric Jameson famously observed that "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism."  But imagining the world after capitalism is not as difficult as Jameson makes it sound.  The problem is not so much that we cannot think of any possibilities of what human existence will be like after capitalism; the problem is that we can imagine too many possibilities of what life will be like, and we don't know which of our imaginings, if any, is what will actually happen.  I certainly have no crystal ball.  Still, some basic common sense - and some materialist analysis - can give us a better idea of which possibilities are more likely than the others. Will there be sexism after capitalism?  Sadly, most likely, yes.  Will the patriarchy continue to exist?  Unfortunately, it almost certainly will.  After all, sexism and the patriarchy have existed on Earth for a lot longer than capitalism has.  The roots of th...

Utilitarianism can be thought of as a "lo-res" model of human morality.  It's not completely worthless - in terms of how much information it gives you, it's better than nothing (and ethics is so complex and difficult that with many models, too much is undecidable, and you often end up learning nothing at all).  Utilitarianism can be thought of as the "satellite view" of morality - high up, and far away.  When you get down to the human level, utilitarianism is too blocky to work, and the obvious inaccuracies and errors just pile up. Utilitarianism, in most formulations, says something along the lines of, "Act in such a way as to cause the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people."  But what it cannot answer is the simple question: why?  Why should I act in such a way as to cause the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people?  In particular: why should I sacrifice some part of my own happiness, in order to make a large number...

I beg you, please stop referring to Trump as a "populist."  1. It's factually untrue.  Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular president.  Not only did he win the presidency after losing the popular vote, but - even more unusually - Trump's approval rating, in his entire presidency, has never been above 50%.  There have been presidents whose approval ratings have gone up and down, but this is relatively unprecedented .  Usually even unpopular presidents have some kind of honeymoon period, however brief and slight.  His is the first presidency that has never broken 50% in Gallup polling , and has the lowest average approval rating of any president in history . 2. The word "populism" has a meaning.  Populism has a history.  People like Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins are (or were) populists.  Donald Trump simply has absolutely nothing to do with the tradition of Eugene Debs, Terence Powderly, James Weaver, and William Jennings Bryan, let alone peo...

Seems like, every real movement that happens.... ...Anarchists start it. ...Marxist-Leninists try to co-opt it, and fail. ...Liberal Democrats try to co-opt it, and succeed. ...left-coms complain about it. Anarchists are the only ones with the co-ordination and organization to get anything accomplished. I'm not saying that's how it ought to be, but that's how it is.