I wrote about it yesterday, but it certainly bears repeating: you conservaghouls need to find yourself a new token brother, one with a little bit of sizzle. Fo’shizzle, even. Because let’s face it: trotting out “articulate” types like Uncle Tom Sowell won’t win you many fans from the Spike Lee set, who are convinced an Obama presidency is “predeortained.” Which, you know — fuck your bourgeois insistence on intelligibility in
language / intentionalism
September 19, 2008
Rush to judgment: intentionalism vs. progressive will to power
As Obama learns poststructuralist iteration and differance, Rush Limbaugh fires back by invoking intentionalism. It is progressivism and its linguistic assumptions — consensus interpretation and manufacted consent, deployed cynically to create new “meanings” in new “contexts” — vs. a coherent linguistic system in which meaning, for purposes of interpretation (rather than, say, the kind “re-imagining” the Obama campaign engages in here), must necessarily appeal to the creator of the signs:
August 14, 2008
Provocateurism, 8
I’ve spent a lot of energy on this site detailing how underlying ideological assumptions — which I believe are necessarily driven by certain linguistic ideas (some of which have become so entrenched in our institutional rhetoric that they are difficult to discern, and even more difficult to weed out) — manifest themselves, in most cases, in predictable political affiliations. On a more concrete level, this idea is fleshed out by
August 11, 2008
Provocateurism, 6
Longtime readers of this site have frequently encountered arguments in which I fasten identity politics to a form of soft, progressivist totalitarianism “PC” speech (which, we are often told with a wave of the hand and a gourmands’ sniff, is, like, so ’90s — and thus, supposedly antiquated as a legitimate point of ideological friction, current fashion circumscribing the only authentic topics for political complaint, with that fashion decided upon,
July 14, 2008
A few thoughts on the New Yorker / Obama cover kerfuffle [UPDATED]
In the comments to Karl’s earlier post on this subject, Lisa writes: Yeah, I get that it’s satire. But, ya know, maybe it’s, um, a little ahead of its time, given that approximately half the country would forward this picture to a relative with the note: “Even the New Yorker thinks they’re black power terrorists!†without a trace of irony. Appropriately, I think, Education Guy replies thusly: No offense Lisa,
June 7, 2008
Provocateurism, 2
Longtime readers of this site will recall that I’ve often tied progressivism (specifically by way of its philosophical assumptions) to totalitarianism, arguing that the resurgence of progressivism as a viable political force is, at least in part, tied to the linguistic turn — a rethinking of where “meaning” is grounded that gave us the kind of structural-linguistic arguments (incoherent and pernicious as they are) that came to undergird our very
May 9, 2008
On meaning, intent, and the poststructural paradox
Looks like some sort of philosophy “expert” got hold of my earlier post on the problems inherent in Obama’s purported judicial philosophy and, unsurprisingly, has decided I know not of what I speak. What always makes me smile about this type of criticism (and about the inevitable commenter who misses the tongue-in-cheek nature of my site’s tagline) is that it pretends towards fleshing out my “pseudo” understanding of the too-difficult-for-small-minds-like-mine-to-discern
May 9, 2008
A pinch of hope, a dash of change, and voila! — a Living Constitution that a good progressive would be proud to serve alongside the antipasto and the 2005 Prosecco Perlage Riva Moretta
David Harsanyi, on Barack Obama’s putative judicial philosophy: Supreme Court justices take an oath promising to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties . . . of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.” They do not take an oath to “faithfully and impartially perform all duties . . . except when personally offended, or
April 27, 2008
The Colonialization of Kong
In light of feminist outrage over the supposedly RACIST! way some Vogue photographer posed LeBron James and Giselle Bundchen (LeBron being a man — and a Black man, at that — was too stupid, presumably, to notice that he was being used by the white power structure to denigrate his own race; and Giselle, being a “pretty white thing,” was probably too frail and fearful to put an end to
October 4, 2007
Oh. And just in case people think I'm not still paying at least partial attention…
…this entire dustup over the use of “faggot” does nothing much more than vindicate every argument I’ve ever made on this site about how language functions — and about the dangers of allowing for the appropriation of hermeneutics by consensus-driven communities under no compulsion to appeal to anything other than their own interpretations as a way towards determining “meaning.” Not only is the maneuver on offer all over the leftwing