The tweet’s from Greg Knauss (gknauss) on twitter. His point adds a little humor to Palin et al.’s fetish of individual responsibility—something I find much more reprehensible than her use of the metaphor, “blood libel.”
Imagine if Palin had come out and said, “My initial response was to defend the fact that I had never condoned such violence, and never would. But the fact is, if I in any way contributed to an unhealthy political climate, I have to be more careful and deliberate in my public language rather than merely sharpen my defenses.” That would’ve been leadership: It would have made her critics look small, and it would’ve made her look big
You know, Sarah Palin just can’t seem to get it, on any front. I think she’s an attractive person, she is articulate, but I think intellectually, she seems not to be able to understand what’s going on here.
what he *is*
So much energy is being used in order to define the Tucson shooter. He’s a leftist, a rightist, a Tea Partier, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-semite, etc. And then there’s the super-category of insane, which has the wonderful property of absolving all social and political positions/movements.
Thanks in part to certain comments from a certain Professor Herring, I’m much more interested in the historical and material conditions of the shooting. Few of us may be absolved from those considerations.
I’m also interested in reminding us that
1) lots of people will use this debate on what the shooter is to score points against political opponents; we will recognize this (mis)use of debate only in those we oppose
2) US foreign policy creates conditions that are regularly and durably responsible for many more than 6 innocent victims. When’s the last time you and I cared about “innocent victims” or “collateral damage” when the US government was the shooter and the attack occurred outside US borders?
Maynard James Keenan with Steven Drozd - Rocket Man
(Source: youtube.com)
Slavoj Žižek, “God without the Sacred.”
Watching this talk before going to Manhattan recently, I was struck by how nice it was below ground where the subway station was called “World Trade Center,” while above ground folks said, “Ground Zero.” Of course, “WTC” has got its own ideological baggage, but not nearly that of “GZ.” This ideological character was especially obvious in the context of a to-do list of a woman on the sidewalk outside the new WTC construction site. She was leading her family around the city to various sites, each of which she written in sharpie on a large piece of paper, a check-off box beside each name.
Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Ground Zero, Empire State Building… I couldn’t help but imagine similar lists in the hands of the faithful in Jerusalem and Mecca. Now, “WTC” would have made a similar point, but “Ground Zero” put such a sharp point on the sacred character of what this family was doing that day.
Oh yea, “United Nations” wasn’t on the list.
(Source: nypl.org)
“Economic thinking has its own reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with things. The political is considered immaterial, because it must be concerned with other than economic values. In sharp contrast to this absolute economic materiality, Catholicism is eminently political.”—Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form
Weiner’s wrong about a lot of stuff, but I do love to watch him. (BTW, he’s right that the inheritance tax doesn’t double tax an income because the earner is dead.)
