Name: Julianne
Sign: Aquarius. Aquarius! (Sing it. SING IT.)
Job: Graduate student/failure
City: Cambridge/London, UK
Status: Not on fire? Yay! (Happily enmeshed? Mysteriously ill? Overfond of adverbs?)
Dream job: Getting paid to tell other people how abysmally wrong they are. Prospects: consulting or philosophy.
There appears to be an inverse relationship between the seriousness of my posts and my getting unfollowed rate.
In other news, a friend from long-ago contacted me, on the premise that “he’s always had a thing for needy women” (and, if you haven’t noticed, I am going through a shit time). How in the bleeding anal fistula am I supposed to take that?
EDIT: as though there’s a point of editing on tumblr. I’ve also been reblogged into a private group! Possibly for hatred of me! Dare I dream, fellow tumblrs? Dare I dream?
I’ve been distracted by some rather pressing personal issues, and thus, posting has been light and, worse, shallow. My apologies. To make matters even more dire, I may currently be drunk. Mea maxima culpa.
I spent yesterday watching the Petreaus/Crocker Senate hearings. I was impressed by the following:
-Sheer number of Republicans expressing skepticism, dismay, or downright outrage. Hagel we all saw coming, but Luger? Props, man.
-Senator Clinton’s demeanor. She gave an opening statement that was terribly run of the mill and clearly campaign posturing, but she conducted herself in a confidence-inspiring way. My purely subjective and emotive response was quite positive. I too am concerned about this hand-binding treaty that Congress apparently doesn’t get to vote on.
-Senator Obama’s specificity and intelligence. I am always impressed by the level of conceptual depth that Obama brings to any argument. But I was expecting some grandstanding, and instead he launched directly into a line of questioning that pressed on the testifiers to define success, por favor. Alas, it’s “complicated”. Senator Clinton alluded to the same point (as did several other Senators), but in the process of his questioning Obama was able to glean additional information from Petraeus.
-Joe Biden made a funny. I still like that guy. He reminds me of me in lecture. Maybe I too am an arrogant blowhard. But I’m a funny arrogant blowhard, bitches.
-My fellow sane human beings. For the love of all that is sacred and holy. Say, life. Senator McCain is off his damn rocker. First off, he can’t keep track of whether Al-Qaeda is “Shi’ite, or Sunni, or whatever.” Second, his questioning consisted of attempts to conflate Al-Qaeda (and that natural hatred that Americans feel when that name is invoked) with “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”, a marginal paramilitary force by anyone’s estimation. To say that his questions were leading would be a minor understatement. And, of course, we have the attempts to make Iran look evilevilevil and bombbombbombomb-able
-The usual amazing Senators did an amazing job: Senator Biden (already acknowledged for his humor), Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold, Senator Boxer (forgiving her numerical transgressions…sweetheart, that’s *billions* of dollars a week, not millions). Why can’t you all get together and quietly carry Harry Reid off to an undisclosed location and get A BETTER MAJORITY LEADER?!?
Awhile back, my friend in Obamamania and college colleague, squashed, asked why Democrats hate America, on the premise that, Democrats refuse to acknowledge that the surge has worked. We need to define what we mean by “worked”, here, and further, the conditions under which troop levels can return to pre-surge status, let alone the beginning of a reduction. From the administration’s PR department, with poor Gen. Petraeus stuck between the apocryphal Scylla and Charybdis of his job as a military general and his newfound role as a propaganda machine for the war, we learn that violence is down. But at what political cost? The whole point of this endeavor was to create “breathing room” for the Iraqis to reach political consolidation. Instead, they seem more fractured, more “sectarian” (I keep hearing that word tossed about…”a multi-sectarian government”…as though that has the remotest prospect of success), and, as Petraeus himself said, the progress is fragile and reversible. So. Without invoking the whole whack-a-mole metaphor, on the face of it, securing Iraq is leading to the kind of tribalism and local fueding that can only end in…further violence forever. I’m not saying I have a genius plan to unify the country. I’m just saying, denying that the surge has worked, even in the face of shiny graphs, doesn’t mean you’re gunning for disaster in Iraq because it would validate your politics.
I am sick of reading about General Election match-ups. Right now, they are about as meaningful as contests between pancakes and waffles. To the vast majority of Americans who aren’t following the election with agonizing scrutiny, the candidates are like brand names. McCain: I’ve been around a long time, I got tortured, plus I’m a “maverick”. Obama: the future is me, fogies to the back of the bus. Clinton: remember the 90s? That didn’t suck. When (in all probability) Obama and McCain get down to it, and the people who plan to vote, I dunno, watch a debate between the two, they’ll realize that a) McCain, for all his longevity, doesn’t know shit from shinola when it comes to the Middle East, b) McCain, for all the media infatuation, is, yes, a totally unhinged warmonger, and c) Obama is not promising “more wars, lots of PTSD to treat” and jobs that will never come back, but a new optimistic version of America, I honestly think there is the potential for a Reagenesque landslide in November. If he plays his campaign as well as he has thusfar.
Protesters drawn to Olympic flame in S.F. - Los Angeles Times
Dare we hope it sets Cheney on fire?
Subconscious bias—the new Jim Crow.
I “passed” the Harvard Implicit Association Test, but I just totally failed the UChicago Don’t Shoot the Unarmed Black Guy Test (okay, that’s not its actual name.)
Sad now.
Sun Weide, spokeperson for Beijing Olympic organizing committee.
Amid protests, Olympic torch extinguished in Paris - msnbc.com
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot) (via asprettyasasong) (via claudia)
How to ascribe the blame—and more importantly, proscribe solutions—has been the subject of many of my mental vacations.
So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.
But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jeans Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
“Growing Up Class Conscious”, narrated by a very droll Viggo Mortenson, from aforementioned A People’s History of American Empire