Woop, I turn around for one second, completely ignoring my past self who was all, “Belle, just put some words or music or something on your blog! It’s not brain surgery, and Ben Carson is a brain surgeon, so….” and the result is that our blog stagnates! Well, no more of that. I’m saying stuff. Stuff like, you should listen to this insanely good Breakwater song, “We’re Going to Work it Out”!

So mellow, with a Latin swing thing happening. Also, this rubby-dubby sound like someone was rubbing on a balloon; what is that even, well-informed commentariat?

In not-mellow-at-all-bummer news we have this article on Deadspin documenting a case in which NFL player Greg Hardy assaulted his girlfriend. It’s an excellent piece that pulls together evidence that seems to have been publicly available for some time. Hardy was both charged and convicted (unusual for DV cases, especially with a powerful man involved), but the case was overturned on appeal and then expunged. I wasn’t aware this could even happen except when the Innocence Project proves that a person was unjustly put on death row, but in principle it’s an intuitive mechanism. The criminal justice system needs to be able to say, not merely “not guilty” but affirmatively “innocent.” This could be useful–in other cases.

There are photos of the woman’s injuries, and it may be that, as in the Ray Rice situation, the visual imagery will make an impact where the conviction (howsoever temporary) did not. Wait, except Ray Rice got the charges against him exchanged for some anger management or something? Well, we can say his career was permanently injured.

Greg Hardy is a better player than Rice and more valuable to his team, so they are probably backing him up all the way (even when he gets in a fight with coaching staff! Special Teams, tho, the B-list coaches.) Part of Hardy’s defense involved the ludicrous claim that, given how much stronger and bigger he was than the victim, the woman should have been much injured more seriously. Like, if he had assaulted her, her mere beatdown couldn’t have happened. This makes less than zero sense (people can’t hold back?) and I believe it has the dubious distinction of being shared with Mike Tyson’s DV defense back in the 90s. From the Deadspin post.

When asked to explain Holder’s injuries during his bench trial, he and Curtis would testify that Holder had jumped into the bathtub, then thrown herself on the couch, and then went crazy trying to attack Hardy. Hardy’s lawyer, Chris Fialko, would assert that Holder must have caused the injuries to herself. If the 290-lb. pass rusher had really wanted to hurt a woman who weighed well less than half what he did, his argument went, the damage would have been a lot worse.

Riiiiiight. My eyes are oscillating like unhinged gyroscopes, back, back, ever back. I can only see darkness and brain now.

The following statement came after the fight with the special teams coach, but listen to the leadershippy leadership of the owner of the world’s most hated football franchise: “[Greg Hardy’s], of course, one of the real leaders on this team and he earns it and he earns it with respect from all of his teammates and that’s the kind of thing that inspires a football team,” [Cowboys owner Jerry] Jones said. Mmm, taste the respect of a dude who flips the coaches clipboard up in his face on the field.

Although Deadspin is mostly a snarky sports blog that tells you why your NFL team sucks, it is also at times serious investigative journalism. They broke the Te’o Manti catfishing thing too. (I can’t summarize it, really.) In cases like these the established sports media seem disinclined to look too carefully into anything.

The NYT has been running a series of investigative reports on the spread of arbitration clauses that stipulate any conflict between an individual and the corporation or group be resolved outside court. Many times this means that instead of judges, plaintiffs have to plead their case to professional arbitrators who are hired to work repeatedly for the same companies. People often enter the agreements without knowing they have done so, because they may be hidden in something as banal as your purchase agreement for bamboo flooring. Many of the clauses seem to be notionally opt-in, but are in fact opt-out –it’s just that if you read through carefully and noticed you had a month to contest the terms and if it wasn’t the only job you could get to feed your family, you could, in theory, abstain from the agreement. It’s not just obvious conflicts of interest at work, though the Times does allude to how an arbitrator who awarded 1.7 million to a plaintiff was blacklisted. No, many of these clauses are religion-based, and you are forced to have civil disagreements judged in an explicitly religious “court,” in which Bible scripture can be quoted. In an extra FU move, a Christian school which lost in private arbitration decided they were Jesus-court in the streets, legal-system in the sheets, and tried to contest the ruling by filing a normal appeal. One poor sap is having his case against the Church of Scientology judged in…a Scientology-based religious court. Even though he’s on a list of “Suppressive Persons” and Scientologists are forbidden from having contact with him. Not sure how that’s going to work out. Someone must surely be willing to enter into an employment contract governed by a Muslim faith-based arbitrator, then suffer some harm, and then be forced to submit to religious arbitration of their case so that this BS can finally breathe life into the poorly-constructed scarecrow known as Sharia law? The law was enacted as a way to deter class-action lawsuits, and there are plenty of lawyers in the comments at the NYT defending the contracts that mandate arbitration on this basis. In what is a final indignity, this ruling (that such clauses in contracts) were constitutional came down under the tenure of Chief Justice Roberts, even though it seems as if he argued for the position in lower courts before joining the bench? Real labor and civil rights are being ceded to corporations, and judges have said “the first amendment made me do it” even in cases where they grant there has been serious injustice done.

ETA: I think this can best be summed up as companies thinking that if they cross their fingers behind them they can call “backsies” on all existing labor and product liability laws.

Remember? This post and comments are about meta songs that refer to themselves in the song, and I got a ton of great recommendations. Definitely enough for the themed mix I didn’t end up making and will do now. I noted that the genius Raspberries song “Overnight Sensation” has the lines “and if the program director don’t want it/he’s bound to get back a bullet,” which is ridiculous, as Eric Carmen is like the third least-hardcore person in the entire world, after Art Garfunkel and Usher. The plaintive would-be hit has a radio effect at 3:05 that I lovelovelove.

I thought the other day, you know, I wrote stuff almost daily for…7 or 8 years? But I never read it. Then someone linked to an old post and I was moved to go. It’s like I have a huge diary online, which I don’t look at.* It’s sort of weird. It does make me feel I should throw up posts more often on this here blog, just because there’s surely always one thing I have an opinion about each day. Such as, in Minecraft PE creative mode it seems as if you can use the monster spawn cages as industrial-style end tables, or cool window grilles. I’ve just tested them in a cave and gotten nothing; I haven’t built anything with them yet. But OTOH I’ve gotten actual monsters spawning out of the naturally occurring ones since the recent update (in which I got rain! I love Minecraft rain!). I like to spawn harmless monsters to give my smoothed, finished linked caverns some atmosphere, except not spiders because NO. Also ghasts make creepy noises you can hear from above-ground even after you brick them into a huge cave, mewling down there in their blockish-Lovecraftian fashion. But the girls loathe it when I make Endermen to walk around carrying the world away block by block to build the Enderlands. I wouldn’t want my realistic HDB window grilles to make my girls unhappy by generating Endermen inside at random. I bet you guys have lots of opinions about this. “Belle, don’t front. Endermen are straight creepy and you’re only acting brave because you never play Survival.” Or, “what the hell are you blogging about Minecraft for on this allegedly academic blog.” So many opinions. Tell me the stories of your people.

*Violet wants to explain that this is why, if you do a google image search for her name you…actually get a million baby pictures of her, personally. Also no one is named Holbo in the world except them and some other people originally from a single small farm in Norway.

Would you like to watch a pro-natalist video from Singapore…and Mentos or something? The answer is sort of that you wouldn’t because it is the single most embarrassing thing in the world. It’s waaaaay more like the Lonely Island’s (awesome) song “I Just Had Sex” than it is like anything remotely appropriate as a domestic policy, er, proposal. But it is real. (Congratulations on the 50 years, Singapore!) I mean, you can see that it’s intended to be funny, yet…

“Aw yeah baby, I want to hang out in your void deck.” THIS WAS A REAL THING. There is a moment where you think, someone had to actively approve of this idea.

Lifted from YouTube comments (!) “Response by my London friends: ‘LOL That’s hilarious!’ Response by Singaporean viewers: ‘HAH? WHAT STROLLER? LIAK BO KIEW!’ It’s terrible when foreigners get the song more than locals. We have a terrible sense of humour.” This is not evidence of a lack of humour per se or anything other than being price-conscious IMO. Relatedly, I saw an ad for OCBC or something on Singapore Airlines: father and young son approach huge carousel and ticket booth manned by improbable moustachioed Irish fellow. “How much?” “One dollar and children under five are free.” “I’d like two tickets then.” Irish guy: “how old is your son?” “Six” Leaning in close, the Irish guy, “you know, you didn’t have to buy him a ticket. I never would have known.” “No,” says the dad looking down at his son’s gleaming, parted hair, “but he would.” I was kind of moved by this commitment to Asian values (I am a soft touch generally) until I realized the ad was ostensibly about a Singaporean refusing a free ticket. Just, no.

ETA: how exactly did they Iggy Azalea that accent up?

A couple of months ago, at the beginning of the semester, I posted on Facebook a plea to my fellow faculty that they not post complaints there about their students. You know the kind I’m talking about: where students are mocked for the errors they make in class, the faux pas of the politically incorrect, and so forth. I said that I considered such public commentary a kind of betrayal, even when the students weren’t named.

Yesterday, Gothamist reported that an undercover cop had been spying for months, if not years, on a group of Muslim students at Brooklyn College, leading to the arrest of two women last spring for allegedly planning to build a bomb.

Set aside the problem of entrapment with these schemes. Set aside New York City Mayor de Blasio’s promise to stop this kind of surveillance of Muslims in New York. Let’s focus instead on the leadership of CUNY that either knowingly allows this kind of spying on our students to continue or does little to nothing to stop it.

Tolerating, actively or passively, undercover officers of the state on our campus, allowing them to spy on our students, to report back to the state what our students say, as they meet with their friends to share in their studies, swap their stories, figure out their faith, shoot the shit, or whatever it is that students do when they believe themselves to be among friends, is a betrayal. Of the worst sort.

I posted my comment on Facebook because I believe we, as faculty, have a trust to uphold with our students. That when they come to our campus, they will be allowed to try on new clothes, nudge themselves away from who they were toward who they will become, make a stab at independence, that they will be allowed to make mistakes—in full knowledge that their fumbles and foibles are safe with us.

As my friend Moustafa Bayoumi, who’s also a professor at Brookyn College, writes in his book This Muslim American Life, which is just out with NYU Press:

Americans of all types are expected to acquiesce to intrusions into their private lives, supposedly for greater security, while any objection is interpreted as “having something to hide.” But having something to hide—or having the right to hold an inner life and to be free to determine how much of yourself you show to others—is not only a guarantee of our democracy but also a necessary part of being human. Losing that right is troubling and dangerous for the same reason that Elaine Scarry identifies as the dark innovation of the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque.”

The same applies, even more so, when we are talking about students.

When we allow officers of the state onto our campus to monitor and surveil our students as they make their way into the world, to troll for trouble (even creating the circumstances for that trouble), we betray that trust. We simply cannot build a campus that is true to its mission if we allow this kind of practice to continue.

There’s a petition being circulated calling on CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to stop this practice. I urge you to sign it. And to share this post, and the petition, widely.

Along with 60 other Australians, mostly more eminent than me, I’ve signed an open letter to world leaders calling for a moratorium on new coal mines and coal mine expansions. The letter focuses particularly on Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine in Queensland but this is part of a global movement to stop new coal mines everywhere in the world.

The underlying reasoning isn’t spelt out but ought to be clear enough. If we are to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 ppm or below, as the world’s leaders have already agreed we should, it is necessary for carbon dioxide emissions to peak soon, and decline to zero over the next 30 years or so. Given that burning coal creates major health hazards in addition to C02 emissions, coal burning needs to eliminated even more rapidly. That means first, that no new coal mine can expect to work for an operating life of more than 30 years, and second that any new coal mine must be offset be additional closures of existing coal mines. Once these factors are taken into account, it’s essentially impossible for new coal mines to make economic sense within the constraints imposed by a limited carbon budget. Certainly, that’s the case for Carmichael, which is a massive boondoggle keeping alive only in the hope of extracting some form of government assistance or compensation.

I don’t have much to say about this, but I couldn’t resist the multiple absurdities embodied in the title. For those who haven’t heard anything about this, two appointed members of the House of Lords (Warner and Grabiner) have announced that they will no longer follow the direction of the Labour Party on how to vote, and a third (Mandelson) has made noises suggesting he may go the same way. This is a result of the party’s leadership election, in which the members a (nominally, at least) democratic socialist party chose a (nominally at least) democratic socialist leader.

For those who are a little closer to the action, this is your chance to comment or speculate on the implications.

One of my students was wondering about the following passage from The Gay Science (section 356): [click to continue…]

Sheldon Wolin, the political theorist, has died.

In the last five years or so, we’ve seen the exit of an entire generation of scholars: David Montgomery, Carl Schorske, Peter Gay, Marshall Berman. This was the generation that taught me, sometimes literally. But Wolin’s death hits me hardest. I took two courses with him as an undergraduate: Modern Political Theory (Machiavelli to Smith) and Radical Political Thought (Paine to Foucault). The first in my freshman year, the second in my sophomore year. I would have taken more, but Wolin retired the following year. Those courses set me on my way. I would never have become a political theorist were it not for him.

There will be many texts and appreciations in the days and months to come. Wolin taught generations of students, many of whom are now leaders of the field, and their students are now teaching other students. At CUNY, we’re always swimming in his seas: Robyn Marasco, at Hunter, was the student of Wendy Brown and Nick Xenos, both of whom were students of Wolin. John Wallach, also at Hunter, and Uday Mehta, at the Graduate Center, were both students of Wolin. There’s probably no more powerful a demonstration of Wolin’s vision of political theory as a tradition of continuity and innovation, as a transmission across time, than these students of students of students.

While many of these texts and appreciations will focus, and rightly so, on the political side of Wolin—as mentor and participant and commentator on the student movements of the 1960s, particularly at Berkeley; as leader of the divestment movement at Princeton in the 1970s and 1980s; as searching public critic of technocratic liberalism, market conservatism, and American imperialism, in the pages of the New York Review of Books and his wondrous though short-lived journal democracy; as a theorist of radical or “fugitive” democracy—I want to focus here on the way he did political theory. Less the substance (though I’ll come to that at the end) than the style.

The first thing to note about Wolin’s approach is how literary it was. It’s hard to see this in some of his texts, but it was on full display in his lectures. I don’t know if Wolin was at all trained in New Criticism—I seem to recall him citing I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism somewhere—but he read like a New Critic. The opening paragraph or page of every text was the site of an extended exploration and explication, as if the key to all of the Second Discourse was to be found in that arresting image of the statue of Glaucus which Rousseau mentions at the outset.

Chekhov has a line somewhere about how if you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you damn well better make sure it goes off in the second. Wolin paid attention to those guns, especially when they didn’t go off. He was endlessly curious about a theorist’s metaphors, asides, slips, and allusions, and mined them to great effect. Long before we were reading de Man and Derrida, he was reading like them. But without all the fuss. He just did it. [click to continue…]

Richard Cohen has a…I’m not sure what to call it. Formally, it’s an oped in the Washington Post.* In defense of tipping. In reality, it’s more like an overheated entry from his diary. In which Cohen confesses that his feelings of noblesse oblige toward waiters are really a cover for his fantasies of discipline and punish. Where there’s no safe word. Except, maybe, “check please.”

The context for Cohen’s musings is that Danny Meyer, the restauranteur, has decided to eliminate tipping at his restaurants. This has prompted a spate of articles, praising Meyer and criticizing the anti-democratic elements of tipping. Enter Cohen.

I love tipping.

The practice originated with European aristocracy…

And he’s off. Now remember, in DC parlance, Cohen is considered a liberal.

There are four moments worth noting in the piece. First, this:

Like almost everyone else in America, I was once a waiter — and a busboy, and a short-order cook and a dishwasher — and I never felt I was groveling for tips. I did feel, as a friend told me before I went off on a wait job, “Remember, you work for the customer, not the restaurant.” If tipping doesn’t quite shift loyalties so neatly, it does put loyalties into play.

There’s the democratic nod to Cohen having once been a waiter. From Lincoln to Cohen, how many relationships of deference in the United States have been justified by reference to one’s own humble past, by invoking this escalator of social mobility, in which one begins at the bottom, serving a superior, and arrives at the top, being served by an inferior?

There’s also that invocation of loyalty. Though the capitalist workplace is often described by its defenders and critics as a glorious (or gory) space of untrammeled self-interest and personal advance, for many of its denizens, it is a domain of loyalty (and subordination). For Cohen, that loyalty is never to one’s co-workers; it is either to the boss or to the customer.

Finally, there’s that claim that when he was a waiter, Cohen “never felt I was groveling for tips.” No, I’m sure he did not. (Just as I’m sure he doesn’t feel as if he’s groveling for a different kind of tip when he sucks up to power now: once a courtier, always a courtier). There’s a reason Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, chose the waiter as one of his paradigmatic examples of “bad faith.” Wrote Sartre: “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.” Cohen was/is a waiter in the mode of being what he is.

Here’s the second moment of Cohen’s piece:

The waiter is my guy for the duration of the meal. He’s my agent. He looks out for me and, if he does a good job, I look out for him. He has an incentive to give me exceptional service, not some mediocre minimum, to ensure that my water glass is full, that my wine is replenished, to make sure that the busboy does not prematurely remove the plates — that I am not hurried along so that the owner can squeeze in another sitting. The waiter is my wingman.

Again, notice the sublimation that goes on in the capitalist workplace. For most observers, I think, the relationship between a waiter/restaurant and a customer is a relatively straightforward exchange of money for service (the tip, as Cohen and others like to say, stands for “to insure promptitude”). But notice the affective element that gets introduced here: the waiter becomes Cohen’s agent, his wingman. In that exchange of money for service a bromance develops, a rather one-sided bromance, in which Cohen gets to imagine that this man—my guy—cares about him, really cares about him, as a self, a soul. And that he, Cohen, cares about the man. My guy. That this bromance is consecrated by the exchange of money is incidental or ornamental.

Or maybe not, as Cohen makes clear in this third passage:

I hesitate to mention another reason I like tipping. I like to make a difference, not just to be a bit of a big shot or be noticed or appreciated, but to give some of what I make to those who make less. I’m not flipping silver dollars into the air or hurling twenties around with abandon, but I am a healthy tipper (once a waiter, always a tipper) because this is my way of recognizing a good job. A healthy tip is like a pat on the back.

The tip is recognition of service well-performed. It shows that I care, that I notice — that I recognize what the restaurateur way back in the kitchen does not because he cannot. Why would I want to treat everyone as if they were equally good at their tasks?

The real signification of that exchange of money is that it allows Cohen—and not some impersonal mechanism like the market or the law—to distribute benefits and largesse to the staff. Partly because he wants to recognize the help, to lift the individuals among them above the dross and drab of democracy, where everyone is treated equally and no one gets noticed. Tipping is about making distinctions, about awarding distinctions, which are threatened by those egalitarian rules of equal pay for equal work.

The real object of that art of distinction, however, is not the waiter doing an excellent job but the tipper who is recognizing and rewarding him for it. Notice the ostentatious subject of virtually every single sentence in this passage: “I hesitate…I like tipping. I like to make a difference…I make… I’m not flipping silver dollars…I am a healthy tipper…my way of recognizing a good job….I care…I notice…I recognize…Why would I want…”

In the act of dispensing rewards, Cohen gets to play the part of a lord. Money is the means of his conveyance. Circulating it advances his cause, elevates him above the crowd. Dispensing money puts his signature on the otherwise drab world of democracy and exchange.

And elevates him a particular sort of way. The last passage:

I like to reward, but occasionally I like to punish. Make my meal an ordeal, make me anxious about whether you got the order straight, and no 20 percent tip will come your way. Maybe that’s not democratic, but a meal is not a town hall meeting.

Reminds me of that passage from the ancient Laws of Manu, which de Maistre loved to cite:

Punishment is an active ruler; he is the true manager of public affairs; he is the dispenser of laws; and wise men call him the sponsor of all the four orders for the discharge of their several duties. Punishment governs all mankind; punishment alone preserves them; punishment wakes, while their guards are asleep….The whole race of men is kept in order by punishment.

If only someone would write a book about all this.

*H/t Andrew Seal.

I’m writing from the other side of the planet, but there are enough Oz-related links to offer some thoughts on the Canadian election result.

First, taken in conjunction with the recent removal of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, this is a big win for the planet. Abbott and Harper were the only two world leaders who were clearly climate denialists (despite some official denial-denialism) and now they are both gone. That leaves only the US Republican Party as a serious political force dominated by denial (of course, a big “only”). The chance for a decent agreement coming out of the Paris conference in December has improved significantly

Second, as the UK election also showed, the combination of multiple parties and First Past the Post voting is highly unpredictable. If things had shaken out a little differently, Harper might have managed it back into some kind of minority government, or we could be seeing the NDP rather than the Liberals winning on the basis of strategic voting. Applying this to the UK example, the idea that Cameron’s victory was in some sense inevitable is fallacious. Had a few things gone differently, we could all be talking about the mysterious appeal of Ed Miliband.

Third, the supposed dark magic of Oz spinmeister Lynton Crosby did Harper no good. If anything, Crosby’s dog whistle strategy motivated the majority to vote strategically against Harper. But I suspect that people like Crosby are better at selling themselves to politicians than at selling politicians to the public.

This is more of a bleg than a post, I’m looking for contradiction. One of the often-claimed worries about immigration is of cultural loss, that the incomers will overwhelm the natives who will then lose the distinctive identity that they value. Supposedly, open borders would lead to the erosion of difference, people would lose their countries, and be bereft. But thinking about it, I’m struggling to think of *any* cases of cultural extinction due to the kind of immigration that results from individuals and families simply choosing to move to another country for a better or different life. Open borders within Europe haven’t caused the Germans and French to disappear. Open borders within the UK (and with Ireland) haven’t led to the demise of the Scots, the English, the Welsh or the Irish. And such immigrants as have come, have just turned into regular folks with slightly unusual names or atypical appearance within a generation. Not that there haven’t been historical cases of some peoples chasing out or killing other peoples, of course there have. But all the instances — at least all the modern ones — I can think of are *state-sponsored projects* of colonialism, genocide, forced relocation and the like. In the absence of deliberate state action and political mobilization, peoples of ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic distinctiveness seem to be pretty robust entities. Though Henry Sidgwick and Michael Walzer seemed to think they needed borders and border control to preserve themselves, mostly they don’t.