Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2007-01-21 04:34:00
Oooops! I may be plagiarizing there. Whatev. I’ve been quite irked of late to read a lot of dismissals of theory and ideology, as if to say that asshattery and shitbagginess are caused by commitment to a political theory or ideology. I’m an ideologue and I am proud. Indeed, pretty much every single person […]

I rescued my old posts on Janet Halley’s Split Decisions, archiving them here: http://cleandraws.com/category/so-very-1998/janet-halley-so-very-1998/
sorry to be behind on that project. took a spill on my bike and had to recuperate.

jeffrey fisher wasn’t too keen on the books i was reading last year since both exposed the faulty research behind various drugs, from drugs to treat heart burn to anxiety attacks to heart disease. jeffrey mentioned having taken medication for anxiety/depression, that they’d helped him, etc. a few weeks ago, though, jeff wrote to tell […]

At lbo, Dennis Claxton dropped a link to something Michael Berube wrote at his blog. Basically, Berube read the same Michaels I did, not the one fantasized by Henwood. He wrote about it in his blog post, criticized him in similar ways to the ways I had. Only Berube is much funnier than moi.
When Doug […]

Doug Henwood tried to mock Carrol Cox for chiding people about using logical fallacy in their discussion of Gore Vidal. Doug wrote:
Life isn’t about people. It’s about Historical Forces.
Yeah, it was a dumb comment because it really has zippo to do with Carrol’s theory of society. It has a lot more to do […]

Michaels chapter on religion is, I think, a skeleton key to what he’s about. He seems to have taken to heart whatever he learned in rhetoric classes and spent a career elevating all the reasons why you shouldn’t use ad hominem into a theory that has all the analytical subtlety of the cudgel you […]

and no, the point isn’t to ransack his text for incriminating evidence. the point is to explicate the entire damn argument, instead of extracting out of it the one thing you agree with and discarding the rest as if there is no fucking connection between the two!
i don’t think you rescue ideas from a […]

I’ve been using up crap in the cupboards and fridge. I had this tube of crescent rolls and some turkey sausage, so i just made some dicks ‘n’ dough. I was chuckling to myself, wrapping the meat in the dough, watching as the dough starting expanding ever so slightly as it hit the warm air. […]

Chuck Grimes pointed me at a post about Walter Benn Michaels by Lou Proyect. I dropped by to ask him his opinion. I left the link to WBM’s talk at Harvard and listened to it again as I was packing. At Lou’s blog, people challenged him on his interpretation of WBM and Lou concedes that […]

Honestly, Walter Benn MIchaels really is a piece of work. I’ve been packing my stuff to move, and so I have plenty of time to think about this one particular chapter. It starts out, helpfully (!), to show that it’s just not race that’s a problem, but also other things like gender. (Of course, don’t […]

So, one of the other things I didn’t address in Walter Been Michaels’ book, The Trouble with Diversity, was the chapter, Just and Unjust Rewards. It seems to begin as an attempt disarm critics who might argue that he is singling out race when it comes to diversity. To really be fair, and not […]

since a bunch of people i respect are recommending the work of hardt and negri, i started poking around reading reviews. i read this:
Multitude contains solid concepts undermined by nuttiness: “We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern […]

OK., so LOBsters know about my ranting about Walter Benn Michaels. What I bitched about early on was his use of leftist and radical language — class, exploitation, and referring to “the left” — to advance what is merely a reformist Welfare liberal position in opposition to Neo-Liberalism.
Henwood, of course, challenged me, arguing that […]

oh good god. i have been on a rant, criticizing Walter Benn MIchaels work in The Trouble With Diversity over at LBO. So, I’m about wrapped up with it all, have made my case, and I happen across a video of him. So, bored at work, I’m listening away only to learn that Michaels pulls […]

huh. reading stuff that susie bright linked to, i came across David Healey’s Let them Eat Prozac. While I find Healey’s writing more than a little confusing — he’s not a good writer — I could help but remain riveted.
For one, his testimony in the trial against Eli Lilly over the murder/suicide of David Forsythe […]

i kind of agreed with daisy’s reaction to amber’s post. (www.amberrhea.com) i was going to comment, but thought better of it. yeah, i know amber, you might read it here, but i feel that it would be inappropriate to post at your blog given how you feel on the topic. here, however, it’s my blog. […]

toward the conclusion of Christopher Lane’s book, Shyness, he writes about the 2005 discovery that the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America had been caught offering 6 figures to Michael Viner, publisher of Phoenix Books (tabloid publications on themes such as O.J. Simpson, Heidi Fleiss, etc.). The deal was that he was to have a […]

pfizer, the company that was found to be illegally promoting neurontin a few years back, which I wrote about as part of my ramblings about Melody Petersen’s book, _Our Daily Meds_, is in the news again. Pfizer was hit with the largest fine ever for, once again, using illegal tactics to promote drugs — in […]

wow. i picked up the book, _Our Daily Meds_, because it was one of three books reviews in the New York Times and recommended by someone at LBO. There was another book I am about 1/3 of the way through. It’s about how shyness became social anxiety disorder. I just finished the chapter on all […]

it’s because of Teh Capitalism!
Petersen has a chapter called “Neurontin for Everything.” She details the case United States of America, ex rel David Franklin v Pfizer and Parke-Davis, Civil Action No 96-11651-PBS. Filed 1996, settled 2004. You can find material on this case at dida.library.ucsf.edu.
Unlike a lot of earlier cases, the company’s records were […]

in my last post, i actually forgot to write more about Petersen’s findings in her book. Here is a compilation of a few of the things I’ve written.
TAke away: while I agree that the thing to do is for people to make decisions based on evidence and research, deciding what will benefit them, weighing costs […]

i finished Melody Petersen’s book, Our Daily Meds, which is an absolute must-read — though as I mentioned before, it will probably be more information than someone wants if they are on medications and just don’t want to hear the bad news.
I brought the book up at LBO, asking people about Petersen’s argument that […]

when i asked lbo-talk members what their criticisms of Weather Underground were about, Dennis Perrin chose not to actually elaborate his ideas but, instead, pointed to the Web site of Mark Rudd. Perrin didn’t explain if he agreed with everything Rudd said or just part of it. So, it was a little irritating, that response. […]

went to see Observe and Report over the weekend, on the strength of Lauren’s (Faux Real Tho) comments about the director’s previous work. I have had The Foot Fist Way on my list of must-sees for awhile…
Meanwhile, I ordered my book for my feminist book reading group last week and it finally arrived. While logged […]

Last year, I read Serrano’s Whipping Girl, which was very good. I was reminded of it when I saw a post at Womanist Musings which featured several cuts of Serrano speaking out against the bigotry against transgendered women on the part of ‘radical feminists’. She’s pretty engaging, much like her book. It reminds me though […]