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

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 come [...]

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 [...]

with apologies to Eric for being totally Hegelian in this :) At LBO, Michael Pollak wrote: True, and that was a great editorial to post. But I think both of you are missing a key linguistic and conceptual asymmetry here between right and left, which the left has no interest in curing, but which if [...]

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 [...]

Man, this stinks. From SA who says that this think tank is in the tank for Obama Care. What the fuck are you mealy mouthed dem supporting, Obama supporting fuckers thinking? hmmm? I’m so disgusted by this I could spit hot nails out of my earballs! http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2922 Consider an illustrative family of three in which [...]

after watching this administration do exactly as Glen Ford, Aldoph Reed, Uhuru, Anthony Kennerson, yours truly, and others said he would — reveal himself to be the rightwing shit that he always proudly said he was — i hope ppl like the blogger at reappropriate and people, like sylvia, who argued that obama was more [...]

I decided that I wanted to use up some leftover dressing from an event at work, along with some leftover turkey I’d roasted and a can of chicken I opened but hadn’t remembered to make lunch or dinner of last week. I was also in the mood for bread or pizza or something. So, I [...]

the greek work, idiote, means private, iirc. i was thinking of ids and idiotes because i was thinking of identity politics, reading this thread that amber pointed to: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/07/11/ad-hominems-etc/ i didn’t read all the details as to what went on, surely not to be in any position to decide who i agree with and who [...]

that’s the word that comes to mind when i read lefties re: the current events in Iran. I read Lipstick Jihad for my book reading group a couple of months ago. Moaveni is a pretty good writer, so I followed up by reading her second book, Honeymoon in Tehran. This doesn’t make me an expert, [...]

rantwoman, whose posts i always adore at lefty mailing list, has an interesting blog post that concludes with a bit about passing: And what would be the reasonable accommodation here: as the world’s most irrepressible nephew would hear, “use your words.” Ask nicely. Listen carefully. Communicate, don’t just assume … because some of us spend [...]

yeah. i think I’m adorno, ‘k? first, I have two new books with which to avoid reading Moishe Postone. _Fresh: a perishable history_ by Susanne Freidberg and _The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language_ by Christine Kenneally. I immediately wrote Dwayne to let him know since we have been relishing reading various [...]

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. [...]

last week, i had to work an early morning release: get up at 3 a.m. to be to work by 4 a.m. to help make sure a big software release goes out correctly during our maintenance hours. I was doing this twice a week, to help out an understaffed QA department. After months, they cut [...]

This is a really awesome talk hooks gave. In it, she brings up the issue that inflamed folks recently when Renee Martin wrote about big girl panties. While I disagree with Martin’s characterizations of Black Amazon and others, I think hooks says some really interesting things here, some of which I tend to chafe against [...]

At work, I’ve been doing a lot of rather rote work that requires a ton of QA. It leaves me lots of time to listen to lectures and talks on youtube. I finally found that one video that I’d seen, the one where hooks discusses institutionalized racism and what she thinks of as the need [...]

at work, I’ve been listening to Angela Davis — just search on youtube and listen to them all. It’s all you need to understand what is going on, and how to address so many of the issues that come up repeatedly within leftist and feminist circles. Seriously. Meanwhile, a “related video” alert brought me to [...]

Angela Davis talks about how change happens and about her understanding of feminism. She speaks to the issue, often noted here and elsewhere, that the people behind the Montgomery bus boycott were women, that Rosa Parks wasn’t just a tired woman who got fed up one day, etc. It’s very good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RHtEbiOA

my boss became a citizen recently — though his wife, a doctor, didn’t. I didn’t want to pry but I wondered, why? I was guessing pressure at work. Dunno. Meanwhile, Yates has a post up about immigration: President Obama has decided not to nominate immigrant-rights advocate and attorney, Thomas Saenz, to head the Civil Rights [...]

Have you ever heard that expression? “If you don’t like the weather in this town, just wait awhile. It will change.” It gets said everywhere I’ve lived. Well, in this town, it’s true. I walked to work, nice morning. The rain finally stopped. In the late afternoon, I sat in a park for a late [...]

this is rich. Jack Welch, the man who promoted the idea that shareholder profits should come first and foremost, and hence the constant emphasis on profit and increasing share values, has decided that he didn’t really mean it. of course, what he says is that he never meant it that way to begin with. nonetheless… [...]