Deconstruction

This is the most deconstructionist thing that has ever happened: Screenshot from the official White House release of the president's remarks on the tragic shootings over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton and not, as I'm sure you have heard, in that other Ohio city:

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";^[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.

In the philosophy of deconstruction, sous rature has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.^[2][3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.^[4]

But which, in the last analysis, are we looking at here, in the rature of "in Toledo"? Is it really "inadequate yet necessary"? or is it more "paradoxical or self-undermining"?

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

For the Record: Baron von Troomp and the Mysteries of Authorship

Image via Express, August 2017. The book, from 1893, is real.

A funny word usage of Trump's on the Twitter this morning went toward answering a question Jordan has asked—Steve and I figured out a boringly rational explanation of why Trump believes he himself wrote The Art of the Deal and other books published under his name:

Aside from everything else, Donald thinks books originate as "transcripts" https://t.co/4a7zXBoKPo

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Right. And he has no idea how much work Schwarz had to do with it after the interviews, because he hasn't read it.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Ghostwriters probably gave him copies of their interview transcripts before they started the actual writing, and he gave these to the lawyers tasked with making sure he hadn't said anything that would get him in trouble and washed his hands of them, and felt his work was done. Obviously a man of his responsibilities can't sit down and type the thing, or whatever it is they do, but he's very confident that he authored it.

Postmodern Day Presidential

George Raymond Wagner, known as Gorgeous George, 1915-63, via Wrestlepedia.

So on Independence Day weekend 2017, in his sixth month in office, President Donald J. Trump broadcast this to the wider world:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

The footage, if you need to know, is from the World Wrestling Entertainment network video of Wrestlemania 23, April 1 2007, which featured a Battle of the Billionaires between the champions (Bobby Lashley and Umaga respectively) of WWE executive Vincent McMahon (whose wife Linda is now head of the Small Business Administration) and then reality TV star Donald J. Trump, and originally showed Trump savaging McMahon, in a righteous rage, after McMahon's evil subterfuge of trying to replace the guest referee, Stone Cold Steve Austin, with his own son Shane.

After which Umaga won, of course, and McMahon had to submit to having his beautiful hair shaved off his head. Which you couldn't help appreciating the dramatic justice of, if you were seven years old and refused to believe that the entire event was scripted and staged. My son was eleven, but we still watched, because it was funny, or seemed funny at the time.

A much longer excerpt with audio is here, via Hollywood Reporter:

The Eve of Deconstruction

Image by Todd McLellan.

Philip Rucker's Bannon interview, in the Washington Post:

Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.

“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said.

So it's easy to laugh—obviously my first instinct. As in, too bad Jacques Derrida is dead, he would have made such a great Secretary of State. Or maybe Commerce, or the head of Faith-Based Programs.

No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!

 

Image by REBRN.

In college, "we will flunk you if you use #AlternativeFacts," @FrankSesno says. https://t.co/6zRBTPMCKL

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 22, 2017

Actually the opposite. Academy was incubator for "privileged knowledge," epistemic relativism, and "there's no truth only narratives." https://t.co/TQirmV4Q5s

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) January 23, 2017

.@omriceren Is there a "Protocols of the Elders of Academia" where this shit comes from?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 23, 2017

Float

Mme. de Saint-Exupéry, 1937, by Man Ray, apparently sitting on the floor, or at a bizarrely tall table. Everything about her from the African hat to the enormous cup seems to be a symbol of something, but what?

Saw a terrific example of a floating signifier the other morning: an advertising billboard reading "It's not a phone—it's a Galaxy".

By "signifier" we mean, in this case, the string of letters, or the sounds you hear in your head when you read them, the physical stuff that does the work of communicating. The other side of the sign, that which is communicated, the "signified", is in this case missing altogether; the expression wipes out its own meaning, by the overwhelming character of its falsity.

That is, not only do we know the Galaxy is a phone, but we know they're not even trying to fool us; they don't in any way expect us to think it's not a phone. In fact if we bought one and it somehow turned out not to be a phone we would be justly enraged. "Mr. Samsung, I am sorry to say that my new phone has turned out to be a European Ford minivan, or a vast cluster of stars, I am sending it back."

Liberal Fascism watch

Via Nairaland.

Culture War reporting from Raw Story:

The [Colorado] Civil Rights Commission last week upheld an administrative judge’s finding that Christian bakery owner Jack Phillips had violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination statutes.

“I’m beginning to think, are re-education camps next?” [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins wondered aloud. “When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?”

Talk of the Townhall

Thomas Sowell:

If someone wrote a novel about a man who was raised from childhood to resent the successful and despise the basic values of America -- and who then went on to become President of the United States -- that novel would be considered too unbelievable, even for a work of fiction. Yet that is what has happened in real life.

Not unbelievable, just postmodern. Anyway Nixon's been dead for years, why are you suddenly bringing him up now?

Just asking.

WFMY News, Greensboro.

And Ann Coulter:

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year?

That would be you, Ann. I'm guessing you've been getting that first drink earlier and earlier on December 25, so that the Kwanzaa kind of sneaks up on you.

And the extraordinary Robert Knight on the difference between charity and socialism,

in which income is forcibly seized and then redistributed to groups and individuals favored by government officials. Socialism is rooted in the formula from Karl Marx—“from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.”

That’s a fine arrangement when voluntary, such as in families, churches and private charities. However, when imposed by force—and socialism is always accompanied by force since it violates human nature—it is soft tyranny masquerading as charity. 

I think if you accept all these premises you can prove that charity doesn't exist—it's not socialism if it's voluntary but it's never voluntary—but I won't swear to it. It could be that it violates human nature for government officials to give stuff to people outside their own families or religious affiliations. You could distinguish between homoagapism or giving to one's relatives and pew partners (the belief that charity begins—and ends—at home) and heteroagapism or giving to those who are not our sort, dear, which is necessarily violent, though also soft, i.e., socialism. I trust this is clear. In traditional political theory, of course, charity to one's relatives (nepotagapism) is the conservative mode of government.

From World News.