Outsiders

Outsiders are supposed to be good because they bring the perspective of, well, outsiders. Before he worked in the Office of the White House Counsel, Shomik Dutta was pressing his street cred to the fundraising arm of the Obama campaign. His pitch? “You need someone who really understands the mid-Atlantic—the less established donors, the real-estate-developer folks.” That’s what passes for heterodoxy in these quarters.

Grin

Niceness is the blank grin on the face of the psychopath: it is the public enactment of all the forms of love and kindness without the troublesome burden of loving anyone or treating people with kindness.

Disturbing

Actually, while we're here, let's enjoy the imprecise creepiness of this sign from the foyer.

Quotable

I think my desk calendar is taking the piss.

Unwindows

Just now watching "The Commuter", from the Philip K. Dick anthology series Electric Dreams, I am amused to note that the creepy "perfect" town of Macon Heights is portrayed by Poundbury, the famously real-life Dickian exemplar of the dangers of confusing utopian simulacra with a better life.

Poundbury, in the outskirts of Dorchester is a toytown for Prince Charles. Here his architectural views have been given reign. It is an ‘unashamedly traditional’, low, zoning-free faux Georgiania, of car-less dream alleys and not-too-high towers, a market-town fantasia... The paths are gravel for appearances’ sake, for the sake of the picture: that gravel spreads and is a nightmare for pushchairs does not matter.

Many of the 25-year-old exteriors of Poundbury have been constructed with fake bricked-up windows, emulations of the real avoidance-mechanism dating from the 1696 Window Tax.

In Poundbury, strict rules disallow illuminated signs, or clothes-driers, aerials, metres, air extractors, ventilation openings, dustbins, solar cells being visible from the street. And yet here are unwindows, a facile and putrid kitsch homage to a devastating, unsanitary and hated repressive measure, that condemned people to unventilated darkness, is a tasteful detail.

Here, the bad picturesque lives, or is at least undead.

from Skewing the Picture, by China Mieville.

Obituary

In breaking news, Australian breakfast television host David Koch is still fucking alive.

Name the Bats

I never realised Palin did SNL. H/t Mr Perrin

Man is the warmest plasticine to hide...

Ohmigod why have I not seen this before.



("This" - since it's been age-screened - being a claymation mash-up parody of Pingu and The Thing. Grisly if you're triggered by lots of spurting red play-doh.)

Vale Bodgie

It's unsurprising our media are choosing to focus on the Tiananmen Square thing and a fair amount of content provider wank about his "common touch", rather than his orchestrating a wage freeze during an economic boom, privatising everything that wasn't nailed down, deregulating everything else, generally selling out ALP policy and the party base while cozying up to the moneyed elite, marching in lockstep with US imperialism, and providing the inspiration for Blairism. But as you're supposed to say something nice at such times, let's celebrate his legacy as being that he has forced the bilious commissars of Newscorps, and Coalition scumbags themselves, to say something nice about a Labor politician the day before an election; that must feel like swallowing an echidna tail-first. And then we can go and cozily ignore Hawke's contribution to getting us to precisely where we are now, when we give government tomorrow to the charisma free Hawke clone who is the best we can hope for these days.

Previously

Well, this seems fairly comprehensive...

Notajournalist

I gotta say I'm loving this more than usually clueless outbreak of spineless content providers for advertising platforms imagining they belong to a profession.

Solidarity

Neoliberalism is neo because, unlike classical liberalism, it proceeds logically from the dismantling of the labor theory of value. In terms of class, this means writing out the working class, and substituting as its pertinent tri-fold structure the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. The wealthy are described as wealth makers. The middle class are economically autonomous, and the poor are government dependents.

...

Class, which used to indicate a position in the spheres of production and circulation, becomes, in neoliberalism, a proxy for income.

Politically, income is a very weak guarantor of solidarity. The search for solidarity turns elsewehere – to various identities, which, in the absence of a robust sense of production and circulation, take on the primary roles in structuring our lives, and thus the politics concerning our lives.

Thus society is understood to consist of three groups: investors, consumers, and dole bludgers. This neatly makes explicable the inability of Americans, and, increasingly, everyone else, to understand what class means, and why it matters.