Billmon:
Back to Main
August 7, 2006
WB: A Man for All Seasons
Comments
Okay, someones got to come over here and clean my keyboard and monitor, master billmon has gone from cynical to kynical in blinding speed and a quantum leap; bitingly humorous satire that writes it self, from the mouths of hoe’s. Only billmon could have juxtipostioned these. A Master of Irony.
The Journal of
Cognitive Liberties
In his book, Critique of Cynical Reason — a careful play with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason — Sloterdijk attempts to explain the difference between “cynical reason” and “kynical irony.’” Cynical reason is, in his opinion, “enlightened false consciousness.” The cynic knows his beliefs to be false or ideological, but holds to them nonetheless for the sake of self-protection, as a way to negotiate the contradictory demands placed upon him. In other words, a cynic is a person who recognizes the reality of aesthetic conflict or political contradiction, but who disavows this contradiction nonetheless. Actually, the cynic just ignores this reality, and hence is almost impervious to ideology critique. Already demystified, already enlightened about his ideological relation to the world, the cynic believes himself beyond the need for self reflection and feels superior to ideology critics. Ideological and enlightened at the same time, the cynic is, to quote Sloterdijk, “reflexively buffered”7: his very splitting armors him, his very ambivalence renders him immune.
Opposed to cynical reason is what Sloterdijk names “kynical irony,” the bold resistance of truth laid bare. The two are not always distinct. In fact, the one follows from the other (both cynicism and kynicism are constants in history) and, according to Sloterdijk, only within a balanced situation between these two states of mind (perceptions of things) can a third version of the notion of cynicism evolve to become a “phenomenology of polemic states of awareness.”9
So what is this kynicism? Where cynicism embodies repression, kynicism shows resistance, where cynicism comes near to a splitting of the self, kynicism becomes the embodiment of such a resistance.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 6:39 utc | 2
Beware of the next ten days. Bush will be in Texas only ten days and he has already been three or four. Blair was supposed to go to Barbados but he is staying in London. I am going to confession.
Posted by: jlcg | Aug 7 2006 9:13 utc | 4
Tears and blood will flow for a long while.
Via TPM, a WaPo story by Anthony Shadid in Southern Lebanon.
Posted by: moeman | Aug 7 2006 12:34 utc | 5
cloned
i posted that last night & wondered how long murdock would tolerate it so i(m glad it’s archived elsewhere
Posted by: r’giap | Aug 7 2006 14:27 utc | 7
Sorry I missed yours r’giap
Uncle posted a link yesterday about Israeli propaganda, I played around with the URL, some powerful stuff.
Link
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 7 2006 14:39 utc | 8
thanks cloned poster, i had wondered about the options after viewing the USS liberty video the other day.
Posted by: annie | Aug 7 2006 15:12 utc | 9
re this comment:
“Given my current opinion of “democracy” in America, I think at this point I’d settle for a reasonably competent military junta — that is, as long as it didn’t shoot too many people.”
have you ever read this paper:
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
CHARLES J. DUNLAP, JR.
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1992/dunlap.htm
Posted by: linda | Aug 7 2006 15:41 utc | 11
Imagined Thomas Friedman editoral “When is blood not blood” Answer apparent, this is a comment.
Posted by: eliza black | Aug 7 2006 15:43 utc | 12
Billmon followers need to visit here to protest at another smackdown of his online thoughts, from the usual suspect.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 7 2006 16:36 utc | 13
“Billmon followers need to visit here to protest at another smackdown of his online thoughts, from the usual suspect.”
Gilliard seems to be under the delusion that I am debating him.
And please never EVER refer to my readers as “Billmon followers.” It makes my fucking skin crawl.
Posted by: billmon | Aug 7 2006 16:59 utc | 14
“Reflexively buffered” …the Sloterdijkian cynic is one who has evolved into this state following idealism and introspection, hence the sense of superiority. When I read Sloterdijk’s book in the 1990s it seemed a bafflingly accurate description of the Clinton/Blair/Mitterand/Gore-type “Third Way-type-liberal”, who has persuaded himself quite sincerely that his type of corruption is the “least of all evils” and hence “the greatest attainable good”. Fukuyama in “The End of History and the Last Man” describes the same type, though, unlike Sloterdijk he doesn’t see him in a trap, he glorifies him.
The dialectic hasn’t stopped there though, has it. After Last Man Clinton came Bush, i.e. a triumphalist primitivism that staggers the Last Man by its mindboggling self-destructive stupidity. Not surprisingly Fukuyama too has gone over to the opposition.
I have never been able to articulate what exactly this signifies. But I think it is clear that somehow, collectively, we have hit a ceiling and are now regressing.
We are trapped.
The “enlightened junta” Billmon talks about in a different post, would already constitute a defensive measure against this phenomenon. Sort of like the Limes wall against the Goths, or the Great Wall of China against the Gobi desert and its Mongols.
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 7 2006 17:16 utc | 15
“And please never EVER refer to my readers as “Billmon followers.” It makes my fucking skin crawl.”
He has given us… His shoe!
The shoe is the sign. Let us follow His example.
If Billmon were buying rounds of drinks in a brick-and-mortar whisky bar, I’d consider following him.
@Guthman Bey:
Amy had an excellent show today on the mother of all neo-liberal meatgrinders, The Democratic Republic of Congo. I was thinking at the time that we need to look at countries like that in order to prepare ourselves for the type of leaders we will have in the future.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 7 2006 17:53 utc | 18
He has given us… His shoe!
The shoe is the sign. Let us follow His example.
I’m pretty tired . . . I think I’ll go home now.
Posted by: Billmon | Aug 7 2006 17:54 utc | 19
Oops. Wrong movie. I was thinking of this bit:
Forrest Gump stops running. The group stops behind him. Forrest stands and looks as the group waits expectantly. Forrest turns and look.
YOUNG MAN: Quiet. Quiet, he’s gonna say something.
FORREST: I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.
Forrest walks toward the group. The group parts for Forrest as he walks down the middle of the road.
YOUNG MAN: Now what are we supposed to do?
Posted by: billmon | Aug 7 2006 17:59 utc | 20
yours is pretty good billmon but if you read the rest of the scene from Life of Brian, it does sound like what goes on around here at times.
Posted by: dan of steele | Aug 7 2006 18:02 utc | 21
1ST REPORTER: Why are you running?
2ND REPORTER: Are you doing this for world peace?
3RD REPORTER: Are you doing this for women’s right?
1ST REPORTER: Or for the environment?
2ND REPORTER: Or for animals?
3RD REPORTER: Or for nuclear arms?
FORREST: (voice over) They just couldn’t believe that somebody would do all that running for no particular reason.
2ND REPORTER: Why are you doing this?
FORREST: I just felt like running.
Posted by: billmon | Aug 7 2006 18:07 utc | 22
It is not about the shoe. It is about the gourd, The Holy Gourd of Jerusalem!
Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Aug 7 2006 18:34 utc | 23
With regard to “blessed are the cheesemakers” – I agree that this should be interpreted liberally, as applying to all producers and distributors of dairy products.
Posted by: mistah charley | Aug 7 2006 18:43 utc | 24
Holy moses who farted the red cheese, later to be followed by baby Jesus and the three winemen, or was it the other way around?
Hence wine and cheese rememberence?
He has given us… His shoe!
The shoe is the sign. Let us follow His example.
Okay, damn it, someone really does have to come over and clean my monitor. Soy milk just came out my nose.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 19:13 utc | 25
I hope Billmon is laughing as much as the Uncle.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 7 2006 19:31 utc | 26
Uncle, it’s okay – you’re better off if the soy is on yr. monitor than in your body. Soy, when not fermented & eaten in only in very small amounts, is a thyroid suppressor & hormone de-regulator. And that’s the stuff that’s not genetically mutilated, which virtually all of it is!! For more info. that is an excellent book.
Posted by: jj | Aug 7 2006 19:37 utc | 27
re soy, also see
weston a. price’s soy alert
soy online service
Posted by: b real | Aug 7 2006 19:56 utc | 28
the galloway is good – if a wee bit brutal – he knocks her off her stool of talking points – commenced to produce in a coherent order – the real talking points. at the end of the ‘interview’ it is underscored by her inablity to name any of the palestinians
even ‘george’s’ bloody good hiding is a subversion of the scoring such media manipulate
i know many people don’t like him – but i rather think he is a jewel
Posted by: r’giap | Aug 7 2006 20:03 utc | 29
b real, great references. Thanks. Soy is seriously bad stuff, but then all processed foods are full of toxic garbage. If you want to eat soy, have a few soy burgers a year made from fresh home cooked Organic soy beans & occas. bowl of miso soup.
You got it, Unca??
signed,
Loving Staff of Billmon’s Bar & Natural Care Center
Posted by: jj | Aug 7 2006 20:10 utc | 30
r’giap, i loved the galloway interview tho i thought she had a lot of nerve interupting him so much and editorializing her questions, speaking right over his answers, rude. he’s a gem .
Posted by: annie | Aug 7 2006 21:23 utc | 31
Yeah, so they say, in ten years it will all change, it seems like these researches into all these things that are bad for ya, change every 5 to 10 years. Besides, I rarely do soy. Part of the reason I swithced to soy in the first place, was because milk was so full of antibiotics, hormones and other grossness etc…
yeah, right or wrong, if we had even one politician w/the passion and wit of galloway, I’d be happy, but all we have are vultures, vampires and dullards, only in Merica can you have a vulturous vampire dullard…lol
Vampirous halfwits
vulturous dullards
Vampiric vulturous halfwit dullards
well, you get the picture…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 21:37 utc | 32