Joe Zivak > Recent Status Updates

Nudges, guys!!!
"Adams told me that Rhodes was fond of mentalists like Derren Brown, a British performer who believes he can influence his large audiences through a series of small suggestions."

The sheriff…is the closest thing there is to being a king in the U.S. I have no unions, I don’t have civil service, I hire and fire at will. I don’t have to go to council and propose a budget. I approve the budget. I’m the head of the law-enforcement district, and the law-enforcement district only has one vote, which is me.

Throughout the anti–gender ideology movement, a morally righteous sadism has triumphed over the powers of capacious alliance or any commitment to cohabitation on the basis of equality. This form of sadism rides on the conviction that fueling hatred is the only way to save the world, that only by destroying will destruction come to an end.

The contradictory character of the phantasm allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear that the anti–gender ideology wishes to stoke for its own purposes, without having to make any of it cohere. Indeed, the liberation from historical documentation and coherent logic is part of an escalating exhilaration that feeds a fascist frenzy and shores up forms of authoritarianism.

and to mobilize the far right in opposition to a hated liberal foe. Welch gloated that although Birch campaigns often failed, “none of them have left the enemy laughing by the time we finished."

They’re not looking to bring back the past as it really was. What they’re doing is using the past to strengthen their hand in the present. And this form of control— tinged with expedience and hypocrisy—is one of the enduring themes of patriarchal power.

Things are not always getting better. One measure of racial progress is this just-so story moving from slavery, through Jim Crow, to the real but incomplete victories of the civil rights movement. A different measure of progress is the space between the two seconds it took police to shoot Tamir Rice.

Prior to the civil rights movement, discrimination was open, legal, and routine. Following the civil rights movement, discrimination is covert, illegal (but rarely enforced), and routine. The mainstream narrative of racial progress also downplays the violent resistance civil rights activists faced, and that resistance to integration and equal opportunity had never really ended.

Cultural excuses for racial inequality aren’t applied evenly, as extremely violent white movies and music are held to lower standards, rarely invoked as explanations for white violence. And cultural explanations ignore the fact that civil rights martyrs like Dr. King weren’t saved by dressing well.

The second problem with Cornucopianism is its assertion that past advances have been the result—and could only have been the result— of free market systems. This assertion is demonstrably false.

This is to say that backlashes are long-term political projects, not one-off natural events. Yet backlashes are often described, as Mike Wallace did in the Black Power– White Backlash documentary, as automatic and mechanical, a reflexive response to the speed and depth of social change or political or legal frameworks.

She shows that the growth of conservative political power in Orange County was a gradual process requiring the activism of many engaged men and women who held coffee klatches, ran for local school boards, leafleted their neighbors, and organized campaigns for elected officials at all levels of government.

More accurately understood as persistent, not episodic, backlashes are the continuous—long-term and ongoing—attempt by white conservative reactionaries to stand in the way of Black people’s demands for equality. Indeed, it was this pattern of white opposition that made African American campaigns for equality necessary in the first place.

As far as Dr. Blanchard is concerned, all non-reproductive sex should be pathologized. He is a radical Catholic who would go back to a time before 1972 and classify all lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as suffering from a paraphilia.

to attract new voters and rally the faithful, conservatism had to establish its idealism and integrity, its absolute independence from the beck and call of wealth, from privilege and materialism—from reality itself. If they were to change reality, conservatives would have to divorce themselves, at least in their self-understanding, from reality.

During the Bush years, the anti-feminist right’s strategy was to portray feminism as some kind of well-intended mistake that had done more harm than good, and to argue that women had to be rescued from having rights for their own sake. Mostly, the fight focused on women’s sexual autonomy.

Almost no other concept has been as great a gift to the American right as the myth of “political correctness,” this widespread contention in right wing circles that a censorious left has somehow disallowed conservatives nationwide to enjoy their First Amendment–guaranteed right to be an asshole.

Such an imaginary would help us find our way toward an ethical and political life in which aggression and sorrow do not immediately convert into violence, in which we might be able to endure the difficulty and the hostility of the social bonds we never chose.

To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized, for which provisions for flourishing should be available.

The democracies, which cannot compete [with totalitarian governments] in terms of highly centralized discipline, must seek their strength in resourceful and imaginative administration. If this be true the loyalty program is fast dissipating one of our most precious assets.1

So another reason for loyalty defendants to keep friends and associates in the dark was to prevent them from trying to help. People who had been accused also worried that they would do more harm than good if they tried to defend others. By making it dangerous to vouch for one’s associates, loyalty investigations damaged not just individuals but also ties among individuals.

like other markets, the marketplace of ideas was not really a free one. Whatever weight one assigns the loyalty investigations in the Keyserlings’ abandonment of the left, the investigations certainly caused them to attempt to erase their youthful socialism from the past. They were not unique; other high-ranking loyalty defendants similarly shifted to the center and then denied any such shift.

Their years under scrutiny as disloyalty suspects may not have been the exclusive cause for the Keyserlings’ rightward shift to the “vital center” in the 1950s, but it was a major factor. The transformation of these New Dealers into Cold War liberals was an adaptation to political repression, not a purely objective intellectual development;

To the displeasure of the Dies Committee, the CSC loyalty examiners distinguished between leftism and Communist Party membership, and they also tended to forgive Communist associations that predated the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. Although wartime loyalty-security measures evolved hastily and with little public scrutiny, they were often fairer to employees than what was to follow.

as evidence of a homoerotic “conspiracy of the gentlemen”; the patricians’ government service as inability to compete as entrepreneurs; their urbane intellectualism as “fancy-pants” effeteness; and their internationalism as lack of patriotism. Questioning the masculinity of the “imperial brotherhood” became one tactic by which ultraconservatives tried to gain control over U.S. foreign policy.

30s
Contrary to recurring suggestions that leftist faculty dominated college campuses, they were in the minority everywhere. Many would have sympathized with Caroline Ware’s complaint that the Vassar administration was hiring conventional thinkers and “steering the college firmly down the path of the genteel tradition, aided and abetted by the old guard.”