Joshua Gooch

God Told Me To

What was President Ronald Reagan's favorite flavor?

Children’s tears

The music people are playing at airports is nuts.

At 5am, BUF was blasting “The Final Countdown.” Arrive in SFO and they’re playing a bossa nova version of “Come as You Are.”

Amazon page for Le Capital, the French edition of volume 1. It lists a Kindle, paperback, and board book edition

I have questions about the board book

Rebooking a delayed flight at 4am is better than missing a connecting flight but it also means being awake at 4am for no reason

It sure would be nice to be able to search inside your online Verso library

He's hilariously Freudian at times, even if the argument about problems with fathers sometimes seems on the nose right now

Adorno attributes this to Freudian trouble. In essence, pseudo conservatives have a father-complex.

Trouble identifying with the father is also trouble identifying with a higher social class.

It’s also, Adorno says, why quack doctors and scientists are attracted to fascism.

Adorno makes a distinction between genuine and pseudo conservatives.

The genuine succeed “in their identification with authoritarian patterns without considerable carryovers of their emotional conflicts.”

Pseudo-conservatives retain those conflicts, so they “overdo it … to convince themselves.”

Always took this as ironic given the split they did with Born Against

(Threats to present government?) "Probably most dangerous threat to our government today, and that also applies to union organization, and life in general, is disinterest, the tendency to let the other fellow do it on the part of great numbers of people so that things go on the way a few selfish men determine." The decisive twist is achieved by jumping from the very abstract idea of "equality and justice for all men" to the equally formalistic condemnation of "running the country by the party in power"-which happens to be the party of the New Deal. The vague cliché of an all-comprising democracy serves as an instrument against any specific democratic contents.

He even identifies the Times’s extoll-an-ideal-while-shitting-on-its-practice

My relationship with his work has changed a lot over the last decade

“The second aspect of ignorance which has to be stressed here, is of a more psychological nature. Political news and comment like all other information poured out by the radio, the press, and the newsreels, is generally absorbed during leisure time and falls, in a certain way, within the framework of “entertainment.” Politics is viewed in much the same way as sport or the movies, not as something directly involved with one’s own participation in the process of production. Viewed within this frame of reference, however, politics is necessarily “disappointing.” It appears to people conditioned by an industrial culture and its specific kinds of “entertainment values” as drab, cold, dry—as boring. This may be enhanced by that undercurrent of American tradition which regards politics somehow as a dirty business with which a respectable person should have but little to do. Disappointment in politics as a leisure-time activity which pays no quick returns prob” Excerpt From The Authoritarian Personality T. W. Adorno This material may be protected by copyright.

“probably makes for indifference, and it is quite possible that the prevailing ignorance is due not merely to unfamiliarity with the facts but also a kind of resistance against what is supposed to serve as a pastime and mostly tends to be disagreeable. A pattern most often to be observed, perhaps, among women, namely, skipping the political sections of newspapers, where information is available, and turning immediately to gossip columns, crime stories, the woman’s page, and so forth, may be an extreme expression of something more general.” Excerpt From The Authoritarian Personality T. W. Adorno This material may be protected by copyright.

In 1950, Adorno argues that the authoritarian personality is in part a result of the US treating the news as entertainment.

He says here politics looks boring in comparison to sport, which encourages apathy. Implied is the fact that "entertaining" news is part of authoritarian projects.

Your Hearts, Your Scars Bellevue Literary Press is devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions ...

I’m trying a few essays from Talve Goodman’s Your Heart Your Scars in my narrative medicine course this term

Adorno: Thus, the "good" outgroup members would be those whom the subject personally knows, whereas the "bad" ones would be those at a greater social distance-a distinction obviously related to the differences between assimilated and nonassimilated sectors of the outgroup.

Adorno: The "two kinds" stereotype thus has to be viewed as a compromise between antagonistic tendencies within the prejudiced person himself. … we should expect that the "two kinds" idea serves as a makeshift for bridging the gap between general stereotypy and personal experience.

Adorno: “Optimism with regard to the hygienic effects of personal contacts should be discarded. One cannot ‘correct’ stereotypy by experience; he has to reconstitute the capacity for having experiences in order to prevent the growth of ideas which are malignant in the most literal, clinical sense.”

Maybe JHU Press feeding its books into AI will create a doom loop when the machines try to parse Of Grammatology

Wait, Jack Nance is in Ghoulies?!

Fugazi records ranked

1. Red medicine
2. The argument
3. Repeater
4. 13 songs
5. End hits
6. In on the killtaker
7. Steady diet of nothing
8. Instrument

Gorz: socialism “is the conscious practical project of abolishing everything that makes society a system, a megamachine, together with the simultaneous expansion of autonomous self-regulated forms of sociability, which make possible ‘the free development of individuality.’”

“For society to become human, it has to cease to be manly.”

From the 1989 SPD program, quoted by Andre Gorz in Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

All of Dickens’ late middle aged issues with women are on full display in that one (and in Little Dorrit!). A real combo of very divorced, dating an eighteen year old, and getting his children married off

14x14 pan of focaccia topped with cherry tomatoes, olives, and fresh oregano

So it’s possible to cook focaccia on a grill. Not as much browning on top but my house isn’t roasting

Walking the dog past a Catholic Church and couldn’t stop thinking about how they could have someone singing “Tuesday mass at 8” like Henry Rollins shouting “TV Party tonight!”

Love to get more and more examples of the law being nothing more than the form of domination for whatever hegemonic bloc tries to direct accumulation

May be working up something on Peter Straub, and now I see his papers are at NYU. Hmmm...

Introducing my kid to the Big Bopper so I can annoy them by constantly saying “Hellllloooo baaaby!”

The acceleration of centralization processes that occurred during neoliberalism could only progressively limit democracy to the point of bringing new fascisms into government, all over the world. This new fascism does not need thugs, nor does it need to assume the form of reactionary revolution (as it did between the two world wars), because there is no Bolshevik danger, no revolution threatening the landowning classes. Political movements are now powerless since the revolutionary strategy has been lost - they do not threaten the existing order. Societies are divided and social polarizations are reaching nineteenth-century levels, but there is no revolutionary theory or practice capable of transforming these divisions into political alternatives.

The epilogue of the Trump and Bolsonaro presidencies are clear signs of how, for the moment, a part of big capital, the administration, and the military have no interest in pushing the fascist hypothesis to its extreme because - again for the moment - it is running no real risks, except possibly of the will to power and profit of the state and capitalism itself: The growth of new fascism is a sign, however, that war is coming, or is already among us. Fascism = war, the revolutionaries used to say, and it is still true.

Lazzarato at his most pessimistic:

Four cups of yellow raspberries in a Pyrex cup with a few blueberries on top

Raspberries are coming in fast.

I picked four cups just this morning