I’ve no intention of seeing the Sex and the City film, obviously, but the sheer intensity of the media push for it has got me thinking (one of those eerie media campaigns that, like a Grant Morrison villain, becomes a piece of actual reality through sheer force of the imagination). Sex and the City, for all its purported shockingness, is an extraordinarily nostalgic show; an hour-long cry of “awww, aren’t 1950s gender roles sweet.” A bit like a 21st century Happy Days, but less funny. But this combination of the shocking and the nostalgic isn’t contradictory at all, indeed, the two support each other: it’s “shock” that we’re supposed to be nostalgic about. It’s very comforting to imagine that, once upon a time, there was a time when transgression was thinkable.
The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its admission to the International from the General Council, but got the reply: “Already in the case of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Council has declared that it recognizes no theological sections” (Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association).
Which is interesting a) because I never realized the YMCA tried to join the First International (presumably we can now claim the Village People song as a communist anthem) and b) because the First International rejected a group for being explicitly atheist, which sheds some interesting light on debates about whether Marx was a secularist. Also:
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable (“Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”).
Which is presumably the source of Negri’s celebrated line “No pity for our enemies.”
Now I’m not going to deny that Kyra Phillips looks super cute in her faux-military olive fatigues. But isn’t there something just plain weird about the willingness of journalists to, still, after five years of clear and documented bullshit, identify with the military? If it was just the stylish caps, I wouldn’t mind, but it leads to horribly fawning interviews like this one (skip forward to 18 minutes or so in to see how bad it can get):
Leanne Battersby’s recent storyline in Coronation Street has been excellent. It’s done a very good job of criticizing the material conditions of prostitution without basing that on a stigmatization of prostitutes. The economic criticism of prostitution is too often expressed as horror that economic conditions force women so low; but it’s hard to disentangle that from the marginalization of prostitutes which, as Coronation Street has been pointing out, is precisely part of the economic problem of prostitution. Read more↴
Nietzsche, as ever, has just the right words to describe Tracy Barlow:
Mischief-makers overtaken by punishments have for thousands of years felt in respect of their “transgressions” just as Spinoza did: “here something has unexpectedly gone wrong,” not: “I ought not to have done that.”
