You weren’t the only one to notice that the skin around John McCain’s left eye has been sagging lately. Most of us have figured that the presidential candidate had simply suffered a stroke or hemorrhage, both frequent occurrences among the elderly, and often brought on by excessive stress. It was a natural assumption to make, because it explains, in a single sentence, just about everything we have witnessed over the last few weeks.

However, an even more illuminating revelation has just surfaced, and is about to break the airwaves as we speak: John McCain is a robot. Years and years of NASA-research has gone into developing the highly sophisticated maverobotic technology needed to keep a straight latex face (despite small glue-problems around the eye) while debunking conventional wisdom about the need for experience in a vice president, and the soundness of the economy being based on growth in the real wages of the middle and working class.

Asked whether withholding this information from the public amounted to dishonesty on the campaign’s part, McCain spokesman Rick Davis scoffed. “Look, we’re not that worried about the media spin on this issue. No one associated with John’s campaign has ever made an explicit claim about him being made of flesh and blood rather than silicone and titanium,” Davis said in a phone exchange with Soft Theory, “and not a single member of our hideously biased news media has so much as suggested cutting Barack Obama’s chest open with a rusty knife to see what he might be hiding. We’ve heard he has a heart of gold, well, let’s see that heart.”

Responding to the news of the humanoid nature of their opponent, Obama campaign officials claimed to be “utterly unsurprised.” “The reports about McCain being constructed in a lab is frankly just another example of how completely out of touch he is with regular Americans, most of whom are human beings spawned through sexual intercourse between consenting adults,” the campaign says in a written statement, adding that “[McCain's] firmware [is] in dire need of an update.”

McCain spokespeople, on the other hand, thinks this latest twist to an already twisted election cycle will favor McCain in voter’s minds. “The American people is ready for change,” Davis said. “For more than two hundred years, this country has been run by living, breathing organisms, and see where that has gotten us. Being a robot, it’s virtually impossible for McCain to die in office, since all he needs is a few thousand barrels a oil a day to recharge his high performance batteries. Barring some hypothetical energy crisis, our Johnnybot will be able to run for reelection again and again, effectively rendering the Democrats’ slanderous and sexist talking point about Sarah Palin’s experience moot.”

In a related story, President Bush has asked Congress to approve a bill which would oblige courts to sentence to death any “hacker” involved in “gaining illicit access to the software on which elected officials are running, whether for criminal, exploration or entertainment purposes.”

As a socialist, I am happy to see the U.S government, if not actually coming to, then at least approaching its senses, in undertaking a serious effort to nationalize and perhaps even plan the economy. (Not the health care part, though, only communists would do that.) As a liberal (yes, you can be both) it worries me that the effort is undertaken by people who have spent their careers loathing the very idea of government intervention, and therefore have no idea how to go about it.

Technically, socialism is supposed to be about the people (or state, working class, commune, whatever) aquiring, through purchase, confiscation, theft, or revolution, the means of production. That way, most of the surplus created by labour organized towards mass production falls to the people doing the labour, not the people organizing them. You can agree or disagree with this basic goal, and many would claim that the organizing, and the financial risk that goes into it, should be rewarded accordingly, and labourers be happy with their fixed (and therefore secure) incomes. But whatever side of this fence you find yourself falling down on, the current plans by the administration (although details of this plan are not availiable to the general public) seems to fly straight in the face of both objectives. As Senator Bernie Sanders, Benjamin Barber, and Cenk Uygur has pointed out in different but equally compelling terms, this particular public investment actually moves the risk to the workers, but leaves the surplus with the owners. [Update: After I wrote this, almost all sensible people, and Newt Gingrich, has joined the choir.] You can almost hear Marx and Orwell weeping.

I recently had the opportunity to ask the US’ ambassador to Norway, Benson K. Whitney, about how this abandonment of the most basic principle of the GOP economic policies might play out come November, and whether he thought there was a chance the libertarian candidate Bob Barr could emerge as an inverse Ralph Nader. He said that it was an interesting point, and proceeded to give, following republican fashion, a thorough non-answer, claiming that everyone agrees that the economy must be regulated, the question is just how much. In a time of crisis, he said, the rules change. Rules change, you say? Why stop there? Screw ‘em all, I say. Spend as much public money you can find on bad debts, and if the taxpayers don’t like it, they can stop paying taxes. That will, of course, lead to their arrest and subsequent incarceration, but after you’ve nationalized the prisons you can start calling them hotels, so people can go on staycations all year long. Wait, the prisons are allready owned by the states, you say? Well, then you can privatize them. Should do wonders for the economy, a little reduction in the excessive spending those darned democrats have forced the administration to succumb to, in spite of congress being controlled by the incumbent party for six of the last eight years. (This has been a crash course in “Republican Reasoning ™: Where Contradiction Equals Creativity, and Reality is Optional! Jump on the Bandwagon! Down that KoolAid! Praise the Lord! And All That Jazz!”)

Anyway, the most interesting aspect of the ambassador’s keynote lecture was the foreign policy part. Granted, he dodged the accusation of the US being somewhat hypocritical in condemning Russia’s actions in Georgia after having spent the better part of the seventies and eighties aiding and abetting military coups in their own neighborhood, Latin America. “I am no expert on that continent,” he said, ”and I don’t know exactly what we’ve been up to there.” He also said that Norway should follow American cues in the question of Russian expansionism, arguing that there are no guarantees Russia won’t come to see the Arctic as part of their sphere of interest. Well, ambassador, the difference is that the chance of a democratic revolution ticking off Russia in that particular area is slim, because no one lives there.

In his prepared remarks, Whitney offered some fascinating visual insight in America’s thinking on globalization. After displaying a map with the usual suspects — the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India and the EU — highlighted to show that multipolarity is the name of the current game, he presented the striking metaphor of the new world order as a chessboard turned into a globe, with the pieces distributed all over the place. So while the hawks can no longer hold on to a “US versus Sovjet” mentality, the “war on terror” has provided them with the opportunity to recommit to a black and white world view, Good vs Evil being the relevant diplomatic categories. Infinitely more frightening, of course, since where the USSR was a relatively stable construct (until it collapsed), just about anyone might fall on the wrong side of this new dichotomy.

The ambassador took great pains to emphasize that there are few differences in the foreign policies of senators McCain and Obama, which brings me to the larger point of what exactly those of us who have been frustrated by the Bush administration can hope for in the next four to eight years. From a left leaning European standpoint, the differences between the two candidates are indeed negligible; one party offers right wing extremism, the other a slightly less extreme, but still far right, view. So who really cares, right?

I find myself agreeing almost entirely with Steven Shaviro’s recent article on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory (not including his dystopic addendum). The argument in this piece is, in simplified form, a Kantian rewriting of Slavo Zizek’s Hegelian point, that in the choice between two morally depraved ideologies, it is necessary to support the party that at least tries to hide its abject misanthropy because, well, appearances matter^[1]. As Lawrence Lessig and the good people at ChangeCongress.org has shown, corruption is rampant on both sides of the congressional aisle, but it matters that the democrats are embarrassed enough to try to hide it. That the republican ticket sticks to their talking points long after they have been exposed as blatant lies, shows that they think of the difference between right and wrong as an obstacle to overcome, while the democrats at least know that the line shouldn’t be crossed, even as they keep crossing it.

I feel, however, that there is one crucial point missing from Shaviro’s post. That point is that, once elected, the president’s foreign policy shifts gear from a theoretical outline of principles to a performance art. In other words, that both of the candidates are taking a hard-line approach to Iran’s nuclear program, neither of them coming anywhere close to conceding the point that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is, principally, perfectly justified in trying to get Iran off the oil addiction it shares with all other countries in the developed world^[2], doesn’t substract form the significance of how the potential presidents address him. Substantially, they largely agree; symbolically one makes it clear that to him, a good Iranian is a dead Iranian, by joking about exporting cigarettes as “a way to kill them,” and the other simply doesn’t. Which one is more likely to motivate the clerical rulers of Iran to take that step no one wants them to take? And who is better equipped to pursuade them not to? The security of the world depends on how american voters answer that question.

[1] [Back]Zizek seems to think of Obama as a vessel for new ideas that has hitherto been unthinkable. In this view, it matters less whether he actually follows through on his rhetoric, because the world spirit will from now on be unable to ignore the thoughts he has brought into the public sphere. Shaviro, on the other hand, is more concerned with each singular act undertaken by individuals, in this case the casting of votes. It is a moral imperative, he says, that each of us make the morally right choice in every case, and vote for the lesser of the two evils.

[2] [Back] I don’t mean to say that I’m not scared of Iran developing nuclear weapons. I am. Ahamdinejad seems to be committed to a more dangerous eschatology than Sarah Palin’s, and that’s not saying little. The fact nevertheless remains that there is absolutely no hard evidence that Iran has intentions or inclinations to take their research into the realm of warfare. Along with the general alienation and the rampant capitalism threatening to eradicate the world’s natural resources, modernity has given us in the ‘western world’ at least two principles we’re supposed to believe in: objective science and the benefit of the doubt. If those only matter when we’re the beneficiaries, what’s the point?

[Thanks to Jessica and Prof. Mark Dery.]

Apparently, I have some kind of beef with chicken. Ideally speaking, there would be a reason for the animosity I feel toward this innocent-looking fowl. It should stem from, for instance, an unfortunate encounter with a particularly ruthless member of the species, which at a traumatic moment in my formative years sought to strengthen its beak muscles by using my nose as resistance. That would be a good reason for me to exert a solid dose of vengeance upon henkind in general, a collective punishment of sorts. Violence begets violence, as they say.

Unfortunately, I never had such an experience. Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever met a chicken in person. Yet nearly every day, I become an accomplice to the untimely and unnatural departure of at least one such bird. If that’s not proof of my undying hatred toward this homeliest of poultry, the chicken that I expect to offer up its life for the pleasure of my palate – quite apart from the fact that it has most likely grown up in what Wikipedia describes as a coop consisting “of several nesting boxes just large enough for the chickens to sit in while laying their eggs” – has been artificially brought into being, explicitly for the sake of being decapitated by its creator and devoured by me. So how do I justify such behavior, absent a vindictive motivation? Why, by way of continental philosophy, of course.

Any discussion of whether the eating of animals can be ethically defended must begin with the question of whether the examiner is a pessimist or an optimist, i.e, whether she thinks birth is the worst thing that can happen to a sentient creature. If the carnivore believes, like Arthur Schopenhauer, that Being is a major bummer because there is no such thing as pleasure, merely absence of pain, it would be more excusable to go out in the woods and hunt dinner for yourself than to partake in the industrial meat economy. The optimist will, like the philosophical poster-boy of the animal rights movement, Peter Singer, focus on the life conditions of the animal, insisting that the hatchet must fall as a complete surprise and that suffering during the animal’s brief life should be minimized, if not eliminated.

Assuming that the winged creature gracing my plate in the form of a filet fried to perfection, accompanied by a side of spaghetti, and drowned in a Chablis-and-cream sauce, was treated cordially while still cackling, the question arises: What makes it acceptable to sacrifice one life for the sustenance of another, especially in light of the fact that we can easily survive on a balanced diet of seaweeds, carrots, and tofu? As far as I can tell, there are three defensive strategies to choose from when faced with the vegan inquisition, though each has its own distasteful implications.

The most popular stance will be to claim that humans occupy a privileged position on earth because of our ability to exercise reason. According to the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Lévinas, this talent is the result of the face to face encounter between individuals who can’t read each other’s minds, and must therefore employ language. This, he claims, is the transcendent foundation of rationality, and proof of humans’ inviolability. Animals don’t speak, so straight to the frying pan they go. If we look closer at his argument, however, we notice that it is executed in precisely language, employing reason. Using reason to privilege reason? Sounds a lot like saying that because I like myself so much, I must be pretty great.

The second justification runs along religious lines. God made Adam and Eve, not Lady and the Tramp, so all animals should be subservient to human needs. Atheists and other followers of one of the many contemporary heretic institutions, however, must find a slightly different route to evoke the divine justification. To the rescue comes Martin Heidegger, the most hatefully admired thinker of the last century. For him, there is a kind of being that is strictly reserved for the human subject, which he calls “Dasein.” This translates literally, from the original German, as “There-Being,” meaning not only that “there” is where you are, but also what you are. The subject is its world, upon which it projects itself in the form of its possibilities for the future, and as the sum of all subjects in the world, this kind of Being is the mutual condition for Being-in-General, Heidegger’s quasi-religious fall-back after Catholicism failed to stand up to his scrutiny. Animals, for him, do not project themselves onto the world, and you may therefore kill them with a clean conscience.

Unfortunately, Heidegger was more than willing to tweak his argument to encompass Jews, homosexuals and mental patients, so bringing him up at a typical New York gathering does carry a certain social risk.

Finally, we have the Nietzschean appeal to power, the only solution I can swallow: I kill and eat the animal because I can. The stronger and healthier lifeforms must prevail, and if one has to eradicate weaker beings along the way, it’s not only justified, but serving the larger purpose of evolution. Morality is an artificial construct anyway, so pleas for mercy will be heeded at the discretion of the eater. Technically speaking, Nietzsche would probably demand that you kill the animal yourself, in a weaponless fist fight, and that you accept being eaten yourself, in the event of defeat. But since we’re speaking of chickens, I think I’m up to the task.

So bring it on, Beaked One, I’ll supply the marinade.

Works Consulted

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1926
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil – Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. 1886
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and infinity; an essay on exteriority. 1961
Singer, Peter. Untitled essay in Gutman, Amy (ed.) The Lives of Animals. 1999
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Suffering of the World. 1850

If William Kerr had been more of a hard core puritan, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been a pretty good movie. Unfortunately, it would also have been about twenty-five minutes long.

It’s interesting to note that the dirty jokes, of course, kill in the theatre. (Specifically the one theatre I saw it in.) One full frontal male nudity gains exactly one belly roar from the audience, similar to the way stand up comics (sometimes) score cheap laughs by saying fuck.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always up for a good old raunchy comedy. But when about ninety percent of the sex jokes are bad ones, and it’s more like the other way around when the carachters are allowed to actually interact instead of being props for embarrasing sight gags and lude innendo of varying originality, I can’t help but think that here is a team who have sold out to the loss of the cineasticly inclined.

Lovers of The Seventies Show and/or Veronica Mars are in for a treat, and Jonah Hill does a lot better than in the much overrated hit Superbad. If you stay the whole way through, to spot the Arrested Development -star cameo, the last forty-five minutes will probably leave you feeling justified in not leaving an hour earlier. Somewhat.

And most of it is set in Hawaii. That’s gonna count for something.

Discussing the subversion of the patriarchy with my beloved one the other day, I was, as always, in the market for scoring cheap points. I figured I’d impress her by expressing my non-aversion to pursuing a career as a stay-at-home dad. “Karl,” she replied, “that would’ve been a pretty good offer, had you not been such a lazy bum.”