Screwddriver

My family--first my grandfather and now one of my uncles--has owned a little bar in Pittsburgh since the 1950s; that was where my dad and all his brothers had their first post-paper-route jobs; at least one of my cousins still works there; my grandmother, at almost 90, still keeps the books! So reading the heartfelt whining of all these little suburban overachievers ("Massive grade inflation means one less standard deviation between myself and those who don't try"--oh, oh, the Hugh Manatee!), I was appalled to read:

Serving people drinks was more rewarding than this full-time job, and it is killing me inside.

Hey maybe you ought to quit your bullshit jobs and go back to serving people drinks you dummy! Like, um, oh, is it beneath you because of your high school GPA? Fuck you. Where's muh beer? So you acquired a soul-munching fake-economy white-collar boondoggle of a job and it totally sucks? Hm. Maybe you could take a moment to reexamine the priorities of your life, to reflect upon the nature of honest labor and personal contentment, to consider that happiness and success are opposites.

R2D2

Andrew Sullivan ought to go back to trolling craigslist for bareback hookups, an altogether more wholesome pastime than crouching wantonly before the Pentagonal glory hole and hoping for a little, er, intervention.  Here he is defending something Here is some ridiculous Andy Sullivan Guestblurgher  defending something that Anne-Marie Slaughter--and with the marvelous exception of Samantha Power, was ever a chick apparat so appropriately surnamed?--calls the Responsibility to Protect, rather glibly IRCized as R2P, as if intended to be textulated intertwixt giddy tweens: OMG did u gIz c r2p @ da VMAz last nite LOL she wuz drest up in a manuhtee custoom!ROFL!  Arendt's error was living too soon; Eichmann may have trumped these motherfuckers when it came to evil, but he was a goddamn sight less fucking banal.  So apparently Humanitarian Intervention is out and R2P is in; I return to my metaphor; these people are more changeable than teenagers in an Urban Outfitters; mom I told you I wanted Levi's slim jeans these are Levi's skinny jeans god you are so stoopid I don't want these 511s I want 513s why do you hate me so much???!!!!  Sullivan attempts to make some kind of taxonomic distinction between the two, aping Slaughter, but insofar as there is any difference, it appears that the new, ahem, doctrine makes so-called sovereignty even more contingent upon the whims of the west than it was under the humanitarian rubric, although also, maybe, the opposite?  I don't know; you tell me.  Either the case is herein made that this new Responsibility frees the West to forcefully intervene more often, or the case is herein made that it does not . . . well, in fact, disregard that either/or.  Both cases are made, and in the course of offering a clarification, we find a muddle.

Anyway, the contingency of sovereignty now apparently rests on what yinz leaders r doin to yinz own people.  THIS IS NOT TOM HOBBES OLD SOVEREIGNTY.  This is the new Chevy Malibu, um, Volt, um, Cruze, um, THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER'S BUICK.  But pay attention to the prestidigitation; the new definition of sovereignty is a crackpot reintroduction of a subject's belonging to his sovereign.  When a leader fucks with his own people, he is a leader no more.  Now this is just hysterical, but you will see it wherever war is being promoted.  It is an objectively true, empirically verifiable fact that Barack Obama has ordered the deaths of more people than Muammar Qaddafi or Bashar al-Assad.  But not his own people.  Ergo the moral duty falls to the greater murderer to murder the lesser because it is worse to kill your neighbor somehow than some random dude across town.  Well, actually, given the Hobbesian social compact, it is.  And you know, by the way, the next time you go worrying about a Hobbesian state of nature, you may recall that not only did Hobbes have no idea what such a state might consist of, living as he did before archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, zoology, biology, or pretty much any ology that might contribute in any meaningful way to an understanding of how the animal world functions, let alone how pre-agricultural homonids might interact with each other and their environment, but also he was an apologist for totalitarian theocratic monarchy; his vision of the State wasn't the fucking Works Progress Administration; it was the Ukranian Famine.  ANYHOO, his ghost mocks us all; here we are with a new name for an old company; Payroll Solutions is now called Sentrix, but we are the same Customer-"Sentrix" company that we've always been!  America has an unlimited right to fucking kill you.  The end.

War Is a Farce that Gives Us Preening

I take it as a given that it is not the event which is an outlier, but the reporting of it.  So while you are constructing your elaborate morality pyramid in which the United States, however compromised, however violent in pursuit of its policy aims, at least isn't [insert enormity], well, basically, fuck you, you are worse than wrong.  The argument that the institutional violence the US pursues, its endless supposedly accidental slaughter, is by dint of some extraordinary claims about good intentions not simply less objectionable than "terrorism" or whatever bargain-rack Hitler you are fixated upon at this particular timeslot in cable history, but actually supportable as some kind of legitimate force of opposition to the amateur depredations of the Qaddafis of the world is simply laughable.  We avail ourselves of our army of conquest in order to take all those al-Assads' places; we are not merely Saddam's executioners, but his executors; this is the conqueror's doom, and it is why all our endeavors on this bloody field are in the most classical sense tragic--they aren't just awful, but also inexorable.