All Day Permanent Red

Moving to New Blog

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:22:11 GMT

I guess it's official. I've migrated all my old posts and set up All Day Permanent Red at a new location. Please update your blogrolls!

Hope to see you at the new site. So, once again, that address is

http://www.permanentred.com/

I'll miss you, Radio.

Blame Wordpress

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 08:59:30 GMT

Ok, I'm blown away. Wordpress is amazing. I'll probably move. I'm going to see what I can do about setting up redirects (I've migrated all my old content). My domain name hasn't propagated out yet, so please don't change your bookmarks.

But for now you can find me here.

Update: Had a domain up and running, but decided to use permanentred.com (which I had already). But, once again, it will take a while to take effect. For now the IP link above should work. So come visit me there. I've got the style swithing working, so you can pick which template you want to use to render the site.

Site Design

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 04:54:25 GMT

Stop by my new site and let me know what you think of the new design.

Testing

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 03:48:06 GMT

Imported all my posts into Wordpress -- just wanted to see if it could be done.

Migrate??

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 22:26:11 GMT

Obviously I thinking of migrating, or (less likely) keeping two blogs. I haven't been able to get remote access for Radio working. I can log in remotely, but I can't post (and yes, I have remote posting enabled.) I tried out TypePad before but if I'm going to move, I'd like something I can really control and tweak/hack. I had fun setting up Wordpress and look forward to learning its API.

I think Wordpress can import the RSS files fairly easily, so I could recreate my blog, but, you know, after taking a year off, I'm worried about losing what readership I have. But, hey, if I'm going to switch, I should probably do it now.

Wish I had signed up with with TextDrive for hosting, but they only accept PayPal, and PayPal refused (without reason) to accept any of the payment methods I tried to use.

Right now the new blog is here (ip adress until the new domain name propagates out), but there is not much up yet.

TextPress

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:46:39 GMT

I'm playing around with Wordpress and Textpattern. Why? Not sure yet.

Hmmm, just did a manual install of Wordpress and it turns out the hosting company has one-click install. Ah well, at least I learned how to do it.

Paglia as Verdurin

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 03:33:33 GMT

omg, I was just looking at the traces of myself on the net, and ran across this post from... my early grad school days. Let's just say sometime in the 90s. Like talking to a younger me.

This was an email I wrote to a listserv. Email never dies.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've been thinking, obviously, about the politics of response. The Paglia
thread started with a discussion of her attack on queer studies, and her
charge that we should put and end to it before the Republicans do so.

Many people argue, of course, that her work is insufficiently interesting
even to warrant a response; as a theoretical sparing partner she is a bit
of a straw dog. Her attacks, however, came on the heels of a number of
assaults from George Bush himself and his members of his administration
which, as we now, had the amazing effect of giving national visibility to
the MLA and even the titles of paper topics -- like the example of William
F. Buckely going ape over the title of Sedgwick's "Jane Austin and the
Masturbating Girl." This situation led to a number of now-famous
editorials and condemnation of the tendency of literary studies to focus
"irrelevant" concerns such as queer studies. (Although I do admit enjoying
the accusation that the MLA was "more dangerous to the nation than Sadam
Hussain.")

Paglia preferred genre seems to be that of the personal insult, such as
when she attacks "French philosophy" (whatever that may be) with the claim
that it is the effluvia of a dust-bound pedantic French academic culture,
while her thought offers a hip alternative because she was listening to the
Beetles rather than watching _Waiting for Godot_ (she made this attack on
Foucault in a NY Times editorial about 4 years ago; she boasted of her
superiority to Foucault because he liked Beckett and she did not).

Only a brain-dead argument, right? It was, however, picked up by the media
and played very well into an easy discourse of national stereotypes.
_Vanity Fair_ and several major newspapers picked this up and all chimed
in, yes, the French are really rude, overly academic, and after all, the
whole philosophy of France is based on the insane presupposition that
"there is nothing outside the text." This line was picked up and we had a
feast of tautologies in response. If the French think there is nothing
outside the text, it is because they do in fact spend too much time in the
library and are not concerned with the "real world"! This recalls the
Althussarian definition of ideology (or was this one of his commentators?),
that ideology is that which makes you scream "yes, the world is the world"
and then present that as if it were the motion and action of thought.
Recall what Deleuze said about thought, that it is a rare event, something
which creates a new logic of image, which in turn intersects, motivates and
deforms other images. A painful, joyous, and rare event.

With Paglia, however, we get an impoverished vision of what intellectual
work should do, but one that seems profoundly reassuring to many people --
it avoids the aspect of pain involved in thought, replaces the ecstasy of
thought with the cheap pleasure of a personal snipe. For example, the work
of displacement and intellectual estrangement done by the work of
"historicist" thinkers becomes, in Paglia, a "historical" argument
motivated by stock stores of knowledge about national type ("the French are
bookish; we are groovy and have rock and roll).

Confronting these arguments, however, presents a problem in that she has
inertia and stock knowledge on her side, and we rarely have the time to
give any sense to phrases such as "there is nothing outside the text," or
even commonplaces such as the (mis)statement that sexuality is "nothing
but" discourse. And, her argument has a built in defense: if you don't
like it, it's because you can't take a joke, and hence you really are
dust-bound like the French (and we saved their butt in the big war,
remember?)

So, I am wondering how other people handle these questions. How do you
respond to Paglia when literary studies (and especially its queer studies
incarnations) hasn't managed to find a way to translate itself into
journalism? Is it better just to ignore the majority of her arguments,
which are D.O.A anyway, or is that acting like Dukakis? And in what genre
should we respond? That of the traditional academic journal article? Do
we return crass insults from hers with similar ones? (And I think if we do
come to some sort of answer to these questions, she might in fact have
something to offer queer studies after all).

Harrison Brace
Grad Student
Stanford, Department of Comparative Literature

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's
equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind
which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Georges Bataille

email me for PGP key
*******************************************************************

Oh, Stephen, how you have misled me!

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 01:29:41 GMT

In the "wish I had thought of this joke first" category, Tena posts on Eschaton:

Hawking is a flip flopper!

Sheesh. I have thrown all kinds of damning evidence, and voiced terrible confessions into a black hole I happened upon-- all based on Hawking's reassurance I would be safe. But now it seems I'm screwed.

TextPattern

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 22:22:13 GMT

Has anyone tried out TextPattern? (CSM/Blogging software.) It looks pretty cool.

Update: I've installed it and tried it out (then nuked it for the time being). Nice interface, but it's a bit scary to use software from a one-person development team.

AHHHHH

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 20:22:01 GMT

Fantastic cartoon:

Mark Fiore: Minister of Fear

Tom Ridge wants you to remain calm but scared

Auf-Johnauf Johntätigkeit

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:22:04 GMT

Whoh. The German autotranslation is getting surrealer and surrealer now that the blog has actual German text in it. Apparently it retranslates the German phrase it originally created into ... well, stranger German.

Heißes Wonkette auf John auf Johntätigkeit!

becomes

Auf-Johnauf Johntätigkeit Heisses Wonkette!

Heißes Wonkette auf John auf Johntätigkeit!

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 17:22:02 GMT

Took a look at the German (auto)translation of my blog -- always a fun thing to do -- and came across this phrase:

Heißes Wonkette auf John auf Johntätigkeit!

Meaning "Hot Wonkette on John on John action." But I love how "John action" becomes a single word: Johntätigkeit.

Let's declare a Johntätigkeit day: John action day!

Street Performers Rejoice

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 17:22:02 GMT

Happy International Juggling Day!

Say It Isn't So, Kevin

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:07:00 GMT

Kevin Drum wonders

Is it possible that Bush played the gay marriage amendment issue perfectly? Maybe. By making a few phone calls and a radio speech he was able to look like a hero to his social neanderthal base, but by otherwise paying little attention to it (and getting it off the agenda quickly) he doesn't look too scary to moderate Republicans. Overall, he probably played this pretty well.

That would be a real Reagan-like trick to pull. But I think -- or hope -- that Kevin's not right about this one. If things were going Bush's way, a ploy like this might actually work. But now, as Bush appears increasingly incompetent, I think his legislative failures look more like failures.

Yeah, sure, he showed that he had the hate in his heart, but he was too much of a boob to turn the hate into anything useful.

We don't know who you are, but we know how much money you make

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:10:53 GMT

Ran across this observation on Pandagon. He's commenting on an article contesting the use of homosexual as a noun -- because it implies that homosexuality defines a class of people, rather than a class of behavior.

Those [statistics] are just a sample of the worst. The theory of the entire piece is that since there's no way to confirm that someone is actually homosexual (the same thing could be said for heterosexuality, mind you), and since homosexual is a fairly new word, at least according to the author, they don't actually exist, and therefore, can be discriminated against at will.

Yes -- but you won't believe how common it is for homophobes to combine this argument to legitimize discrimination against homosexuals with another, contradictory one: that homosexuals are known to make (x) amount more money than straight people, and therefore don't need laws protecting their right not be fired for being gay, or thrown out of their homes.

No kidding: these arguments are made at the same time. Gays don't deserve protection against discrimination in the workplace because we don't really know who is gay -- it's a behavior, not an identity -- and, gays don't need protection because they make more money.

Yes, we have precise demographic information about a demographic group that we claim can't be identified as a demographic group, so will you stop talking about them, please?

Culture Wars

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 06:40:37 GMT

Among other comic horrors, the FMA has subjected us to the indignities of headlines such as "Will the gay marriage debate reignite the culture wars?"

As if, politically, we had anything but "culture" wars. It is no accident that political acrimony has grown as the actual political distance between the political parties has diminished.

But that sounds too much like a Naderish point. The next election, as Hersh said in his talk at the ACLU, is no doubt the most important since 1860. And as Burningbird has argued, if Kerry did nothing but take long naps during his presidency, he would be better than Bush.

Political analysts have been baffled by Bush's inability to put the most basic thought into words. He was never eloquent, but, back in Texas, he could at least hold his own. (He sounded so much more presidential as a Governor than he ever has as a president.) The reason seems clear enough: the governorship of Texas is almost a ceremonial office. He didn't really need to do anything.

As president, Bush's awkwardness has always seemed like an acknowledgement that he's far out of his depth. It's only through something like a collective mass hysteria that people have convinced themselves that he seems "commanding." A collective fiction that we have embraced out of fear, one that has baffled the rest of the world.

Abu Ghraib, even worse than we knew

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:33:08 GMT

They said that far more horrific stories were going to come out of Abu Ghraib. Here it is

At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:

"Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

See the post about this on edcone.com here.

Sadly, No offers a smaller, downloadable version of Hersh's talk.

Fox's New Reality Show: The Republican Party!

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:22:03 GMT

If you haven't seen the memos from Fox News that Wonkette reprinted, read them now. They are astounding in their candor about Fox's right-wing political bias. (I'm really looking forward to seeing Outfoxed this weekend at one of the house parties organized by MoveOn.org. It has backyard vision with an LCD projector! BBQ! Booze!)

Slam Slim Fast

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:22:03 GMT

Join Eschaton in sending a message to Slim Fast. (They canned Whoopi Goldberg for her comments about Shrub.) Contact Slim Fast electronically here.

Feedalicious

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 21:22:01 GMT

Via Logos, information about updates at Feedster. I agree that it's become a great search engine (mainly for blogs, of course.)

Feedster update

Feedster is my favorite feed searchengine. After a first year of continuous improvements Feedster has now done a major update. It has many features. I can understand why Scott Johnson is...

Wonkette on John on John

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 20:22:14 GMT

Hot Wonkette on John on John Action!

John on John Action: Looking at the Overnights Edition

You don't even have to try to make it sound dirty:

Zut Alors!!!! Le Prison!!!

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:15:25 GMT

Bastille Day is over already.

And we missed all the Republican anti-parties.

Matthew reminds us of some of the forgotten bloody verses of La Marseillaise.

As an undergrad I spent a year in Paris (yeah, yeah, didn't everyone). I'll never forget the night I was sitting outside my apartment -- in the middle of Paris -- when some drunken American sorority girls stumbled by and said, "Frenchy frenchy frenchy French frog, eating frenchy frenchy french fries?" (Well, ok, I was in fact eating French fries.)

They are probably Congressional members now.

Well, there is always this.

Homeland Homophobes

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:54:24 GMT

Came across this on George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!

"Isn't that the ultimate homeland security? To defend the sanctity of marriage?" ? Rick Santorum

Oh... my... god. Santorum is equating gay marriage with a terrorist attack.

What an offense to the all the real victims of terror.

He's disgracing the memory of those killed on 9/11. He's demeaning anyone who puts his or her life on the line for homeland security -- hey, he's saying that he's doing the "ultimate" in homeland security by supporting the amendment; he's doing more than a soldier who fights and dies.

Hot John on John Action, Yet Again

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:28:11 GMT

Hey! I'm the single result you get in google for the search string "hot John on John action!"

Top 5 hits for "hot John on John action" on..

1.	All Day Permanent Red » Hot John on John Action , Yet Again
2.	All Day Permanent Red
3.	All Day Permanent Red
4.	All Day Permanent Red
5.	Harrison Brace's Radio Sandbox

8/4/2004; 12:01:49 AM.

Update: er, well, sort of.

Blogdentity

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:15:28 GMT

A number of people have already written on the "social" network that blogs have with each other. In the good old Marxist tradition, it's the blogs themselves that, increasingly, have the social relation (though that I do not think that this is a condemnation of blogs.)

To the degree that the claim is true about the "sociability" of blogs, design (to state the obvious) takes on a role akin to personal appearance. Not to overstate the case, but I think that accounts for the weirdness people feel when redesigning blogs, or when visited a blog they know that has been redesigned.