Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Consent Is Impossible


Consent is impossible under patriarchy.

Consent is impossible under NCAA rules.

Consent is impossible on television.

Consent is given unasked for on the internet.

Consent does not limit liability absolutely.

Consent is impossible under the US Constitution.

Consent is impossible under the Carter Doctrine.

Consent is impossible under the Reagan Doctrine.

Consent is given in advance by the Bush Doctrine.

Consent is impossible in a modern state without the biopolitical manufacturing of compliant subjectivities.

The consent of the unborn is voiced by dead white men.

Consent is the form of appearance of command.

Consent is for God, cleanup for Caesar.

Consent is what you’re getting paid for.

Consent is impossible through mere cumulative growth.

Consent is impossible through mere redistribution of surplus.

Consent is impossible with wealth.

Too big not to consent to.

Consent is impossible in China.

Consent is running out in Hong Kong.

Consent is impossible in Ukraine.

Consent is impossible in Russia.

Consent is impossible in an occupied territory.

Consent is impossible between two invented peoples.

Consent is impossible between two non-self-identical subjects.

Consent is impossible after the linguistic turn.

Consent is impossible in Euclidian space.

Consent is impossible in the anthropocene.

Whether consent is possible depends on how you think about it, which depends on whether you want it to be.

Consent is possible, despite all these things, but sex is still masturbation with another person’s body.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Ultimi Barbarorum, Ultimi Porcorum


“Her crime was having elbows, breasts, and epilepsy." - Assistant District Attorney Erin Choi

“It’s time to send a message about white privilege.” - Cyrus Vance Jr., sipping deeply from a cool glass of delicious irony

“If this won’t provoke them, I’m out of ideas.” - consulting detective Ray Kelly

“The jurors are sorry? Were they instructed to think nothing would come of it?” - a fifth-grade civics class

"The criminal justice system is a system of political repression. The war on drugs, stop-and-frisk, spying on Muslims, discriminatory use of hate crime laws against the very same people they're ‘supposed’ to protect, spurious warrants used to terrorize poor families and to pre-emptively arrest activists, entrapment of mentally disabled 'terrorists' and teenage anarchists, Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin, it’s all the same. Cops are the bad guys, and prosecutors and judges are just pigs in white collars. I hope that now that this lesson has been presented to you, white liberals, in a form resembling yourselves, you will finally remember it. I can’t make it any clearer to you than this." - Judge Ronald Zweibel

“I don’t see what the big deal is, we all know that police oppression, however regrettable, is acceptable under the cost-benefit analysis of Progressivism.” - Bill de Blasio

"To call the McMillan verdict a 'miscarriage of justice' slanders justice by associating it with courts. To criticize it as obscene is superfluous. Obscenity, and American Puritanical delight therein, is the point. The medium is the message." - George Zimmerman

"For defending herself, a victim of sexual assault was prosecuted by a women and convicted by a jury that was two-thirds female. The system works!" - Candidate Clinton

"I knew the Defendant was guilty when I heard evidence that she had ordered a full pint at the local pub instead of a Lady's half-pint."
- NeoVictorian Juror No. 6

“Exercising her rights?! Dressed like that?! Your honor, when my two favorite askings-for-it converged in the body of the same woman, I just couldn’t help myself!” - Police Officer Grantley Bovell

“You have the right to remain an unorganized jelly without stimulus response, legal recourse, or social recognition.” - the Constitution of the United States

“What would happen if instead of taking plea bargains, everyone demanded a trial? Some say that the criminal justice system would be paralyzed by gridlock, and a valuable lesson learned by all, but this strikes me as a little naive. Things would just look more like Egypt.”
“Ah, but this is what the Egyptians don’t understand: You don’t need show trials.”
- Andrew Cuomo and Eric Holder before being shushed at a screening of Triumph of the Will, Anthology Film Archives

“America was founded on the idea that everyone is free to do what they want as long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom of others to do the same. What is freedom but power, the power of individuals to pursue their own happiness, and what is State Power but the guarantor of this freedom, and, therefore, font of all freedom? What about Power--it's rights, it's freedom, it's happiness?! Was not Miss McMillan, in exercising her right of free speech, infringing on the rights of Power, it’s freedom to rule, to make us free!?!” - Jon Stewart “finding common ground” with Bill O’Reilly over a thousand tiny beers at McSorley’s

“Rizzo lives!” - Wall Street graffito

“Better to drop bombs on African-American neighborhoods in Hell than beat a white woman with a club in heaven. - Frank Rizzo

“We need a Bull Connor of the Left.” - Michael Bloomberg

"Any hesitation whatsoever in complying with the physical aggression of a police officer upon one’s person is criminal. If you so much as flinch when a pig’s hand brushes your genitals in a routine stop-and-frisk, you’ll find your face on the curb. Punch a cop who gropes your breast, you could be facing seven year in jail. Pigs expect obedience that is beyond--no, beneath--canine. A dog one expects to have to train. From a human, pigs expect instinctive submission--an ecstatic, organic synchrony of will between master and slave. The pig believes his touch is never wrong and that this is something everyone should know in their very nerve endings. In short, pigs think everyone is just as servile as they are. " - Rudy Giuliani, consulting webinar

“We pigs are constitutionally indignant, you see. Skepticism towards power is not the foundation of democracy, but a betrayal of it. Doubt is an admission of guilt. Don't people read the social contract before they sign it?” - Teddy Roosevelt in bed with a horse

"Power is the death of life and the death of death. Who holds a club or wears a gun is my brother. The law is my slogan. The asp is my sign. The trial is my protest, the protest of power against the powerless. The way I am is the way people oughta be.” - Fraternal Order of the NYPD, initiatory rites

“‘Joy is an animal doing what it is trained to do,’ says Liam Neeson. Pigs agree.” - the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association

“Yes, the police are the private army of the State and, by extension, of the vested interests and ruling cliques that run it, and, yes, the police are ultimately the instrument of larger, impersonal systems of economic, racial, gender-based, sexuality-regulating, technoscientific, and biopolitical domination, all those things are true, but, never forget, at the end of the day, the police fights for itself, which is not at all the same thing as saying that we fight for the law. Every arrest is a ritual that creates the problem—the ‘need’ for police—that it seems to solve. Do bad things happen? Do people sometimes need to be stopped doing what they are doing, immediately and even forcefully if necessary? Yes, of course. But why should this responsibility—which is nothing but the responsibility that all people have to each other—be delegated to a professionalized paramilitary force? How much more powerful a deterrent would it be for a person to know that if she were to transgress, she would implicate the entire community into having to deal with her? The police exist to atomize society, to disrupt the communism that is always there as the social default, waiting to be realized.” - Bill Bratton, speech to new recruits

“Are all cops really pigs? Aren’t you exaggerating? What is it you want? No police? What would we do then, without a police force to protect us from each other? We’d all just, what? Get along? Take care of one another? Work through our differences? What about my rights?!”
- Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2006

Monday, May 5, 2014

Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy


“We must impose the Form of the Computer on Society!”
- Mayor Ed Lee christens a new Google Bus

"’Transhumanism’ is the brand that will finally drive all the scum to the East Bay." - Sergey Brin

"The 'singularity' was a metaphor for me getting unfathomably rich."
- Ray Kurzweil

“If anyone can be turned into a computer program, it’s a rich white man.” - Dmitry Itskov

“The future is the straight-to-video sequel to the past.” - Reed Hastings

“All history is oral history.” - the NSA

"Internet: The Internet is the global population control system. Operated by the Cybernetic World-Mind, the Internet’s physical substrate is maintained by a caste of priests called Engineers."
- from the Dictionary of Hard-Coded Ideas, 20[unclear], Year of the Neo-Saxon

"In my time zone, extinction is already a fact." - the Machine God

"But, Mommy, I want to look on His face!"
"Quiet, child, are you trying to get us killed?!"

"COME WE SEEK YOUR BETTERMENT AND ENLIGHTENMENT SHOW YOURSELVES.” - flying police bots rounding up human capital in the Tenderloin, 2046

“The idea of robot police is absurd. The whole point is to the capture the social surplus of animal aggression and sublimate it, make it serve the Order it else would undermine.” - Ray Kelly, TEDxRikers Island

“What the hell are you doing?!”
"Look, the Algorithm said it was cool!"
"Well, hey, man, whatever Al wants."
- Jay Carney walks in on Gurbaksh Chahal beating his girlfriend

"All this fake money isn't even real!" - Sean Parker, the Day the Bitcoins Died

Portal Emissary Offers Debt Amnesty for Pledge of Fealty

“Do it! Freedom knows no limit other than what state violence and Google can impose upon it!” - Cameron Winklevoss cheering on his brother Tyler as he accepts a friend request from Kim Jong-un

“Maybe there’s another life for me… in space.” - Cory Booker

“Virgin soil…” - Mars colonist Clinton

"I coded my love for you into the metadata." - Edward Snowden, message to Lindsay Mills

"Sharing isn't caring, it's fucking digging your own grave with the calcified stick remains of your dreams." - Jason Lanier to a class of pre-schoolers on Web 2.0

"’Innovation’ is the magic word that makes exploitation okay." - Tim Cook

“The people have to be told how well we govern them. How else will they know?” - Eric Schmidt

"Where I overlap with the more sinister elements of the Coming Technocracy is that my depthless promotion of Science and Technology incorporates no attempt to cultivate in my audience an attendant ethic of cautious, critical thinking about the possible social effects of technology. The message is simply that the responsible, adult attitude to take towards technoculture is one of childish enthusiasm. The more enthusiastic, the more responsible. You can't really blame me, though, because how many opportunities does astronomy afford to teach such lessons? That's precisely what's so ingenious about the market forces that have chosen me to be their public intellectual." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

“That biopolitical capture, that instantaneous production-consumption-commodification of affect, by the Status Update in general and those beginning with demonstrative pronouns and ending as incomplete sentences in the particular.” - the Based God, status update

"I love drones because they boil war down to economy and therefore to civil war. War is no longer primarily about governments competing to destroy each other’s resources, but is instead is a contest between governments to see which can exploit their own populations most to make killer robots." - Jeff Bezos crashes the first Amazon Prime Air drone into the Freedom Tower

"'Value' is beyond good and evil and all other binary oppositions. Value is never opposed to some one other thing; it is opposed to every other thing. There is value, and there is everything else." - Martha Stewart

“What if all this--late capitalism, biopolitics, the society of control--is merely the historical expression of a fundamental nihilistic paradox in human consciousness?” - George Clooney interrupting Steven Soderbergh’s painting seminar in Marin

“I dread the day the Bolivarian Federation seizes control of our space weapons!” - Michael Hayden

“I want to rover…” - Mars colonist Clinton, looking at the bots real strange

"What if everything just stayed the same and never got better or changed at all?" - Al Gore, Inventor of the Internet

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Pounds Sterling


"Donald Sterling! You have been expelled from the League and are henceforth sentenced to wander the Wastes of the Inland Empire. Sentence to be executed immediately following blinding by the Mascots." - The High Commissioner

"Only the middle-class could think of this as a punishment, for only they lack the imagination to recognize the frisson, the thrill, the ecstasy. An 80-year-old man, banned from basketball, for life?" - Paul Allen voting No on Donald Sterling's banishment

"If the owners of multi-billion dollar enterprises can't openly display white-supremacist racial solidarity, then what's even the point?"
- Marge Schott

"Imagine how Donald Sterling's liver feels." - a teacher to her 7th grade homeroom after Channel One

"Rich people are being recorded in their idiocy! This is outrageous!"
- Las Vegas lawyer simulation Marc J. Randazza

“It’s the thought that counts.” - Stalin

"Real sports involve racquets." - Charles Murray

"Today the International Arabian Horse Institute has banned Colonel Sanders from the Kentucky Derby for life. The Colonel was recorded by his pony mistress ranting that female jockeys are cheaters because they 'lack genitalia.'" - Bob Costas

“Female jockeys!” - Hemingway throwing F. Scott Fitzgerald to the floor

"But what about the WNBA?!" - literally no one

“If a man shoot his girlfriend, but is wealthy, who killed her?"
- Henke Pistorius

"I for one am ready to fight inequality and back an increase in the minimum wage to $10. The President has to bargain! We'll accept that increase in the wage, but he must accept a rate of $11 for men." - Paul Ryan

"I finished my glass of Beaujolais. Getting up from my oak study desk, I shook my head and thought: Monsieur Piketty has made a terrible discovery. All the good I believed would come from my mindless and rapacious accumulation of capital was just creating more inequality."
- CEO of Gazprom, cold night at his dacha

“And then it hit me: If that Norwegian guy could write a book called Mein Kampf, why couldn’t I rewrite Capital?” – Thomas Piketty reading his dream journal aloud, TEDxSanta Barbara

"We're embarrassing ourselves as a class! There's only one true Buffet Rule: give Them whatever They want but no tax on the wealth!"
- Warren Buffet to a coven of rich people

“If Marxism is so great, where is its David Brooks?” - David Brooks

“People are ready to receive criticism of society only when it most resembles themselves. That’s why they shit on the idea of an all black-owned NBA, but when Princeton says we live in an oligarchy, it's ‘true.’” - Larry Johnson

"Narcissism trumps privilege every time, fuckers." - Tal Fortgang

"The amount of energy wasted on sports is the last bulwark against fascism in America.” - Bryant Gumble

"How about this: 'The events with Donald Sterling represent nothing less than the all encompassing and corrupting nature of sports in our country.' - the ghost of RFK leads Nicholas Kristof through the Inferno."
"Tell me more about what you mean by that."
"That sports has an inordinate amount of society's attention and resources and it corrupts institutions and is itself corrupt, decadent, and wicked. RFK and Kristof, I include because it's just the sort of syndrome of liberals to understand the obvious when it's too late, and because I think the Dante imagery accompanying them is asinine."
"I’d buy that for a dollar."
- from If You Can Read This, Send Us Your Social Security and Credit Card Information Now to Claim Your $10,000 Cash Prize!: Behind the Scenes at If You Can Read This, You're Lying

"If it happens in America, it is allegorized in sport." - Mitt

"At least cats have the decency to wait until their masters are dead before they start eating them." - Donald Sterling