The link goes to my post yesterday with that quote as the title. In the comments, I wrote: "He's saying the words that have been left unsaid in the past. In that way, he's like Trump."
Who are the other American politicians who might have said "collectivism" — in a positive way, not as a way of criticizing somebody else? Bernie Sanders, who swore in Mamdani, doesn't use that word.
This blog has a 22-year archive, so I did a search to see how "collectivism" has figured into our discourse. I found 14 items, and I don't think any of them count as a positive use of the word in the style of Zoran Mamdami.
Here are all the past occurrences of "collectivism" on this blog, in chronological order:
"'Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt?' indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000 followers, asked in a post Thursday. Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt...."
What shirt? It was a T-shirt depicting the Buffalo Soldiers that stated that "their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries."
ADDED: The only Indians mentioned by the shirt are "warring Indians," so by definition they are against peace. If there were some Indians who were pro-peace, the shirt has nothing to say about them. I'm not seeing the NRA complaining about "murderous gunmen" or Mexicans complaining about "Mexican revolutionaries."
Both Lorde and [Addison] Rae have worked with the singer whom [Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers,] credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)
That's a headline at the NYT. Subhead: "Democrats have widely acknowledged that they have no answer for the online ecosystem of conservative influencers popular with Gen Z men. Some have argued for a rethink of media strategy."
Celebrity appearances and paid endorsements from influencers come across as transactional and inauthentic, [some younger Democrats] said.
“It’s last-second, ‘Let’s get Beyoncé onstage to say we support women,’ but that doesn’t move anyone who wasn’t already going to vote Democrat,” said Ayem Kpenkaan, a liberal content creator.... He suggested that Democrats needed liberal versions of media platforms that are culturally right-leaning but not inherently political — like Barstool Sports....
“We have to make entertaining, engaging content that men want to watch and care about,” Mr. Kpenkaan said. “Then, over time, you pepper in more progressive views.”
So... make something authentic, then pepper in the political propaganda. How distasteful.
Re "Let’s get Beyoncé onstage to say we support women":
Nonprofit fact-checking website FactCheck.org said that a Harris campaign official told them the claim "is not true." PolitiFact also said that it had found "no evidence" for the claim and that Beyoncé's publicist told them it was "beyond ridiculous."
Newsweek reached out to the Harris campaign for comment via email outside of regular working hours. Newsweek also reached out to representatives for other celebrities who endorsed Harris and have been accused of being paid for it, including Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Eminem, via email.
Some social media users pointed out that two payments to Winfrey's production company, Harpo Productions Inc, can be found under the Harris campaign's disbursements on the Federal Election Committee website. The payments, of $500,000 each, were made on October 15 and are marked as "event production."
"Marked as 'event production'"? I hope they didn't mismark anything! What was the "production" that cost a million dollars? Causing Oprah to appear onstage? The social media users are trying to help, but it looks as though they are calling attention to what might be a false statement to the FEC.
"... said Trey Martinez Fischer, the Democratic leader in the Texas State House. Just about everything related to Ms. Harris’s Houston trip is engineered to create news that will reach voters in the battleground states. Before the rally with Beyoncé and [Willie] Nelson, she is scheduled to record a podcast interview with the popular podcaster Brené Brown, a University of Houston professor and vulnerability researcher who has an audience of millions that skews heavily female.... No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Ms. Harris’s Houston rally appears to be the first for a Democratic presidential nominee in Texas this late in a campaign since President Bill Clinton went to San Antonio in the final days before the 1996 election."
"... and a piped-in recording of Beyoncé’s 'Freedom,' a song the Harris campaign has been using in campaign ads and videos that aired throughout the event.... Columnist Laura Bassett mused: 'teasing a huge surprise guest and leaking that it’s both beyonce and taylor swift just to get people to tune in is actually kind of funny.' In fairness, it wouldn’t have been out of the question. In 2020, Beyoncé seemed to endorse President Joe Biden and Harris: On the eve of the election, she called for Texas residents to vote via an Instagram clip that showed her wearing a Biden-Harris mask...."
I was trying to picture "a Biden-Harris mask," and thinking of one of those rubbery Halloween things with celebrity facial features and finding it weird that Beyoncé would disguise herself like that. Somehow, Covid had slipped my mind:
It's a bad move to trick people into staying tuned and then denying them what they thought they'd get, but I'm glad there was so little use of pop-culture celebrities. I was picturing one celeb after another, but I don't think they did that. I watched very little of the convention, but I got the impression that the Democrats went in the opposite direction and kept filling the stage with clusters of relatively ordinary people who exemplified one issue or another. That's good, though not enough for me to watch.
"Inside the West London crematory were big, beautiful banners emblazoned with slogans like 'Embrace joy today' and 'I want to see you dance again.' In one video, guests were doing the limbo to the silky vocals and pulse of Beyoncé’s hit song 'Heated.'"
Is this hip? Big, beautiful banners with slogans like "Embrace joy today"? Seems too close to the "Live/Laugh/Love" approach to home decor — the antithesis of hipness, no?
But I'm not the arbiter of hipness, so I'll just say....
Inside the West London crematory... Beyoncé’s hit song "Heated"....
The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."
She'd added an eye-rolling emoji — the L.A. Times reports — and then softened the snark with "This isn’t meant as shade, I’m just curious."
The L.A. Times casually displays bias:
Bey’s empowering track “Alien Superstar” has 24 songwriters on it....
It uses the cute pet name "Bey" and designates the song as "empowering."
Here are the lyrics. You tell me if it's empowering: "I'm too classy for this world, forever, I'm that girl/Feed you diamonds and pearls, ooh, baby/I'm too classy to be touched, I paid them all in dust/I'm stingy with my love, ooh, baby."
The objected to line — on "Heated" — is "Spazzing on that ass, spaz on that ass."
Who wrote that line? "The song has nine credited writers including Beyoncé and Drake, the Canadian rapper, but it is not clear which of them wrote the lyrics."
What was the "similar controversy" that happened recently? Lizzo used the same word, in the line "Hold my bag, bitch, hold my bag/ Do you see this shit? I’m a spaz."
"My guess is that the [blue painting] is not by chance. The color is so specific that it has to be some kind of homage. As you can see, there is zero Tiffany blue in the [ad] campaign other than the painting... It’s a way to modernize Tiffany blue."
I was going to quote the expressions of horror by Basquiat's friends, but when I got to Arnault's defense of Tiffany, I saw that those expressions were surplusage. You've heard the phrase "The best defense is a good offense." But sometimes the best offense is a bad defense. Defense is self-serving, so when it works against you, it really works.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose 33 years ago at the age of 27.
But Beyonce and Jay-Z are living well and posing artfully....
It's all so stilted, this "modernization." To my eye, Jay-Z is a tribute to the Maxell blown-away guy of the 1980s...
Then again I could be wrong in my mental associations. At least they are — unlike Arnault's idea that Basquiat mixed that color blue to say "Tiffany!" — unaffected by commercial interests.
Moderators of Black People Twitter, an online forum, asked participants to submit a photo to prove they were not white. Many black users came to believe that white users were pretending to be black to give their unpopular opinions more credibility. https://t.co/vQTf23FGyj
Here's the subreddit in question, BlackPeopleTwitter. From the NYT article:
Many black users came to believe that white users were pretending to be black to give their unpopular opinions more credibility. Some of the posts casually dropped racial slurs. Others repeated anti-black stereotypes about crime, parenting and intelligence. Beyoncé was disparaged.
“These people are white,” said Tony Hinderman, 23, a black actor in Chicago. “Black people love Beyoncé. There is nothing to not love about her.”...
Like all Reddit moderators, [BlackPeopleTwitter moderators] perform tasks like approving posts and banning users; they work without pay, in exchange for mostly free rein to run their subreddit....
"Why exactly we settled on these two billionaire entertainers as the embodiment of progressivism is utterly beyond me. There was never anything revolutionary about 'Woke Queen Bey.' Her weird 2010s monarchist turn was the will-to-power artfully packaged for 20-something Teen Vogue editorial assistants; lyrics like 'I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow bone it / I dream it, I work hard, I grind till I own it' are essentially Randian.... As for Jay-Z, his — gag me — 'feminism' is about as sincere as you might expect from someone who got rich mouthing along to lines like 'In the cut where I keep em / Till I need a nut.'... All of which is to say that I can't believe anyone is actually surprised, much less upset, by Jay-Z's recent partnership with the NFL on racial issues.... Nobody bats an eye when Rush Limbaugh says things like 'I think we're past kneeling.' Why should anybody be surprised when the guy who did 'Big Pimpin'' tells us the same thing? Of course he's 'the NFL's black boyfriend.' He's been upper-middle-class white frat bros' black boyfriend for two decades now."
Interesting to call Beyonce's lyrics "Randian." I had to look up "yellow bone it." From the annotations at Genius.com:
“Yellow bone” refers to being black but having light-skin.... Bey’s considered “yellow-boned” opposed to “red-boned” because her complexion has more of a “honey” tone to it, and is thus “yellow.” Jay Z referred to Beyonce as a “high yellow broad” on his 2009 song “Off That.”
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination....
I'm not going to go any further into the study of whether Beyonce lyrics accord with Randian philosophy! If my head were full of Beyonce lyrics — which maybe they would be if my last 10 years were my teenage years — I might want to sort through whether Beyonce-ism is as left-wing as left-wing commentators had been presenting her up until this football foofaraw. But my teenage years were in the 60s. My head is full of Dylan lyrics. And I've already blogged about whether Dylan is as left-wing as some people seem to think or whether he's really somehow right-wing. So that's it for me for now about the political meaning of musical artists.
Some economist reacts to Tapper's tweet with "Don't understand the point of this conversation. Does @jaketapper think Obama should be back in US leading Democrats or blaming @BarackObama for leaving Democrats in an incredibly weak position or just making random observation?"
Tapper says: "Kind of a combo of 2 and 3. Glad he’s enjoying his life; he’s entitled. Also, FYI, as we begin focus on Nov 2018 and 2020, he presided over a historically precipitous decline of his party. Just a factual matter. Some Dems seem angrier at my tweet than at that fact. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
My ideas are: 1. The song is so popular or Beyoncé and Jay-Z are such idols that no one noticed a problem with writing "N***as in Paris," 2. Though the concert was in Washington, D.C., the Washington, D.C. of the Obamas might as well be Paris, and that's why the song title seemed so apt (and "N***as" came along without much thought), 3. The HuffPo tweeter is black and therefore, like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, has a privilege to bandy that word about casually (but the tweets come from "HuffPo Politics," where there is no individual tweeter identified), 4. Knowing the song seemed cool, so naming it proved coolness, 5. HuffPo wanted to create agitation over the use of the word (and believed, because they are liberal, that more anxiety about race will work out well for their side), 6. They actually get a frisson of racist satisfaction when they put that word next to the Obamas' name.
After writing all that, I'm reading the Wikipedia article on the song, which I see is censored and just called "In Paris" or "Paris" on the radio:
The song received universal acclaim from many critics. Rolling Stone commented on the song by saying "Jay and Ye come in hard over a slow, menacing beat and icy synthesizer notes, but regardless, this cut is mostly memorable for including an unexpected sample of dialogue from the Will Ferrell/Jon Heder ice-skating comedy Blades of Glory. 'No one knows what it means, but it's provocative,' says Ferrell with deep conviction, essentially summing up the art of hip-hop lyrics."
... in this new Beyonce and Jay-Z video, which is called "Apeshit":
There's lots of "Mona Lisa" in that video, but there's other Louvre art shown very well. Watch for "The Coronation of Napoleon" (beginning at 1:37 and then at 4:01). And the "Winged Victory of Samothrace" and the museum's beautiful staircase make a stage set for lots of interesting dancing.
I've got nothing to say about the music, because I don't listen to this kind of music enough to be able to hear it, let alone have an opinion, but I'm extremely interested in the use of artwork — the long views, the closeups, the combination with dancers.
I can hear some of the words, and they seem to be just expressing gratitude about having become rich and famous. The title — which had me thinking about Roseanne's recent ape-related screwup — seems to be simply a reference to the enthusiasm of Beyonce and Jay-Z's fans — "Have you ever seen a crowd going apeshit?"
Let me look up the lyrics and read them. Here. I see there's something about pay equity:
Rah, gimme my check
Put some respeck on my check
Or pay me in equity, pay me in equity
Or watch me reverse out the dick (skrrt)
The annotation explains that last line as "a simple threat: she’ll leave projects and especially men that are cutting her a less-than-satisfactory check for her work."
He wanna go with me (go with me)
He like to roll the weed (roll with me)
He wanna be with me (be with me)
He wanna give me that vitamin D (D!)
I did not need to click on the annotation or use Urban Dictionary to understand the term "vitamin D."
When Jay-Z finally gets his closeup, he begins:
I'm a gorilla in the fuckin' coop
Finna pull up in the zoo
I'm like Chief Keef meet Rafiki
Who been Lion King to you
Pocket watch it like kangaroos
Tell these clowns we ain't amused
Banana clips for that monkey business...
Last night was a fuckin' zoo
Stagedivin' in a pool of people
Ran through Liverpool like a fuckin' Beatle
Smoke gorilla glue like it's fuckin' legal....
All that "ape" and "gorilla" business seems like an invitation to white people to Roseanne ourselves. According to the annotation at the lyrics link:
Jay directly quotes rapper, Chief Keef’s “Faneto”, the first of many animal references he makes throughout this verse.
I’m a gorilla in a fuckin' coupe, finna pull up to the zoo...
“Gorilla” is a racial slur directed towards black people who are perceived by some to be primitive or ape-like. Jay embraces this word proudly and uses it as a sense of empowerment.
“Coupe” or “Coop” are interchangeable. The latter continues Jay’s animalistic theme, saying he is a Gorilla among chickens.
ADDED: This is missing all the art, but musically, it's so much more my style (from 1970):
I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man
We had crazy politicians and a threat of nuclear war back in 1970s. That's not just some new thing cooked up for you kids today.
[Tiffany Haddish] describ[ed] the scene to GQ, “There was this actress there that’s just, like, doing the mostest. She bit Beyoncé in the face.”...
A source who was at the bash tells us, “It was a big thing in the moment at the party, everyone was talking about how anyone would dare to do that....
"Beyoncé’s at the bar, so I said.., ‘Did she really bite you?’” Haddish revealed, adding she told Beyoncé she was ready to beat down the barbarian... "[Bey] was like, ‘Tiffany, no. Don’t do that….. She’s not even drunk. . . Just chill,’” Haddish recounted.
Lathan has strenuously denied biting Bey, tweeting on March 27, “Y’all are funny. Under no circumstance did I bite Beyoncé and if I did it would be a love bite.”
Violence by women is brushed aside — a joke, a catfight, a quirky expression of "love." It's a privilege, but it's also how women are subordinated. What we do doesn't really matter. It's just a silly game. Move on. Compare Trump's silly playfulness that is the basis of my post title.
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