Why do you come here?

[imomus]

Well, Saturday's entry -- in which I advanced the daring view that one Israeli life is equivalent to one Lebanese life -- really did seem to annoy a few Click Opera readers. "I'm arranging a Momus record burning in my yard tomorrow. Just listening to your voice makes me sick. I wish you ill you sick bastard," wrote one ex-satisfied customer with an IP address in Holland.

What puzzles me is why such right-wing people bought Momus records in the first place, or read this blog. Aren't there semantic filters, clues all over the place, political markers? Haven't my political cards always been on the table? Shouldn't right wingers have been rebuffed years ago? Shouldn't this "bigger-than-Jesus"-style record-burning have happened the moment people listened to my records? Shouldn't these people have played the stuff on headphones in Tower or Virgin, concluded "he's a radical", and just bought a Stephen Malkmus record instead?

Speaking of Malkmus, I could understand it if I'd expressed sentiments like those the pig libber shared with Index magazine last year:

"There are things about the West Coast that bug me. There is this really stupid leftism out here. It makes me mad. On September 11, I was at this health-food store on Hawthorne Boulevard called the Daily Grind. It's a ropy kind of place. These young, shiftless hippies hang out there. This one guy was like, "Those workers, man, they deserved it." At first, I wanted to collar him and put him up against a wall and get all Wolfowitzian on his ass. Then I turned into my dad, like, "This guy can hang out and play in his drum circle now, but in forty years he's just going to be a strain on our health-care system. He may be eating health food, but he doesn't know he's still part of the problem."

If I'd said that kind of thing, sure, I'd expect to have ultra-right wing commenters. But I haven't. I'm at a loss. Do these people come here just to "educate" me? Or do they think this white robe I'm wearing is KKK (in fact it's Moroccan), or that the big orange face in the poster behind me is Ayn Rand before she shaved her beard?

Come on, right wing people, enlighten me. What on earth are you doing here?

Comments

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Is it safe to assume that Zionism is a right-wing ideology? Wasn't Israel originally founded as a socialist project?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't want this to be a replay of "the Israel question". Today is a new day, and this is a new subject. I'm interested in why right wingers -- regulars like Henry Perri and Cerulicante, for instance -- come to Click Opera. Now, these people are always "Israel right or wrong" people. It comes with the package of being a conservative these days. Once upon a time supporters of Israel would have been left-leaners, but those days are gone (http://media.www.theeagleonline.com/media/storage/paper666/news/2004/04/02/Opinions/Jewish.Vote.Might.Swing.Right-648140.shtml?sourcedomain=www.theeagleonline.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com).

Personally, I think Marxism is also Jewish, by the way.

[thisisforreal.livejournal.com]

an opinion is an opinion. regardless, i still love you. but then i agree with everything you've been writing so i consider you with a different perspective than they (the right-wingers we can just call... wrighngers? wringers?).

the momus-record-burning is absolutely terrific, i must say.

[autokrater.livejournal.com]

even a lot of seemingly left people are touchy when it comes to subjects like
israel vs. the arab world or 9/11..
even in austin,where i live now..liberal health food eating type people
will get rude like that.
the other day some lady exactly like that at my work went off on me and my co-worker when she overheard us talking about 9/11 and how fake the whole official story is.i think it's basically all based on the type of person..i mean some right wing people can be a bit open minded and some left wing people can be a bit narrow minded..and vice versa..
as to why right wing thinkers would read your journal..?hmmm
perhaps it's one of those instances where they are reading your journal cause they heard it was "crazY' or "ridiculous"
or they read it because they were interested..
..people who go into chat rooms for something they oppose to start shit with everyone
or people who comment in an immature way on message boards on a subject they totally oppose on a website they totally oppose..you wonder why they are even there?
it's like they have nothing else to do

[eptified.livejournal.com]

Being a portlander I buy my grains at the Daily Grind occasionally. I imagine in 40 years time the people who work there will be the only ones capable of tilling the sunburnt soil for their daily bread.

(God. What a douche. Glad I never liked him.)

Anywhom, could be that the rightists come for the frotty side of your idiom ("tender pervert" and "compassionate conservative" have a similar ring to them). Also could be that they're drawn to your power -- your opulence in Scene Cred, which functions just as well in the best markets as traditional capital. Shiny!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That last comment should appear above your comment, Kaolas, not below it.

So you think they're trolls? I must admit, I troll a bit myself. In other words, I leave comments on boards whose whole position I find a bit suspect. I suppose it's motivated by some sort of "saviour complex", the feeling that people can be rescued from "beyond the pale". But the result is that you get attacked and ostracized.

This relates to the "politics of texture" thing, and also to Gladwell's ideas in "Blink". Maybe you should go with your first prejudices. If you find someone aesthetically wrong, nothing you can say will make them see themselves as aesthetically wrong. It's not a matter of rational debate, but one of habitus. How to live. The adverbs again.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

1. Maybe your posts aren't always as replete with political implications as you claimed here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/210211.html). They might not have noticed you were a lefty amidst all the unthreatening design criticism.

2. Maybe they enjoy reading things they disagree with - because the reading engenders gratifying indignation.

3. Maybe your "man equals man" post was ill-considered enough to make them think they'd be a shoo-in to win the debate. I didn't agree with it and I'm not an "Israel right or wrong" type.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< So you think they're trolls? I must admit, I troll a bit myself. In other words, I leave comments on boards whose whole position I find a bit suspect. >>

I get called a troll a lot. I look at the person making the accusation. Is it someone I respect? Can s/he write? I'll back off if someone I respect tells me to do so if I'm being trollsive.

<< habitus: The physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease. >>

Not sure I understand your use of the term habitus here, momus. How is "aesthetically wrong" related to habitus?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering also if my love for Japan isn't something to do with it. Do ultra-conservatives love Japan too?

[(Anonymous)]

Gardening tips.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

Still on your left side.

off the top of my head

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

i think first, you do post in order to work with intelligence and education.
i think you do hope someone will point something out to you and you can learn from it.
mutual exchange. potlatch.
the intelligence may draw attention. reactions, good and bad but reactions nevertheless. it seems you situate yourself in demanding new positions with respect to classic for/against thinking without getting too meta.
some blogs are bigger than others as you once pointed out when you reached some blogging top twenty with a bullet.
yes, its classic trolling but freedom to express it is good isnt it?
i do wonder if as well as issues over geopolitical territory this also extends to personal identity issues as we change in this digital communication.
as we contemplate space invaders - think of personal psychic hurts, room at the bar, housing crises, "war on terror" and our own conceptions of space.
as a friend one said, "in the future we will be fighting over a little box of space"

you are either too popular or too revolutionary
intelligence irks.
they want you and they need you.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

They sure do. And they watch a lot of samurai anime, and dream about slicing up hippies a la Musashi.

Japan has many attributes that attract the neocon: I think the "Japanese aesthetic" (to the extent that such a thing is commodified in my country) cuts across traditional political and aesthetic boundaries.

I'm sure some of your readers who might agree with you in the large have a more specific connection to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

[dermfitz.livejournal.com]

I was going to buy some imomus cds to burn specially, but I couldn't find any in the shops! Sort out your distribution, for God's sake!

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's a parallel universe in which the newly formed Israel allied itself with the Soviet Union, in the name of socialist solidarity, and America ended up funnelling arms and money to Islamist guerillas fighting against it (as they did in Afghanistan).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To quote from the Wikipedia entry on habitus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus):

"Habitus can sometimes be understood as those aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations. It includes the totality of learned habits, bodily skills, styles, tastes, and other non-discursive knowledges that might be said to "go without saying" for a specific group -- in that way it can be said to operate beneath the level of ideology."

In other words, no matter what you argue with someone on the level of ideology, if you don't share "what goes without saying" (and what is encoded at the level of habit and the body, and the instinctive sense of what's beautiful and what's right and how to live), then you won't connect.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Just download some mp3s, burn them, then... burn them.

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

Japan's immigration policies are pretty strict, aren't they? And they tend toward isolationism, both of which might appeal to conservatives (of the paleo- variety, at least).

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Stephen Malkmus: "Well, he's (Bob Dylan) a Gemini. So am I. There's a strong line of rock Geminis. Prince, Brian Wilson, Morrissey, Ian Svenonius, Neil Haggerty. There are tons of us."


THAT'S your problem, Nick: you're not a Gemini. But then, I'm left-ish, so I could be wrong.

[mo-no-chrome.livejournal.com]

But it's rather ironic that the health-food-hating Malkmus should put himself in a genealogy including Morrissey.

It's like a cafe we have in Sydney called Oscillate Wildly, which isn't vegetarian. Grrrr.

The Crackpot Realists

[subtechnique.livejournal.com]

I'll hazard a guess that visitors like Henry Perri and Cerulicante believe themselves to be hard boiled realists who must offer a 'corrective' analysis of your (in their view) blue sky liberalism. No doubt, they're 'reformed' ex-radicals in the David Horowitz mode (for those who're unfamiliar, Horowitz was an American 1960's left-winger who, in the 1980's turned right winger - his "conservatism" is as poorly thought-out as his "radicalism" was).

Although they see themselves as clear-eyed and logical, they are, to borrow a phrase from American social theorist C. Wright Mills, "crackpot realists". In "The Power Elite" Mills wrote:


"For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end," "Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."


Mills was writing about the American defense establishment of the 1950s and 60s but the term has wide applications beyond that specific group and time.



The realist persona is interesting: it confidently asserts a deep understanding of the way the world "really is" (a leitmotif for your right-wing visitors who strive to re-educate you) but is really a retreat into yet another kind of fantasy - from a romaticization of the powerless to a love affair with power.

Cerulicante, for example, rarely passes up an opportunity to instruct us in the supposed cultural perfidies of the Arab world (at one point, he offered the brilliant observation that Arabs live "in mud huts" which is surely true for some minority but apropos of nothing). His statements are little more than the racialist fantasies of a disgruntled young fellow given a simulacrum of geopolitical analysis by terrorism (e.g. people are more likely to believe his sort of absurdities when they're frightened).

Because you spend most of your creative energies here at Click Opera on design, musings about Japan and the global art scene the crackpot hard boiled realist is attracted to you as his natural opposite: the dreamer.

Of course, you can more than hold your own in political debate and this facility - ironically - only fuels their (quite literally) reactionary fire.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A new definition of trolling, then: trolling is the attempt to connect with someone with whom you don't share what goes without saying.

[dermfitz.livejournal.com]

I could never do that, that would be illegal!!!!

[(Anonymous)]

One of my best friends doesn't like blacks.

He's been a really good friend of mine for 20 years, but he doesn't like blacks.

I've argued with him for that amount of time about this subject, still do.

He still doesn't like blacks.

I've argued with myself about this too. Should I be hanging around with this guy who doesn't like blacks and has all these bad ideas about this kind of stuff?

He's still my mate. He still doesn't like blacks.

Aside from him not liking blacks, he is kind, funny, highly intelligent and uncommonly good in many ways.

Should I only seek the company of people who think the same way as me about everything?

Well no, 'cause there aren't any.

Should I only hang out with people that are all good?

Well no, 'cause there aren't any.

There are, however, always a lot of people to consort with that cherry-pick good attitudes as one would cheap neck-ties in a Sue Ryder shop.

"Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man."

John Lennon was a multi-millionaire wife-beater.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

And any society which systematically demeans women the way the Japanese do *has* to appeal to patriarchal conservatism.