[Sharpen the silliness, and the contradictions will sharpen themselves: this is the point I failed to make this morning as I hurried out of the house…]

Faintly recall from student days long ago that N.Malcolm was hard work and unrewarding as a philosopher (trans.: I was a confused and unsatisfactory philosophy student, esp.as far as Anglo-Am Analytical etc goes). But this is a good story, and — whether or not LW drew the correct conclusions at length — Sraffa’s intervention was strong, and Wittgenstein was right to be impressed and unsettled. I’m tempted to argue that music — all music, from Blobby to Boulez — is making much the same gesture to all other intellectual activity: here’s something you can’t do. That might be too strong — other things are always going on in music (including rapprochement, or attempts at same), and of course the various forces and layers never aggregate to a single decisive intent or content anyway — but it’s definitely an element I value in music, and don’t see well grasped in its discussion.

1: the road-testing of the citizens united decision has not developed entirely to the 1%’s advantage
2: TRUMPBOT SMASH *trumpbot falls over on face in puddle of someone else’s vomit*
3: no one ever got rich betting against the continued stupidity of the US pundit class, but — and usually like emerson I am pro creative-transformative intuition and against the soulless bead-counting technocrat where’er he be — but Team Silver has surely helped ding the the current pundit-layer’s crappy jalopy, in a way that a mere unpredicted shock dem win would not have done
4: ratfuck report (relevant internal repug warfare): husted knew — because he could see on his master screen, the one with the knob that technologically flipped the votes — that ohio was gone beyond critical *before* the point where technological vote-flipping could be brought in to save the day; he told the Fox deciders and went home; he pointedly didn’t tell rove bcz FUCK TURDBLOSSOM

First posted at Unfogged, further thoughts at B&T (I had Caro on LBJ in mind here, and the fact that many voting machine companies are Repub-owned): note the Ranter’s response, in particular — my takeaway — the fact that all you need to depress the other guy’s voting (and voters) is for your claim to hold all the cards to be plausible. The loss of this plausibility can be the puncture in the balloon: the hole is small but it doesn’t self-heal. To over-estimate the scope of their control — I think of this as an anarchist failing, but that may just be my age and prejudice showing — is very much to hobble our own options.

(Truly you can hunt for them yourselves and please keep the answers from me…)