Yeah, they could have made their statement by giving it to a random person. I sort of wish they made their statement by auctioning it to the highest bidder and then releasing it for free on the internet the next day.
Of course if it’s really the case that no one has heard it, it’s possible the album is just a recording of them saying “Joke’s on you, you stupid rich asshole.”
Now I’m just imagining that:
A) That is exactly what is on the album
B) Shkreli did listen to it
C) Shkreli told everyone he wasn’t going to listen to it try to hurt the Wu-Tang Clan’s feelings and ruin their joke because he is a giant baby
You have to admit it’s at least plausible.
I think all it’s got on it is their cover of Carly Simon.
Even the good kind of imperialism has certain risks. Now, all we need is someone (cueing Donad Trump) to blame the rise of ISIS on feminism.
Joseph Massad, line one:
I really don’t know if efforts to expand rights in other countries have been helpful or not, but even if they have things often get worse before they get better. Changes in the right direction have backlashes, and a law that says, “you can’t discriminate” isn’t very useful if the judge is also a homophobe. Cultures take time to change.
Except that the notion of a homophobe emerges with the notion of marriage as a sanction of romantic love, and with the notion that sexuality was the measure of a man or woman. Such an idea didn’t really exist prior to the modern age - love, sex, and marriage were not conflated in the same way they were as they are now, I think. Really (if you buy Foucault, at least, and not everyone does) sexual practices were not policed as they are in the modern age.
I’m not sure I do buy Foucault. I mean, I can believe that if you look a long way back we probably acted more like bonobos, but I think people have been policing one another’s sexual behaviour for a very, very long time. How sure are we that homosexual panic results from our ideas about exclusivity of love and identification with sexuality, rather than the other way around? I remember these stories of men walking arm-in-arm in the streets of London before a wave of homosexual panic hit in the 1880s, at which time the British staidness became the thing. I grew up in a wave of homosexual panic that was the backlash of the struggle for gay rights. David Bowie and others didn’t have trouble gender-bending but by the mid-80s it seemed like it is very important to not be gay and the people who grew up in that era (that is, myself and people my age) take gendering toys and clothes for their children to a new fantastic high - we’re still living with an underlying fear. Men I know 10 years younger than me don’t seem to have the same problem showing affection to other men that men my age do.
Obviously you need the underlying homosexuality-is-wrong framework to set the whole thing off, but there isn’t always a gay witch hunt going on. If we don’t think it’s wrong in the first place then there’s nothing to be scared of, but I wonder if that strong identification with sexuality and need to prove yourself sexually don’t come out of the woodwork when homosexual panic appears.
Found this:
…As I argue in my forthcoming book Islam in Liberalism, as capitalism is the universalizing means of production and it has produced its own intimate forms and modes of framing capitalist relations, these forms and modes have not been institutionalized across national laws and economies, and in the quotidian and intimate practices of various peoples, in the same way. They have also not produced similar effects as they have in the United States and Western Europe. This does not mean that the hetero/homo binary was fully successful in normalizing Euro-American societies either, but, rather, that it set itself as the hegemonic form of organizing identities and continues to normalize populations in the West who resist it (by claiming that they suffer from internalized homophobia, false consciousness, and the like). The inability of the hetero-homo binary and its commensurate socio-sexual identities to institute themselves in the same way everywhere is also not unlike many other categories and products that travel with imperial capital from the metropole to the unevenly developed periphery, and are not always used or consumed in the same metropolitan way…
But you don’t get the notion that people are homosexual, he argues until the victorian era. You can even see that in a book like Gay New York (by George Chauncey), where male prostitutes would often have sexual encounters with working class men who didn’t consider themselves to be “fairies” (in the parlance of the time). Chauncey also makes the point that the gay community in places like New York were much more out than we think of in the first half of the 20th century. Much like some whites went to Harlem, some straight people went to these huge drag balls to watch the scene in the 20s. He also argues that the closet was very much an artifact of the Cold War and didn’t exist in the same way it does since then.
My point was that I think there is something to sexuality being divorced from marriage and love, in a way that they aren’t now. Sexuality is seen as integral to romantic love, and as marriage is now supposedly about true love, that’s conflated, too. Some of that is victorian, but it’s also sort of early Cold War, with companionate marriage getting a new focus, if you believe Elaine Tyler May in her book on domesticity, Homeward Bound.
But I don’t want to underplay the various gay panics, either or dismiss them as unimportant. I think the 80s gay panic probably emerged from the AIDS epidemic, from the gender-bending of Bowie, etc, and from the rise of the moral majority who made it an issue, as the gay community was more publicly visible post-Stonewall.
Thanks! Desiring Arabs is a great book, but very controversial. Lots of people don’t like it or him.
I have a new thing to get my kid to do… unfortunately, there isn’t much bourgeois propaganda in her social studies.
How about history class 
I almost thought this was my kid as it would not be totally out of line for the kind of thing he would try…
We didn’t have classes. We called it history society.
At her age, social studies is history. They also do it Montessori style, which means big themes, with them doing active research to figure things out.
I try not to be too bourgeois when I teach, though! 
Happy Marxist New Year, and remember to be on the look out for Profiteers in 2016!
Koch Brothers Are Ramping Up To Eliminate National Parks And Seize Federal Lands [July, 8th, 2015]
The group pushing to sell off (privatize) the national park system to the fossil fuel industry, and indeed, sell off all public land to the highest corporate bidder, is the Koch and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). PERC, Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and Republicans across the nation contend that no state, federal, or local government has any right to own any land within America’s borders;** it is precisely the same argument trumpeted by seditious anti-American rancher Cliven Bundy**. Although Bundy’s contention is that he, Cliven Bundy, retains “sole stewardship rights over government-owned land,” he clearly fails to comprehend that the Kochs have a different vision of what their stewardship as private corporate owners will entail. Unless Cliven Bundy owns monumental drilling, mining, or lumber operations, he should make no mistake that when the Kochs own all government land, he will have no stewardship rights, grazing rights or input into how the land is managed whatsoever.
State Efforts To ‘Reclaim’ Our Public Lands Traced To Koch-Fueled ALEC [MAR 11, 2013 ]
Despite the many problems that states and municipalities face today—from budget shortfalls to unemployment—seven western states have decided to embark on unconstitutional and quixotic battles attempting to force the federal government to turn millions of acres of public lands over to the states. Doing so, however, would result in the eventual exploitation for private profits of these beautiful parks, refuges, forests, and other lands because the leaders driving such efforts would prefer to see quick economic gains from resource extraction rather than prioritizing these areas’ more sustainable economic uses such as recreation.
Firm hired by Legislature for Utah lands fight has ties to Koch brothers Jun 29 2015
